NOTICE: March 20-28 is VMTEAM sale time! Search for vacation-themed items with the ‘vmteamgetaway’ tag by clicking here.
Each participating VMTEAM store has their own special offer for this sale. Please be sure to visit a shop’s main page for that store’s specific details. Here at Tiddleywink, any item tagged ‘vmteamgetaway’ is 20% off the listed price through March 28, 2010.
AAAAAAAaaaaaaaAAAAAAAA!
Whew. Okay. As many of you know, my Biggest Event of the Year is the annual Viva Las Vegas rockabilly weekender. I first attended VLV10 in 2007 at the urging of (and spending all of my time with) my friends at Peek Photo and a mutual friend of ours. They were absolutely sure that VLV was my bag, Baby, and boy were they ever right. I live a relatively sheltered life, and I did not know that there were people out there, hundreds of no thousands no TENS OF THOUSANDS of people out there who listen to really great music and dress the way I wanted to dress. I was hooked!
VLV10 was a pivotal event in my life. For one thing, I met my now-boyfriend, although I didn’t run into him again (and learn his name) for another 6 months. For another thing, spending an entire weekend with my friends brought us that much closer, and they are just about the only ex-coworkers with whom I still hang out (I am historically bad at keeping in touch with people). And finally, I felt free to dress in my beloved mid-century silhouettes without worrying about what people might think, because I knew that scattered around the globe were more people like me who supported my style. To be truthful, I did get some funny looks. I worked at that time within very close proximity to a semi-upscale shopping mall, where I would frequently head for lunch. I was occasionally aware of someone staring, but for the most part I went surprisingly unnoticed. The only time anyone ever approached me directly was to tell me how nice I looked. This was unexpected!
I bought my first vintage dress during my freshman year of college (boy do I ever wish I still had that dress, let alone the 22″ waist that once fit into it) and I’ve been casually collecting ever since. Those of you who know my age know that references a long time. Now it was my goal to make sure that I had enough vintage and repro clothing in my closet to support another year at VLV! I began to collect more aggressively, spending hours lurking around eBay and diving deeper during thrift store excursions with my similarly-afflicted Bestest Friend In The Whole Wide World. As my collection grew, I also had more to wear on a daily basis. And wear it I did. A different-yet-similar group of friends got together for VLV11, and as we prepared we would hunt in packs for dark-rinse high-waisted jeans and era-appropriate shoes. We studied the events schedule and planned our outfits weeks (months) in advance so that we could pack as efficiently as possible. I managed, after months-months-months of looking, to buy for myself a coveted deadstock-with-tags 1960/61 gold lamé DeWeese swimsuit, lightly embroidered and studded with rhinestones. A swimsuit so stellar that I dared to wear it two years in a row. Of course, I can’t get away with wearing it three years running, so the hunt is on for this year’s swimsuit.
Oh yeah, did I mention the swimsuits?
The weekender is held in early April, but it’s held in April in Las Vegas. 100-degree days are not uncommon. And so the weekend winds down on Sunday with a pool party. While this pool party is the first time that us revelers have a chance to slow down, it is also a veritable gallery of vintage swimwear. People are there to see, and to be seen. In swimsuits. In April. Pasty-white April. Only-three-short-months-from-holiday-excess April. So, when VLV attendees say that they’re starting their diet on January 1, this is no empty New Year’s resolution. This is an Emergency Situation.
Nick’s diet plan included being a complete glutton over the holidays, eating himself sick so that by January 1st, he wanted nothing but juice and salad. And of course, the extra pounds that he had packed on melted right off, because his body never adjusted to that artificially high caloric level in the first place. But from a mental standpoint, those pounds dropping encouraged him to keep going and he has been eating an almost-entirely-raw diet (exceptions made for coffee and Monday night dinner with friends) and he feels fantastic and looks better than I’ve seen him in months.
My own diet is less extreme and less effective, but more realistic for a foodie. On a recommendation from Erin, I downloaded an iPhone app called LoseIt. It’s helped to keep me on track, and as of this morning I am 2/3 of the way to my goal weight (and halfway to the weight I was when I had that 22″ waist). Jeans that fit a year ago once again fit properly. I very much look forward to them being a little too big. I’ve started my flickr album of outfit planning, which for the first time is overloaded with options. I have an increasing pile of “needs sewing for Viva.”
I have two months to get everything done. Let the countdown begin!
My last post was written specifically for a contest, and was considerably shorter than my usual stuff. In fact, I’d actually written a much longer post and wound up condensing it to fit within the parameters. But it bothers me. Not that it’s short, but that it’s so severely edited. Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year (admittedly, along with most of the other major holidays) and I felt bad about short-changing it. So, here is the rest of that blog post, albeit RE-edited so as to eliminate redundancy.
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A previous post was about decorating your house for the holidays in a retro style, with the help of brand-new items from the fine folks at Vermont Country Store. I myself have a silver tinsel tree that I bought from Target a few years back and a felt tree skirt from… I don’t recall from where. But those are attempts to recreate a Christmas that I never experienced, a Christmas built from fond memories of my family’s actual traditions mixed with healthy doses of aluminum trees from Charles Schulz and Jean Shepherd and the fashions of Edith Head as seen in Holiday Inn and White Christmas.
My own, actual Christmas memories include felt stockings decorated with glued-on sequins, real Christmas trees, and the molded (plastic? glass?) Santa figurine that I always hung from the center of our dining room’s opal-glass chandelier. And yes, hanging it involved me climbing onto the dining room table. Sorry, mom and dad! It was my father’s task to deal with the tangled strings of lights each year, but I relished the opportunity to “help” him hang them once the bulbs and fuses had been tested and replaced. There were a few years where we had only white mini-lights on the tree, but most years we used strand after strand of multicolored lights. My favorite lights, though, were the single strand of Paramount bubble lights that must have been a hand-me-down from my grandparents. You can see them in the photo in my previous post, hung at kid-pleasing level.
Our tree was decorated every year with a mishmash of ornaments that had been collected from my grandparents, family friends, and one particular Brownie project involving glue and glitter (that ornament gets placed on my father’s tree every year to this day). There were paper chains that my sister and I made each year. The glass grape clusters which my sister and I threw away when they developed mold, only to later discover (too late) that they’d merely been sprayed with artificial snow. The red-and-white mushroom ornaments that my mom carved from Styrofoam, which we hung toward the bottom of the tree so that cats could swat at something that wasn’t glass (and yet every year, we’d lose at least a couple of glass ornaments to the cats anyway). The buxom craft-dough “cherubim,” another of my mom’s creative holiday projects.
And oh, my mom’s projects. Her sugar cookies were legendary. Batch after batch of dough would be mixed, chilled, rolled out, and cut. Even “naked,” her cookies were tastier than most. But then magic happened: time consuming, painstaking magic. Bowls of royal icing all over the kitchen, dyed brilliant colors. Each cookie was a blank canvas, and what my mother did with them was truly art. Glassy-smooth garnet-red hearts with white “lace” overlays. Icy-blue bells, each one different, and embellished with silver dragées. Elephants, iced pink and “draped” with hand-painted paisley (paisley!) rugs over their backs, complete with tiny, piped-on fringe. My mom had one antique cookie cutter which created the shape of a prim woman with her hair in a bun and her hands on her hips, and mom would decorate each one with a different blouse and skirt, and she never ran out of patterns for her icing textiles. With no exaggeration, I can say that Martha and her minions have NOTHING on what my mom was doing with cookies 30 years ago.
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Mom stopped making her cookies years ago, citing the very valid reason of not wanting to go through the incredible effort, nor of wanting to compromise and do a half-assed job of it. Since I now travel each year for Christmas, I’ve been putting up an artificial tree to eliminate any vacation fire hazard. The last few years have been all about color-coordination, while I built up my own stash of ornaments one year at a time.
I wanted to get a real tree this year, like we always had growing up, but my budget insisted that I use one of the artificial trees stashed in my basement. That’s okay. I hung as many ornaments as would fit, but I keep cramming in a few more. And I bought tinsel at an estate sale! I placed it high enough to be out of the cats’ reach. And when night falls, I don’t turn on any other lights, and I let the tree light up the living room. And I smile whenever I look at it.
Freelance hasn’t kept me as busy as I would have hoped this year. I don’t have the extra money to buy whatever ornaments and decorations strike my fancy, let alone extravagant gifts. Instead, this is an opportunity to rewind to the Christmases of my youth. To use the ornaments I’ve collected from past years of color-coordinated decorating, and to let my tree reflect those childhood memories of color and light. And don’t forget the paper chains!
I’ll drink cocoa, made with my mom’s homemade mix. My outfit, ready for my friends’ annual party: a ’50s-vintage red velvet dress, found at a thrift store and paired with a matching rhinestone necklace, a bargain from Art Deco Dame. In my hair I’ll wear a fascinator, a gift from Erin at Urbanity Studio, and made with a vintage brooch. I’m making as many presents as possible, as part of an unintentionally retro, “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” theme. One thing won’t change, though. The holidays aren’t about what’s on or under my tree. Modern or retro, my holiday is about spending time with my family, both by relation and by choosing. And tinsel! :)
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Truth in blogging: Candice DeVille, the author of Super Kawaii Mama, is holding a contest where entrants must write how they’d create the perfect vintage Christmas, in 200 words or less. The lucky winner gets the MOST. AMAZING. EVER. Prize package chock-full of gift certificates from some of my favorite vintage/retro vendors. Click on over for more details on this Very Vintage Christmas Competition.
One of the things that I do well is shop. I have a bit of free time these days, which I can spend searching online for pretty, useful, and/or elusive things (like a faux-jaguar hat to match my ’60s-vintage coat). As a public service, and to further make it more difficult for me to find time to sew, I thought I might start occasionally posting cool finds that I stumble across on these here digital pages.
As an etsy shop owner, I have a certain bias towards that particular coalition of artisans and vendors. Oh my, there are wonderful treasures to be found there! And, as regretsy.com has hilariously made everyone aware, some real stinkers as well. While you can find many wonderful and perhaps wacky vintage Christmas treasures within the shops there, the Vermont Country Store has a reputation for stocking brand-new versions of those items that you remember from Christmas at your grandparents’ house.
The items shown above are, clockwise from top left:
Truth In Advertising: I am receiving NO compensation or any other “encouragement” from VCS for this post. I was simply tickled by the items in their Christmas catalog and decided to write about them. However, if VCS wants to thank me in some box-at-my-door way, it would be rude of me to refuse a gift. ;)
shoes and pie 