How do you tell what's Vintage?

It's probably the most common question I get from those strange friends and family members who don't understand the draw of vintage - How can you tell if its vintage?

I figure that a lot of other people probably ask the same question - how can you be sure that the item you're buying isn't just some 1990 repro piece? Well, there's a few ways..

Brands

There are some iconic vintage brands, among them:

Gunne Sax (Later became Jessica or Scott McClintock)
Vanity Fair
Victor Costa
I.Magnin
Yves St Laurent
Christian Dior
Samsonite Luggage (Think old steamer trunks and train cases)
Pierre Cardin
Yves Saint-Laurent
Coco Chanel
Vivienne Westwood
Hubert de Givenchy

It's by no means an exhaustive list, but if you find these guys, you're in good company.

Labels

Even if you find a piece by one of the designers above, most of the time they've been wildly successful (Dior and Chanel are household names today), and are still making clothes. So how do you tell if the label is vintage or not?


- The label is yellowed with age, or faded.

- The label is sewn with thread, and not just printed.

Of course, there are exceptions to any rule. Some brands today use sewn tags for an extra special touch. And some vintage labels are still crisp today. But for the most part, screen printed tags and multi-colored labels didn't come on the scene until the 70s, and most paper products and thread undergo some yellowing over the years.

Construction and Material

Sometimes the construction of a garment is a dead giveaway. Metal zippers and wide seam allowences are things commonly found in pre-70s clothing that have not widely survived to today.

Contemporary clothing usually has serged edges inside, and plastic or covered metal zippers.













Before polyester was a bad word, it was the best thing since sliced bread, and plenty of vintage clothes are made from quality polyester.

Silk, linen, and polyester are all common fabrics found in vintage garments. Aged lace is another tell-tale sign of vintage.

Union Made Tags


This is my favorite thing to find in a vintage garment! The union made, or ILGWU tags are excellent ways to date your piece, and for the most part, dropped out of wide use after the 1980s, so the tags are almost exclusively found in vintage clothing.

The Vintage Fashion Guild has an excellent guide to the different eras of tags, and it's usually the way I date my pieces.

Autumn on its way

The cooler weather is coming soon (even if it never really hits Florida), and with it, vintage wool!

I am in love with this 1940s suit set



And these beautiful kitten heels!



All in The Shop!

Goth, Golf, what's the difference?

Last weekend I made friends with a snake at a Golf Party, while dressed for a Goth Party, because man, do those two words sound the same when you’re hearing it from a friend of a friend of a boyfriends roommate.

Go Fly a Kite

When I was 14, made a life list (one of many). Right up there with Climb Mt Everest and Swim the English Channel was Become a falconer. It was something that I never really expected to happen, but it was awesome, so on the list it went.

My love affair with mountain climbing never got off the ground, but I'm still a bird nut.

Earlier last year, I was volunteering at Audubon as a phone answerer, not the most exciting thing ever. I referred someone to a bird of prey rehab center right down the road from my house, and decided to check it out for myself.

Surprise to me, they did falconry! Honest to god jesses and hoods falconry. Free flying, no strings, just birds being awesome falconry. It was practically a dream, and I dropped the phones like a bad habit.



Earlier in the year, I asked their master falconer if he would apprentice me. It was kind of nerve wracking, since I don’t like asking for things, and it’s a huge time commitment for them – apprentices usually stick around for two years at least. But I’m not sure how long I’ll be in Florida, so it was a now-or-never opportunity.

But! he said yes, and I'd found a sponsor. I studied, took a test, got approved, built a mews (bird house), and hopefully this winter I’ll be trapping a Hawk for the season.



To prep for my bird (my bird!) I’ve been working on making leather jesses and anklets, perches and hoods. Falconry requires a lot of gear, but most of it you can make yourself with the proper coaching. I’ve made anklets for the center before, so it’s not a huge leap to do it for myself.

They fly a bunch of birds – a barn owl, a red tail, a couple of falcons, a kestrel. And they were nice enough to teach me to fly a Swallow-tailed kite on a creance line, which is totally amazing. It’s no mystical bond between man and bird, but it’s still really awesome to see a bird of prey soaring towards you, even if it is just for the piece of stinky quail hidden in your glove.

And kites are so cool! It’s the neatest thing ever, I can’t wait to do it for real!

Rivers of Honey

Last Thursday, I got to cross the first item off my newly revived life list! As of right now, I have two gallons of pure, organic, raw honey sitting in our kitchen.



I started keeping bees this spring, after listening to Neil Gaiman twitter about it for months. It’s really all his fault. Bee stings? Electric bear fences? Count me in!

But since I don’t live in backwoods Minnesota, bears were not much of an issue. Really, the biggest problem I had was learning to leave the bees alone. They didn’t need me poking at them every few days, all they needed was a check now and then to make sure they were getting along, and that was it. Our bees are damn cool, and can do just fine by themselves.



We have three hives, two of which came from a fellow beekeeper – The Penny and Pepper hives. Our third hive, Prudence, we started ourselves from package bees, which was probably the most exciting thing we’ve had to do. Dumping a wire box full of three pounds of cheezed off bees into a hive is something everyone should experience at least once. Curtis mostly took pictures.

After months of the bees hard work, Thursday found the Pepper hive with frames full of capped honey, ready to harvest. The Pepper hive was named for their spicy behavior, they’re definately the most active hive, and they’ve beaten the other two in honey production hands down. They’re also the most aggressive. I took the Birdchick’s advice and invested in some Bee Quick to get them out of the honey super so I could steal it away. It worked wonderfully!



It’s worth mentioning here that neither one of us has been stung yet, so we’re crossing our fingers that no one’s allergic.

The plan was to cut the comb from the frames into a bucket, and move somewhere else to do the extracting. I had forgotten that the frames have a plastic foundation in them, which made it impossible to cut. After a bit of scrambling, I sterilized a paint scraper and scraped the comb off the foundations into a bucket. It worked beautifully. The comb was warm from the sun and the hive, so it slid off the frames into the bucket in a slow river of golden ambrosia. It was amazing.



I strained the comb from the honey through a cheesecloth, and in the end, we had two gallons of honey. Let me say it again: 2 gallons! And there are still two more supers to harvest! What do you do with two gallons of honey? I’m thinking of trying to make some honey wine with it.

And the best part? It tastes NOTHING like walmart honey (Sadly, that is my control sample). It’s dark amber, and has a bit of a kick to it. We’ve been putting it on pizza, biscuits, fried chicken, and string cheese. It’s honey central over here, and I love it!

I’ll tell you right now what everyone’s getting for Christmas this year.

Labor Day Sale

Summer, like all good things, must come to an end. There's still time to celebrate with some vintage!



Buy one item, save 15%
Buy two items, save 20%
Buy three or more items, save 25%

Refund will be sent through Paypal, just mention Labor Day when you check out!

Etsy Buy Handmade adVintagous

Back from Vacay

After being on vacation for a week, it feels strange to have so much to do! Despite the backlog, we had an awesome time.









Now it's time to get back to work!

Analytics

Today I am sunk in analytics. I've never used them before, and it's so much fun to see the little line spike and dip as people have come and go from my little shop.

Yesterday I found so many goodies! Had a killer photoshoot, and am working on getting them all edited now.

Etsy Time!

All the thrifting this week means there's tons of new stuff up in the shop!

Birds and Family

Spring is here, and so are the rains. All the family too. We went out to Clearwater for my grandfathers memorial. There's been a lot of thrifting and time spent with birds.



A pair of sandhill cranes and their juvies came to visit.



This bird loves lightbulbs. It is a dangerous fascination.



Training with a coopers hawk.



It must be the year of the great horns around here, there have been so many babies in!



Yeah, the bird is weird.



We had a big renaissance fundraiser last week at the center. It was a ball, and even after four hours of glove time, Henry was just wonderful!

Love and life, Love life

I feel very full right now. A lovely kind of full where I'm happy to be alive, surrounded with birds and life and love and family.

I woke up this morning and spend an hour sitting on the little dock surrounded by Sandhill Cranes. They tried to eat my sandal, and then pointedly ignored me and ate snails until I finally had to leave. It was a wonderful way to wake up.

I read books and paint, I fix up clothes and sell them in my little shop, I teach people about raptors, and get to spend time with some of my favorite birds on the planet. I have a wonderful husband and tons family who I'm finally getting to know. On the weekends, we get to try out hotels and restaurants. In a few months, the bees will come, and I may have a summer job.

Life has always been about what's next for me. Where am I going to live, what am I going to study, what job am I going to get. I'm happy just where I am for the first time, and it's like I can finally breathe. Contentment isn't just acceptance of complacency, a lack of drive, it's a wonderful feeling of everything being right. And I love it.

Portrait of a Lady

This weekend was mild enough to fly both falcons on Saturday, so I took some pictures of them doing their thing. Here's Cora, a Peregrine, chowing down on some quail wing.

Lady offscreen: Oh my god, it's alive!

Well, not any more.



Here she is, coming in for the lure. The lure is swung around in circles, and yanked away when the bird dives in. They either have to be fast enough to catch it from Scott (a Master Falconer) or wait for him to slow down for them.

Cora dives faster than Spyder, who puts on the brakes when he takes the lure.



See how his wings are outspread? This is just before grabbing the lure. He's being trained to not slow down before the impact, but he's not quite there yet.



Here he is zooming in. He loses a lot of this speed when he brakes.





When they've caught the lure, they are re-tethered while they eat their prize. To get them back on the glove, they're given another meaty treat as incentive.





Yeah, I'm talking about you.

This weekend JrFalconer and I made some new jesses for the birds.



Jesses are the leather anklets and straps that allow us to handle these birds of prey. They're very soft, so they don't irritate their delicate legs, but are strong enough to keep them from slipping out of them. Usually.

I was making kestrel jesses here, but it took a few tries to get them small enough for their tiny legs! Along the way, we ended up with Barn Owl and Merlin jesses too.



Henry is a master at chewing through his anklets. So are the eagles.

Whoo will you Woo?

Valentines day was lovely - between our volunteer face painter, and the bake sale, we raised a decent amount of money at the ARC, and we even got in the paper! There were a bunch of visitors, and everyone wanted their picture taken with Henry, our resident Valentines Barn Owl.



Barn Owls are pretty cool in general, and I didn't mind talking about him all day! Spider gave everyone a show, even though he was too light to pull the lure off of the kite.



You can see the little tail of his transmitter backpack he wears in this picture - Falcon insurance.



After feeding everyone gutted mice and chopped up quail (My Bloody Valentine, reality edition), I was really ready for a romantic evening with Curtis. We had a gift card for the movies, and in the interest of putting our old student IDs to good use, we went to see Coraline.

The movie was great - I can't believe all the things they did with just claymation. I read somewhere that it had the first stop-motion transformation scene, and it was incredible! And they used those awesome 3D printers for the faces! I'm still geeking out about that one, it's nice to hear that people are finding ways to put them to practical use. Maybe one day they'll become our modern-day Star Trek replicators.

But the best part about Valentines day was that we got pictures of our new bird:



It's just too quiet around here without Peep - we needed a new birdie to help us procrastinate again. Only two more weeks and he can come stay with us!

Only use your google-fu powers for good

It seems that writing swallow tailed kite in a blog-type thing brings the internet watchers of the birding world upon you, sort of like an avian "Beetlejuice". I guess someone read on here that the ARC had an imprint kite, and they got some flack for it last week.

So for anyone interested, Willow came to the ARC as an imprint. Any rehabber who imprints a bird, on purpose or accidentally, is not allowed to keep it. This is to keep people from trying to imprint birds, because they won't be able to keep them anyhow.

Some of the saddest cases are imprint birds. Most of the time there is no reason they couldn't be surviving in the wild if they had not been imprinted by humans, but because someone interfered, they will live their entire lives in captivity. Imprinting happens when a young bird associates itself with its human caretakers, rather than other birds of the same species. When this happens, they grow up lacking the instincts they need to survive in the wild, and released imprints have even been attacked by birds of their same species in the wild - wild birds can tell that they don't belong.

It can happen because a rehabber just doesn't know any better, but a lot of imprints happen because nestlings were taken in by people who thought it would be neat to have a pet raptor. These birds will never make good pets - they eat dead things, poop all over the place, and need a lot of room to be happy. People soon realize that they can't handle a bird like this, and give them up.

It just sucks because, unlike permanently injured birds that end up in captivity, these are beautiful healthy birds that should not be stuck inside with us.

Even if Willow is a sweetie, and she helps educate a lot of people about kites, I'd rather she be flying around Brazil right now.



In other news, I got to assist with a red shoulder that came in. They had to take some blood and fecal samples, and Jr.Falconer was showing me how to hold the bird. He rolled his eyes when CM started to peel a scab off an old compound fracture on the birds wing, and I asked if he was okay with blood. He said he was fine, and then fainted dead away.

CM tried to keep him upright, but he was going down, so I grabbed him, and CM grabbed the bird. He came out of it after just a second, but his eyes were large as saucers. We got him some liquids and snacks, I got to hold the bird, and he got to supervise.

...

Swallowtailswallowtailswallowtail

A bit of bird

Good evening. Tomorrow I get to see my bird friends again, including this one, with the dirty mouth.

Saturday, there was a group of visiting students at the center, and one enterprising young man took off with dads lighter to set fire to things. He happened to settle upon the dry grass in the parking area, and then lit the entire field on fire, underneath all the cars.

Florida is in its dry season right now, and I imagine the field went up just like what it was - kindling. Dry grasses and twigs, with our wooden mews in the background.

Nothing was hurt, except the lawn, and everyone managed to move their cars. Lucky for me, he stayed away from mine, which would have been unmovable with me gone on another program. Lucky for him, too. The fire department came, the police chief gave kiddo a talking down, and our resident hard-ass, Ms. Paula got in his face about endangering the safety of all our birds, as well as his peers. By the end of it, I'm sure the poor kid just wanted to melt into the ground. I'd be more upset at daddo and mom - where were they?

Even after all that, I think we found the least-informed kid in central Florida at the wetlands festival:

Teen girl (pointing at barn owl): That's a bald eagle, right?
All of us, hive-mind: No..
Girl (turns to Red Shouldered hawk): But that's gotta be a bald eagle, huh?
....