Recent find: Vintage framed photograph

Thrift stores are a veritable treasure trove of weird art castoffs. On any given day you can run across huge framed movie posters, any number of French-cafe styled artwork from Target, random original paintings and plenty of other bizarre crap. Over the years we've found cool signed prints by lesser-known artists on the cheap, and a friend of mine even ran across a beautiful original Utagawa Hiroshige print once for a whopping $5.

Sometimes it's a simple thing that catches your eye, though, and that was the case this week with an old framed photograph.



As I mentioned above, it's nothing spectacular, but for $4 it caught my eye. It even has a bit of a personal connection as the words "Danish fisherman rescue" were scrawled on the back in pencil (my second-generation American step-father has a lot of close relatives in the old country). From the age of the print and the crazy life vests they're wearing in the picture, I'm guessing it's from the early 1900s.

Wooly for winter

The worst winter in years has decided to continue to stick around, so my wardrobe hasn't shifted a great deal over the course of the past couple weeks. The daily outfit basically consists of some sort of dark pants, a dress shirt or oxford with a tie, and a sweater of varying weight over the top.

This last week was particularly pesky, with a couple daytime highs that didn't even get close to double digits. One morning I had to take our car into the dealer to get a recall issue fixed, and the temp when I left the house was -20 (Fahrenheit) with the wind chill.

To combat this, I broke out one of my warmest combos, which included 100% wool Gap (which look nicely vintage) pants ($4) and one of my rather standard Arrow dress shirts ($1) with one of my favorite sweaters. I'm not sure why I'm so fond of the older military-style black cable wool sweater (I see them all the time, but mine was well worth the $1 I paid for it), but there it is. It has thick padded patches on the elbow and a padded area on the right breast area, as well as epaulettes on the shoulders.




By itself the sweater seems a bit on the serious side (which is perhaps obvious given it's intended purpose), so I decided to pair it with one of my more playful vintage silk ties. I'm not sure if it works. I think it does.



Even with the wind temperature what it was, I actually found myself getting slightly on the warm side as I scraped some ice of the windshield of the car before making my morning journey.

Wool. For The Win.

Objects I Love: Green ceramic birds

Although I find a good portion of the whole Art Deco aesthetic to be garish beyond belief, there were certainly design elements and flourishes of the movement that were (and are) incredibly beautiful.

Mostly, I enjoy the swooping, yet bold lines, and the focus on geometry. It's when the designers (whether it be in architecture, furniture design, or art) went overboard with sheer ornamentation that I generally found myself turning away.

That's a bit of a broad discussion to lead into a simple post on some ceramic birds, but there we go. These were picked up at a local thrift store a couple years back for under a dollar each and have lived on various shelves in our house since then.



There are several unique things about the birds, none of which make them particularly valuable or interesting, but nonetheless have always drawn my eye to them.



One is that while close, they're not perfectly symmetrical. They're just "off" enough to give them a slightly more handmade quality, which I tend to favor. Additionally, the color of the paint is amazing and works in perfect compliment to our red dining room.



The second odd thing is that although they certainly look the part (and even have a sort of bold shape that hints at it), they are not bookends. They're hollow and light and seem rather fragile, defeating ideas of placing anything of substantial weight between them.



When my wife first spotted the birds, she was incredibly excited, as they looked to have a lot of characteristics in common with the very collectible (and great) Teco art pottery. Alas, there are no markings on them, save the 98 (or is that 86?) cent prices written on the bottom in red grease pencil that we still haven't wiped off.

Like many things in our house, these probably end up falling much further to the kitsch end of the spectrum than the collectible. Trying to explain why I like them so much is much like trying to explain why a child enjoys playing with a box more than the toy that it was packaged in. Sometimes it just happens that way.

Serendipity

Over the years, my wife and I have found a lot of great books at thrift stores. We've picked up signed copies of antique books and nearly new copies of recently-released tomes that we'd been meaning to buy but hadn't yet gotten around to.

Then, not two weeks after starting this blog, my wife runs across the following title for a dollar and gifts it to me one evening. Coincidence? I think not.



As expected, there's a ton that I didn't know, and I've found myself guilty of trashing many of the ground rules (or at least, suggestions) within. That said, this little pocket book seems like it will be a great resource for me as I try to expand my knowledge base.

After all, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Right?

One off: Blue gabardine suit + puppy

My wife is also an aficionado of thrift store shopping, and a part of that is a side business selling some of the things she finds in order to fund the purchase of her other clothes. I've done the same thing for years with music (buy low and sell higher to fund more purchases).

At any rate, sometimes there's an article of clothing that's close to fitting me, and I get to be the model. This particular suit was a sweet dark blue gabardine number from the 50s that ended up being just a bit too large on me. C'est la vie.

A small terrier completes the ensemble

I coupled it with one of my many skinny sharkskin ties (this one was $1) and a plain white dress shirt. Oh, and my vintage Florsheims, which were purchased for $2 and re-heeled and cleaned up for $13. Easily one of my better finds (they'll make a re-appearance later with more detailed pictures).

Sweater weather

Winter has been particularly ruthless this year in my neck of the woods, and while it would be easy for me to pile on my heaviest clothes day after day for ventures into the tundra, it simply wouldn't work for me. The main reason is that the temperature control system in the building where I work is, shall we say, charming?

Temperamental might be a better word, and because of that I've learned to not wear any one layer of clothing that is too thick in order to compensate for cold temperatures outside, because I know that once I'm inside it will often have to come off. Instead, I've taken to dressing in multi-layered outfits that can be peeled off and still look semi-respectable if I have an impromptu meeting or run into a higher-up that might wonder why I was either sweating profusely indoors on a winter day or kicking it in a white t-shirt and slacks as I wait for temperatures to stabilize.

A fairly routine outfit has become a dress shirt or an oxford of some sort coupled with a tie and a light to medium weight sweater which I then cover with a coat of varying weight depending on the temperature. If it gets hot in the office, I can take off the sweater and not look too silly, but a light breathable wool usually suffices for a wide range of temps.

Not one, but two dummys. Zing.

This week, I turned it down to brown with a pair of dark Eddie Bauer chinos ($2.00), a orangish-brown Puritan v-neck sweater ($3.00 - featured here), a cream-colored J Crew dress shirt ($1.00), and a shiny tie ($1.99) that really popped out the color in the sweater.



The tie itself had a cool enough design that I hated to hide it, but alas, I did.

I'll break this out in spring again, in full glory.

Most of my ties are silk or wool, but I've let a few synthetics slip through into the massive collection simply because there's something in the design that I love. This is one of them. And really, who am I to argue with Beau Brummell?

Just knight him already. Mr. Brummell is not to be trifled with.

 

The loneliness of the long-limbed thrifter

Everyone who does a majority of their clothing shopping at a thrift store knows that it's a poop shoot just about every time out. Heck, part of what makes it so fun is the thrill of the hunt and the hopes of finding something amazing in just your size for an absolute steal. It's more than a bit addictive, really.

Being a rather tall fellow, I've had issues finding clothing that fits right ever since I was a kid. For a time, it seemed like I could never find shoes large enough (I finally settled into a size 13 or 14) and sleeve lengths and inseams are a constant source of frustration.

sadly, 35 inch sleeves are too short, so this $1 BB oxford found its way into the re-trade pile

Although I've gotten much better at eyeball tests over the years, I can't count the number of times that I've pulled a pair of pants off the rack giddily and held them up to my waist, only to find that the hems hung somewhere in my lower calf area. Sometimes I'll even double-down and look inside to see if there's enough fabric to let the legs out a couple inches, only to be crushed again.



Shirts are another matter, and even more consternating than pants, as different makers vary so wildly in their sizing. I have several shirts in size 16 with 36 inch sleeves that fit remarkably, yet I've tried on others in the same size that fit nicely in the shoulders yet come up a full four inches too short in the sleeves. It's come to the point where if I find a nice shirt that actually fits, I frantically scan the rest of the store hoping that several other items arrived in the same lot (and to be fair, I've occasionally been rewarded for doing so).

Hell, we all come in different shapes and sizes, and I'm sure that just about everyone has fable-worthy stories of the unobtainables; A pair of killer pants that came up a couple inches too short; an amazing jacket with a stain that was just far too creepy to buy; the most beautiful wingtips in the world that made you reconsider the fine art of foot binding.

In the end, though, we all just go out again, hoping for the next great score.