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How to Choose a Vintage Gift

admin — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 00:33:25 +0000

Today I’m starting a series on choosing vintage gifts. We’ll explore jewelry,clothing and more over the next few weeks before Christmas. But before we start on specifics, I thought a little bit of advice on what to look for would be helpful, and how to search online.

Condition,Condition,condition

Vintage by definition means that an item is used and from another era. So, one needs to pay close attention to the seller’s description of condition. Any flaws should be described, and hopefully pictured. Think of you senses..any flaws that you can see,hear or smell should be noted. Then you need to use your judgment as to whether that flaw can be lived with or remedied.

Style

Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s desirable or stylish now. Classics never go out of style and you will see elements of this style copied in today’s stylish fashion and decor. Some things are so ugly that they enter the hallowed ranks of kitschy. But some things are just not. Know the person that you are buying the gift for—if they like kitschy or they like classic, buy accordingly.

Likely to Increase in Value

Vintage items don’t always increase in value. But you know that the ones that do will continue to be desirable and stylish for decades into the future. This is a hard one to judge, but if the item is likely to increase in value, it is probably worth considering. If not, pause and think a bit about this one.

Searching Online Versus Searching Locally

Many of the articles that I read about buying vintage gifts suggest that you search at resale consignment shops, antique shops, thrift stores and flea markets. And this is a good idea if you are not so familiar with the type of gift you are purchasing. You can touch,inspect and smell the items to get an idea of what is quality and what is not. However, you can only see what is available nearby. With online sales, you get a whole world of variety to choose from. But you don’t get to touch, inspect or smell the items. As you would do if looking at an item in person, ask questions if the description is not clear to you.

And where to look online? I would do a search on google or your favorite search engine. Just enter a description of the type of item you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for a vintage toy, enter “vintage toys“. You will see pages of links to sellers of vintage toys. And if you know you are looking for a vintage board game, use those keywords to narrow your search. If you have a favorite site like eBay or etsy, you can start by going to that site and entering your search terms there.

Why Buy Vintage?

admin — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:28:00 +0000

Good Design is everywhere in the 21st Century, so why buy vintage? Here are 4 good reasons:

Vintage is Quality. Vintage items are better made. They use better materials,show better craftsmanship and better construction. Everything was made to last longer. Similar quality today will cost way more than buying vintage.
Vintage is Green. Reuse of materials and resources is one of the basic tenets of living green. The materials that would go into today’s manufacture will be saved. That means more living trees,minerals still in the ground and fuels that don’t need to be burned.
Investment Value. Most vintage goods will retain their value and possibly increase in value. Most goods bought today will lose much of their value tomorrow. Vintage goods are relatively liquid and can be resold easily to trade up to your next collecting fancy.
Vintage is Unique. A vintage piece that speaks to you shows your individuality. Mixing vintage pieces with modern purchases shows your taste and stimulates conversation.

Halloween Ephemera

admin — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:58:25 +0000

It seems to me that much of the most highly collected Halloween items of the past could be classed as ephemera because it was designed to be used and then thrown away. Or it was made of materials that deteriorated quickly and were discarded after a few years of reuse.

Halloween, as a commonly celebrated US event, truly came into its own in the very early 1920s. Parties then were primarily for adults, with guests settling in to play mahjong, bridge or other games. Tables and walls would be decorated with a wide array of Halloween-themed items, really setting the party’s mood. The games’ winners would be given prizes to take home, like candy containers, lanterns or noisemakers. Only later did “trick or treating” come into vogue, with the holiday becoming more oriented toward children.

The imagery of vintage Halloween items through the 1940s is very memorable. The pumpkin, or its more humanized incarnation, the Jack-O-Lantern, is the most common image. Next most common are black cats, skeletons and owls. Mor rare are witches, veggie people and bats, with the rarest being devils. This means that within any given genre, devil imagery is the rarest to find.

The imagery of the older Halloween pieces is significantly different than imagery common from the 1950s through today. The imagery was meant to provoke a reaction – generally a horrific one! The pieces were, in many instances, meant to scare. More recent Halloween imagery is,in comparison, pedestrian, cute and dull. Since Halloween items are notoriously hard to accurately date, one rule of thumb used is this: the scarier the imagery, the older the item!

Source: http://www.halloweencollector.com/history/

Theodore Roosevelt Arch

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 01:27:09 +0000

When I listed a postcard this week showing the Theodore Roosevelt Arch, I wondered why I hadn’t ever seen this structure pictured before. So,I googled it and came up with a fascinating story.

Yellowstone,Theodore Roosevelt Arch

The arch was built early in the National Park’s history. The cornerstone was laid in April, 1903. And Theodore Roosevelt was present at the ceremony for laying the cornerstone. More on that later. But first, one might ask why such an imposing structure would be built at the North Entrance of the park, a less used entry point today. But at the time that it was built, it was the closest entrance to a railroad line. In 1903, the railroad ended at Cinnabar, Montana. The Northern Pacific Railway was persuaded to extend the railroad line much closer to the park entrance to Gardiner, Montana where a stone railroad depot was constructed at the same time as was the arch. In the spring of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt embarked on a massive tour of the West via railroad car. He spent a fortnight in Yellowstone Park as a vacation. At Cinnabar, President Roosevelt debarked from the train and was met by the Superintendent of the Park and Commanding Officer of Fort Yellowstone. The presidential party left on horseback for two weeks of camping and viewing the sights. At the end of this time, President Roosevelt returned to the site of the park entrance and partcipated in the laying the cornerstone. The Masonic Order conducted rituals and President Roosevelt addressed the crowd, giving a talk about wilderness,democracy and the promise of the West.

Although the automobile was not allowed to enter the park until 1915, the building of roads,great lodges and other amenities that marked the gradual decline in use of the north entrance. Today, one must detour to view the arch and the depot that was constructed at the same time no longer stands. Most visitors enter from the south of the park.

Yellowstone National Parks’ Photographer

admin — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:32:48 +0000

Yellowstone,Old Faithful Geyser

I’ve been listing some postcards of Yellowstone National Park over the past couple of days and began to wonder who Frank Haynes, the photographer and/or distributor of many of the earlier postcards was. According to Front Range Living, photographer Frank Jay Haynes set out to photograph the West in 1898 and took many photographs in America’s first national park. His family owned the concession at Yellowstone until 1963, when his son died. For the better part of a century, Haynes and his family photographed and sold postcards that chronicled Yellowstone. Most of the postcards that I’ve seen focus on the national wonders of the park. However, early postcards also captured the people who journeyed to see Old Faithful, who danced and dined in one of the lodges, where conveyed by horse and buggy to see the sights, set off in Model T cars on dusty roads and fed bears by hand.

Yellowstone,Mammoth Hot Spring Terraces

Over time, the pastimes of the visitors changed from singing campsongs around a campfire to today’s self guided walks and hikes. The formations themselves have changed over time as well. Even Old Faithful is on a slightly longer schedule than in previous years. In recent years, a massive forest fire changed the look of the park. Although, in time this devastation will grow back, the park is ever evolving, and it is fascinating to peek back in time to see what the park looked like in the past.

Vintage Photographs

admin — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 02:26:10 +0000

Black & White Photograph, Sand Dunes, Northwest USA Coast

B&W Photo,Crater Lake, Phantom Ship

I’ve listed some vintage photographs recently. There is nothing like a good clear black and white photo to give a clear picture of what a scene looked like in years past. So I wondered what types of photos were more collectible than others.

So, I thought I’d do a terapeak search to see what categories of vintage photographs sold the best over the last 3 months on eBay. I’ve reproduced the results below.

Categories	Total Listings	Average End Price	Sell-Through
Photographic Images	5,666	$17.23	28.22%
Transportation	286	$11.10	38.46%
Historical Memoribilia	261	$18.68	17.62%
Militaria	236	$16.91	30.08%
Postcards	189	$8.69	27.51%
Autographs	97	$55.58	14.43%
Paper	62	$12.04	53.23%
Souvenirs & Travel	59	$6.98	5.08%
Cultures & Ethnicities	35	$16.57	34.29%
Advertising	26	$8.99	23.08%

So if I’m reading these results right, photos that have transportation (trains,boats,planes,cars) as subjects are most sought after, followed by historic photos, and then military photos. Real photo postcards, autographed by the photographer photos and ephemera are collectible in their own right. As are souvenir photos,photos of ethnic groups and advertising photos.

QSL Cards

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 20:03:33 +0000

QSL Card, Ilwaco, North Head Lighthouse

A few weeks back I sold my first QSL card. I had to google them to find out what they were and how they were used, so I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of the information that I found.

According to Wikipedia, QSL cards are exchanged between amateur radio operators “to confirm two-way radio contact between stations. Each card contains details about one or more contacts, the station and its operator. At a minimum, this includes the call sign of both stations participating in the contact, the time and date when it occurred (usually specified in UTC), the radio frequency or Band used, the mode of transmission used, and a signal report. One national association of amateur radio operators, the IARU Region #2, recommends a size of 3½ by 5½ inches (89 mm by 140 mm).”

QSL cards are mostly collected by other ham radio operators. Although they look like a postcard, a QSL is really a ham radio operator’s calling card and are frequently an expression of individual creativity. They are frequently created with individual pride and reflect the sender’s personality or profession. Consequently, the collecting of QSL cards of especially interesting designs has become an add-on hobby to the simple gathering of printed documentation of a ham’s communications over the course of his or her radio career.

Here’s a link to a video of an especially interesing collector
Martin Luther,Australia's King of QSL Cards

Melmac Spatterware

admin — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 02:52:58 +0000

Blue Spatter Melamine Bowl

I wondered if I could find some information about how the spatterware designs for melamine dishes came about. The blog RetroChalet was the most informative on this topic as they referred to the earliest examples of mottling being by Russel Wright Melmac in the Residential Lines of the 1950s. Russel Wright also experimented with adding other substances like real “aluminum dust” to Black Velvet and copper flakes to Copper Penny. Other manufacturers experimented with mottling and stippling but kept their formulas as closely guarded trade secrets. Apparently some of the designs had their origins in “end of the day” runs when the factory used up the colors used in that day’s productions. Kysite added pulp,paper and cellulose into their mixes.

Coloring Books for Adults

admin — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:21:22 +0000

I have a confession to make…I still like to color. Yes, I’m a senior adult and I’m not regressing to my childhood. It is still fun to let my color-sense go and put my own colors to a design.

When I was a kid, we had two options…color with crayons or watercolor kits. Now we have so many more options

colored pencils

crayons

art gel pens

paints

markers

And how do we find fun coloring sheets or books?

Here are links to the most interesting places that I found in a web search for downloadable coloring sheets.

http://www.squidoo.com/coloring_books_adults
http://color-your-own.com/
http://childparenting.about.com/od/printablecoloringpages/a/adultcoloring.htm
http://www.colourlovers.com/print/blog/2010/01/14/a-big-list-of-coloring-books-for-adults
http://adult-coloring-pages.blogspot.com/

And of course, you can always buy coloring books for grownups.

Roses Sundries eBay ID

admin — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:52:47 +0000

A while back I consolidated my three eBay IDs into one (using grandmastree) so that I could enjoy the benefits of being a powerseller and a top rated seller.

Success! Yay!

And now I’m going to be experimenting with reactivating the Rosessundries eBay ID for my auction postings only. So if you click on a photo in one of my galleries and don’t find the item in my grandmastree store, please do a search or enter this url to check and see if it is listed as an auction.

http://shop.ebay.com/rosessundries/m.html

Once you are there, don’t forget to add this to your saved searches or save rosessundries as a favorite seller so you can quickly find me in the future.

Oh, and another big change…..(drumroll please)

I’m converting all of my listings to be FREE SHIPPING!

This will take me about a month to complete. I hope you enjoy the change!