She's a Star!

I was in Ohio visiting my family when my mom, an inveterate flea marketer, auction-goer, and yard sale huntress, presented me with this star. It lights up! It's handmade! It's vintage! It's perfect! My mom is convinced that I am, in her words, hard to buy for. It's not that I'm hard to buy for, exactly...it's just that there is not a lot of stuff in this world that is worth having in your life. If you have an abundance of space and a lack of preference (or taste, to put it less charitably), you can fill up your surroundings in no time. But how much more enjoyable the process and the end result when you take your time in the world of home decor, picking and choosing what you actually want to live with? Case in point is this star. While it won't actually be living with me in my home (I have sacrificed it to the store), it certainly makes the cut, in my opinion. Some enterprising fellow, or lady, crafted it out of plywood long ago (if 40 years counts as long ago) and I like to imagine the Hanging of the Star became an annual family tradition - just before this same family trouped off into the back 40 to cut their own Christmas tree. Of course I'm just making this last part up, but that is part of the fun of acquiring vintage pieces. They all have a story.

Creative Customers

One of the benefits of having the store is meeting all the creative people who come in with strong ideas of their own. Of course I get plenty of "what do I do with this?" queries (especially when looking over my admittedly more bizarre pieces), but just as often customers don't need me around to give them inspiration. Take the wall hanging shown below, for example. A customer purchased some of this paper from Midori (a sort of Americanized version of the traditional Yuzen paper I also sell) and created this bird silhouette as an overlay. I thought this was a great idea and was happy for the store to play a small part in her project. Actually, I just stood behind the counter and sold her some paper, so my part was very very small indeed.

Whale Trunk + Artist's Living Room = Great Decor

It's feeling festive in town today, as the holiday weekend has arrived - or maybe it's because the economic news hasn't been all bad lately (for a change). Perhaps reporting on the demise of life as we know it, economically-speaking, was not nearly as fun for news outlets once they themselves started becoming victims of the tanking economy... Whatever the reason (and I'm skeptical that the reason is based on facts), the news has been slightly sunnier lately, with hints that things might not be as bad as we thought. The tourists and locals wandering around town seem to sense this, and are deciding that buying a cup of coffee, or a throw pillow, or maybe even (whoa!) a painting does not make them bad people. Just people enjoying a holiday weekend in a small town. Speaking of not-bad people, Karen Tusinski, an amazing artist who happens to have a gallery across the street from the shop (www.karentusinski.com) sent me a couple of photos of her latest Sycamore Hollow acquisition, a small rustic trunk painted with a whale motif. I felt honored that she put it in her house!


Top left corner shows a little of Karen's work.


The tripod lamp next to the couch also came from Sycamore Hollow.

Spring, definitely.

Wow. Two months since I last blogged (is that a verb?). Been very busy at a lot of nothing. The shop is shaping up for the summer - just one short week until Memorial Day! For those of you who care, the website died a lonely death. Just as I completed updating it, my hosting service informed me they would no longer support my software. The software that I used in designing the website was, indeed, nearly obsolete, but what could be more appropriate for use in a store that sells vintage pieces? A vintage website for a vintage store. Sadly, my hosting service did not agree with the inherent charm of vintage software, and we have parted ways. But never fear, some sort of internet presence will be available by the Memorial Day deadline. Meanwhile, the town of Rockport is festive for Spring, as this weekend we celebrate Motif No. 1 Days. What are Motif No. 1 Days you ask? A two-day celebration of the arts, centered around a red fishing shack so beloved by artists as a subject that it was dubbed Motif No. 1 by an art teacher (perhaps tired of looking at so many renditions of the same building). Anyway, here in Rockport we love our Motif, and have set aside a time every Spring to ritually celebrate its existence. Here is our Festival poster, with artwork created by a very talented 9-year-old third-generation Rockport artist.

www.rockportusa.com/motif1days