Shop Finds {somebody stop me!!!}

Help! I might need an intervention ... I keep finding wonderful vintage stuff for the shop, but unless it's boy or a quarter garage sale find, I really need to temper my vintage finding/buying. I have tons to list, but I just get so excited to find something!!

My friend, Sarah, is a huge garage-saler and has found some great stuff (garage sale season has started early with 70s and 80s in March this year) already. I rarely find vintage baby clothing at garage sales, but she's scored.

Here's the cutest little "cheerleader" baby shirt dress she found. 10 cents. Seriously.

Oh, so, cute!

And a Sal Army find: my German "dirndl" style baby shirt:

And, I stopped at a kids sale on the half price days and found several dresses:

(nautical!)

... and a lovely peach smocked, size 3 Orient Express toddler dress.

Gorg. *sigh*

Replacing Worn-out Elastic in Vintage Clothing

So I decided to brave an attempt at fixing some sleeves on my little vintage dresses. Two had the exact same problem: worn out elastic in the sleeves. Otherwise they are in excellent shape!

So I whipped out my trusty elastic thread and went to work.

(Excuse the bad lighting in the photos...)

After I took out the old elastic, I was left with this:

I sewed around the sleeve following the old sewing marks with some elastic thread and tada! Re-ruffled sleeves.

What a difference, right!?

Here's the other: before...

... and after! Much better.

I also took it around the waist of these pink corduroy overalls, but the effect wasn't quite as great because of how heavy the corduroy is. It worked okay, though. I'm good with how they look now.

I love elastic thread! What's your secret sewing weapon??

A few new shop finds for Easter.

I had some glorious hours last Friday all to myself. I got an orange pedicure... (complete with iced Passion tea from the 'bucks)...

... and went thrifting! (Totally my new favorite pastime.)

Here are some fun things I found.

a Polly Flinders size 7 smocked dress. I'm in love!

the sweetest Easter dress - complete with bunnies and daffodils

Two more 1970s jumpers!! Not nearly as sweet as the strawberry jumpsuit, but very, very cute.

I adore this polyester nautical jacket. Not very summery, but I'm listing it anyway. People are crazy for the nautical stuff.

And remember the little cowboy button-up?  I went back and found the pants that matched!! hahaha! (And sold it this week -yay!)

Thrifting. *sigh* it's so much fun.

Fun {shop} Patterns

A friend alerted me to some 60s and 70s patterns at a local thrift store and I was on it! Normally local thrift shops have only super ugly 80s and 90s patterns that no one wants ... but I was so surprised to find their huge selection of earlier vintage patterns!

They were all very cheap, plus 25% off, so I bought 16 to add to the shop. I think I figure if I can sell two of them the rest will be profit. That's pretty darn good!

Here are a few fun ones.

no date - 1960s - my favorite!

1967

1966

1972

1973

*Sigh. Hoping to find more 50s patterns sometime. They are probably my favorite ...

Favorite New Shop Items :-)

In the last two weeks I've had some luck thrifting. After I wrote that things had been flying off the shelves, inevitably, they stopped flying. :-) But, it's okay, the slower pace just kicked me into gear in beefing up the baby sections of my shop.

I will finish out my first year (October 2012) with the miscellaneous vintage things I have and after evaluating what has sold the best, I'll probably try to pare down to the main sellers. This, of course, has been baby clothing so far. I have the best luck finding it, buying it and selling it of all the other things in the shop. Random other things have sold, but these babies have been the pick. We'll see how the rest of the year turns out and go from there.

So, I've found the Salvation Army is my best place to find vintage. Some thrift stores you could look all day and not find a piece or two. Others (the S.A.!), if you're lucky, are vintage heaven. Where are your favorite places to thrift?

Two Salvation Army stores and around 15-20 pieces later, here's my favs of the bunch. Even little baby boy stuff is showing up! Check everything out at the shop, click here.

baby bowties

Yellow Easter dress, anyone?

teeny, tiny little blouse

awesome retro smock top

elephant short overalls

cowboy button-up.

Mmm! Love love love thrifting and finding sweet little things!! Looking forward to garage sale season coming up soon! :-)

Sesame Street love

Aw yay! My little Sesame Street baby boy jumper was featured on this blog! Their Sesame Street post was so cute! Go check it out ... my fav was the fuzzy Grover puzzle.

:-)

Such fun.

Shop Update! A few more little cute things

Wow! Things have been "flying off the shelves" so-to-speak from my etsy shop. And I'm definitely not complaining about that - it's a great problem to have! Love it.

Although it does create the need to fill the shop back up, so we went thrifting the other day and found a few things. I need to go again, but it does take some better planning. (She fell asleep in the car and had wet through her pants - so obviously we need to 1. go in the afternoon and 2. take the diaper bag. Yeah, this mama needs to be more prepared.)

Anyway, here are a few things I've recently added to the shop!

Head on over to see the rest!

Shop: Good news and bad

The good news: I sold the 70s strawberry jumpsuit!

The bad news: I sold the strawberry jumpsuit. *sigh. But, if I didn't want it to go, I shouldn't have listed it until after Ladybug wore it!!! Oh well.

************

January was an awesome month on Etsy.com. They made a huge deal about the holidays (the month of December) and I didn't sell a single thing. Then, right after Christmas my stuff started flying off the shelves! Well, figuratively anyway.

It's so much fun.

...Doing taxes on the money I earned, well, not so much fun. But who's thinking about that!?

:-)