Salvo Wednesday Road Trip: I Think I Bought Out Syracuse

I think it was 6 years ago that one of my students told me about the Salvation Army in Syracuse and how huge it was. It took me four years to get there, but she wasn't kidding. And I'm pretty sure I brought 90% of the contents of the stores home with me.

After the first stop, we both had respectable piles of stuff, and we thought it was a good idea (which it obviously was) to pose with our favorite find. It wasn't really cold enough to require a scarf, so that was her find. Mine is a Brooks Brothers vintage skirt with an amazing novelty golfing print.

That's the wall of dresses. If you can tell, it goes around the corner. I didn't have the time or patience to look at much beyond the dresses in this one. Because wall. Of. Dresses.

And this is what the bag of goodies looked like in the car. This is when I started to get slightly alarmed. My house was built in the 1920s and it has the closet and storage space of that time. It's a problem when you're the kind of girl who needs a walk in closet just for her dresses. It certainly doesn't have room for the totes and bins required to store all my amazing vintage inventory, and I've already filled up the bins I did make room for. I literally don't know where this is going. First, it went here:

Just bags and bags of vintage joy, sitting there without a home.


After I pulled everything out, removed tags, and sorted it on the bed, this is what it looked like:

I don't think that you can really properly see just how tall the stack of dresses is. I'll fill you in: it's tall. 

A lot of this is for my new shop, but some of it was just for me!

I love the summery floral print on this, and come on. Pockets!!!!!

I'm obsessed with maxi dresses.  If you've read my blog before, you already knew this. If you've ever worn one, you wouldn't be surprised, because you're probably obsessed with them too. They're the perfect solution to Rochester weather. They cover your legs for warmth when it's cold, and then 2 seconds later, when it's warm again, you still get a good breeze and if you're sitting, you can just pull it up on your lap. And THIS one is made of that stretchy, jammies-type material. Adorable and snuggly.

I never used to like floral prints but I'm really digging them lately. Cute little baby doll dress with a little flounce on the hem!!

Another cute little dress with dots (I think there's too many for them to count as polka dots) and again, POCKETS. I've said it once and I'll say it again: all dresses should have pockets. It should be a law.

Another maxi dress, and I'm helpfully pointing out the best part! I love the darker color accent on the hem. Maxis!! <3

I was on the fence about this from the front. I mean, it's a maxi dress and it is my favorite shade of blue, but, well, hmm....

.....and then I turned around and looked at the back. Yup. This one's a keeper!

This last dress I'm on the fence about keeping. It's ridiculously cute, and I love it on me. And while I CAN breathe in it, it's not completely comfortable. It would be more comfortable if I rid myself of about 5-10 pounds that I'm really fond of. I suspect I'll wear it once to one short and fabulous event, and then list it on my Etsy shop. That's the great thing about vintage clothes... they're not getting any less vintage!

If you're wondering what the slightly terrified expression is about, it's not about the adorable dress.  It's about the pile of vintage items that were still left on the bed. It's amazing how you can be equal parts giddy over your find and overwhelmed by the amazing finds. I mean, there was still this much left at this point:

Yikes.

And yes, that is a Puffalump back in the corner.

In the end, the road trip was a huge success, and we have agreed it's worth a yearly expedition. Dresses! Hats! Purses! Puffalumps!!! Vintage delights!

My husband is just going to have to get used to the idea of living in a house with mazes of totes.

And to conclude, a bonus photo of the world's cutest dog. Happy summer!

Estate/Yard Saling Fridays, Day 1!

My summer vacation "officially" started this last Friday. By that I mean that Thursday was the last day of the school year that we were contractually obligated to attend. But graduation was Friday night, which as a music teacher, I attend yearly since the senior choir members sing. And Sunday my select choir sang the National Anthem at a local baseball game. So every time I said that Friday was my first day of summer vacation, I really felt like I ought to be using air quotes.

I also broke the cardinal rule of the beginning of summer break and set an alarm for pretty close to my normal time in order to meet my friend at her Snug Bungalow bright and early to go to my first estate sale (in a long, long time, anyway). 

 

There was a long line and a reeeealllyyy annoying man who kept complaining about the wait to get in (he was trying to make a joke out of it but failed. We got it, dude. You want in. We all do. Now shut it and let me enjoy the sunshine). 

We didn't find much, but I did find these super fun pink heels for me and an Echo scarf for my new Etsy shop!

After the estate sale, we moved on to neighborhood yard sales. There were two in Greece (on the very opposite side of our small city) and we got a few good things for our pages. Oh, and we met this guy:

Pierre, the French bulldog who stole my heart

Pretty orange dress for me, only 50 cents! Pretty sure the previous owner was a 12 year old girl... go me?

80s wooden sailboat earrings!

80s plastic button earrings!

Crazy golden fan earrings!

4th of July earrings!

 OK, this guy seems horribly ugly to me, but Sarah insisted that I look up this designer and apparently people go nuts for this stuff.  I said it looks like A Different World. I guess we each have our own flavor of crazy.

I can't resist sequins and beads.  So sparkly and pretty and happy! I think I might just be keeping this one. Maybe.

I love buying 80s toys. It feels so nostalgic, and I mean maybe even more for the college years where Sarah and I did this nonstop than for the 80s when we actually played with these. Smurfette!!

I showed this to an alum who was definitely not a child of the 80s and she was horrified. "It's supposed to be a baby? Then why does it have FUR?!?" She's kind of got a point, but man, did I love Hugga Bunch dolls when I was a kid!

ALF! Because... ALF! Who doesn't love crazy aliens who like to eat cats?

I didn't find much in the way of dresses, and that's always my favorite, but it was a great start anyway. And guess what tomorrow is?!? #salvowednesday 

The Memories of Dresses

I read an amazing book once called The Secret Lives of Dresses. It was the story of a woman who takes over her grandmother's vintage clothing store and finds that her grandmother wrote down the story of each dress.

I've thought a lot about this concept since, especially being a lover of new-to-me dresses. I've wondered about the dresses' history and thought about the stories I'd be adding to their histories. But when I look at my dresses, I don't see a series of stories, or any kind of timeline. Each dress makes me think of one event, the most memorable time I wore it, so strongly that it's like a scent-triggered memory. And I've noticed that this happens most often when I travel.

For instance, the picture I've used for my Etsy shop is of me in a dress I've worn on multiple occasions. But to me, it will always be the dress I wore to a wedding in Cancun. Even more specifically, it's what I was wearing when I was on a beach, watching the wedding party taking photos, standing shoeless in the sand, in my perfect weather (80s and above), wearing a pretty dress, when the servers came and offered me my very favorite wine. That was a nearly perfect moment.

The next dress I wore just this weekend to a baby baptism in Saratoga Springs. I also wore it to a rehearsal dinner the last time I was a bridesmaid. But that's not what stuck. Instead, every time I look at this dress, I'm back shopping in Oviedo, Spain, with my new sister in law.

On our fourth wedding anniversary, my husband and I took an amazing trip to Manchester, England (he's a Man U fan). I had a fabulous dress all picked out to wear for our overseas anniversary dinner... and the airline lost our luggage. We bought last minute outfits from a local discount store (Primark), and that dress has become one of my favorites. It will always speak to me not only of the happiness of being someplace awesome with my awesome husband on our anniversary, but of the innocence of that trip - the last pre-cancer anniversary. The following anniversaries have been just as happy, thankfully, but they've been a very different kind of joy.

When your cuzbud (because we're cousins AND buds) gets married, that's pretty memorable. But when you dance with all your cousins to a song about vacuum cleaner hose-nosed aliens from your childhood that you all still know every word to, you'll never forget that dress. It reminds me how lucky I was to have that kind of a childhood, and of how very very lucky I am to still count those cousins as best friends.

In Portugal, my husband and I wandered Porto one beautiful summer day.

 A few magical things happened that day. First, I got to visit the bookstore where JK Rowling started writing Harry Potter. They wouldn't allow people to take pictures inside, but I swear I was there!

I got to do a port wine tasting... in Porto, Portugal!

I tried to blend in with a tiled wall.

But the thing that I think of every time I look at this dress as it hangs in my closet is the moment when Greg and I had been wandering for hours and wanted to stop and sit. So we stopped at a place along the river Douro, and I remembered that my sister-in-law had mentioned a type of wine called Vinho Verde. I ordered one, and that's the moment. Sitting by the water, in the heat, with my husband, drinking a lightly effervescent glass of "green" wine. Every bit as magical as Harry Potter.

We visited Madrid during that same trip, and even though one of the highlights of my trip was getting to visit a thrift store in Europe, that's not what I think of when I look at this particular dress.

I think of the feeling of the heat. It was, as they say, a dry heat. My nose bled and our lips cracked and you could feel the heat rising off the pavement. They had mist at every restaurant to try to combat this. You can see and almost feel the heat that I think of with this dress here:

The day I wore this dress in this picture was the first day of summer vacation that year. My husband and I went to the beach, ate at a restaurant by the water, and got ice cream and walked along the shore. For those of you who aren't teachers, you might remember the feeling of the start of summer vacation from when you were a student. That feeling of anticipated freedom, and warmth, and excitement at a couple of months of playing outdoors and in pools. That feeling still comes to me every single year, and it is joy.

But the best, strongest memory is one that isn't connected to just one of my dresses, but a whole closetful of them. I call them my "back yard" dresses because they're comfy and I don't mind if the dogs get them dirty. There is no better memory or feeling in the whole world than sitting in my back yard with my husband and dogs in the summer heat. Not in any country in any land.

What stories do your dresses tell you? I would love to hear about them.