Friday Finds: Another Treasury!

Can you believe it? Two treasuries in one week? My last treasury just expired this morning.

This one is also based on the Vintage Jewelry Sellers on Etsy team, but the color scheme is fairly autumnal. I hope you like it!

Here are some of the highlights from this particular treasury as today's Friday Finds:

Thursday Thoughts: Etsy Mini Showcase

We're so excited! We miraculously were able to secure a space on the DZ Fantasy Blog! The blog is all about fiber, fantasy, and sculpture; which makes our inclusion so much more amazing. It's a great opportunity for new people to find us. People who may not otherwise be aware of the glory that is vintage will have our Etsy mini to enjoy right there.

If you get a chance, check it out!

What's What Wednesday: absoVINTAGElutely

It finally happened! My first ETSY treasury is up!!! For those of you who don't know the labor of love a treasury is, trust me...it can be an all-consuming experience. For those who know, isn't it exciting???

Honestly, I've been waiting weeks to see the number get even close to the magic number of 333. Last night when I couldn't sleep, I thought, "Hmmm...It's the middle of the night; I bet that's when the majority of treasuries expire. Let's see what happens."

SCORE! 333 Treasuries with one expiring in an hour or two. So, I waited.

Yup, I waited almost two hours for the treasury to expire so I could put mine together.REPRESENT VJSE!

Since I can't seem to post a treasury mini, I will post some of the items I picked for the treasury:

Friday Finds - Coro Necklaces

Today's Friday Finds is all about Coro, specifically their necklaces. Looking through different VJSE shops, I began to think about how lovely Coro pieces are. We have a leaf necklace that I find really charming, and it's a fun little pastime of mine to shop through different but similar styles. Coro loved leaves.

BCTreasureTrove has a particularly interesting Coro necklace (this item is now sold). I just love how the leaves come in threes and wrap their own meander pattern style around the neck. Yet, when you look at the matching earrings, you don't even feel as though anything is missing. They stand on their own entirely!

You can see that while the theme remains the same, the pattern is quite different with our Coro necklace:

Each of the leaves in this pattern also has three elements. The leaves are the main element, but then there are also berries flanking the sides of the leaf.

Just when you think you are learning some central themes, you realize how wrong you are. After all, Coro was around from 1900 to 1979! Naturally they moved within different themes, styles, and on to new ones over the course of nearly 80 years. Here's a leaf necklace by Coro that isn't in keeping with other themes I've noted. Being a novice can be fun because almost everything is new and exciting!

The above is a necklace and earring set by Coro currently listed Whiggytreasures! Don't you just love the interlocking chain running through the center of the leaves?

While these necklaces are indicative of Coro nature themes, they also do exquisite pieces with little or no nature references such as this gold-toned necklace and bracelet set at Vintage Day's Etsy shop.

And that's today's Friday Finds. I hope you love the pieces as much as I do. And the photos are lovely to boot! Would love to hear about your favorite Coro pieces!

Thursday Thoughts: Photography

Working on finding space and lighting for our photographs can be hard. Mom's not all that dedicated to the art of photography, and I'm still rather new. Plus, I live in Manhattan, which means getting decent light, especially in my tiny apartment, can be tricky at best.

Happily a lot of what we have is jewellery and therefore rather small. The macro setting on my Canon point-and-shoot tends to work pretty well. I'm still working on having the right amount (or any amount) of natural light, limiting the shadows (or using them to what I consider my advantage). But I continue to have trouble keeping myself and my camera out of the reflection when there's a shine to the item being photographed.

I gather there quite a few folks on Etsy who are having similar questions since a lot of posts, articles, and so forth seem to be about photography. Would love to get our sweater guards listed, but have to find room (and lighting) for photos with the guards, sweater, and wall in the photograph...without losing the guards in the photograph...or having household clutter in the picture.

Wish me luck!

Monday Musings: Fresh Coat of Paint

It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do! That's right. A simple coat of paint. Lately my tiny 2-bedroom East Village apartment has been feeling cramped, messy, and (to be frank) a bit dirty. Roommate to the rescue: we'll paint this weekend!

Our living room is now a charming, clean, and crisp off-white/linen color! I think I'll pick up a quart of glossy white for the baseboards. Then all we need to do is pick an accent color, paint the last wall, and refresh the mantle. The room will be glorious soon! And I have a new lease on life.

Maybe I should paint my room, too??? How often do you re-paint your rooms?

Friday Finds - Mother of Pearl (MOP)

I'm hoping to start a fun Friday series called Friday Finds. It'll be something along the lines of an Etsy Treasury, but smaller scale and always done by me.

This inaugural edition was completely serendipitous. I had just joined the Vintage Jewelry Sellers on Etsy Team, and was visiting the store of a fellow team, Vintage Treasures 4 U, when I saw this Vintage Swordfish, Mother of Pearl pin (below).

I wrote to her immediately. Those same discs, or at least very similar discs, appear in my four-leaf clover pins!

Thinking I was lucky to have discovered a similar piece to mine, I was ready to call it a day and be content. Bless Judi at Vintage Treasures 4 U, she wasn't! She soon sent me a link to our team leader's store Cranberry Manor to show me an exquisite Lisner necklace with the same MOP discs! Love it!

And that, boys and girls, is how today's Friday's Finds came to feature MOP. These precious items have a sophisticated glamour to them that is almost wholly attributed to the precious MOP discs incorporated in their designs. I'm off to see what other MOP stuff there is! What are your favorites?

Hello, World!

Just a little programming humor for everyone this morning. (For those of you who don't know...when you are learning a new programming language, it is tradition to make your first output "Hello, World!")

But now the real reason for our Subject Line: we're shipping globally, now! That's right. After lots of thought and lots of reading posts in the Etsy forums, we're taking plunge. We've done our due diligence, and now it's time to hope we know what we're doing.

According to our Google Analytics, we have visitors from countries on almost all the continents. We'd hate to turn someone away or appear to make it impossible to unite them with one of our unburied treasures. So here it goes...we'll ship anywhere!

Look out world, here we come!

Julie & Julia

A long standing friend of mine is a movie critic, which means lots of free movies while their in previews. This is an absolute treat since I wouldn't see half these movies otherwise. A few weeks ago, I asked said friend if he would take me to see Julie & Julia ... I was super happy when he agreed!

The preview was great. We met on the Upper West Side after work, headed into the crowded theatre, got a massive bag of popcorn, and sat back to enjoy the movie. Meryl Streep did not disappoint. I suppose that goes without saying. Amy Adams was cute. She wasn't a knock-out, but she wasn't playing an icon, either.

All-in-all, it's a great movie for foodies. (Oops, I almost called it a film, and it is clearly a movie!) If you love to cook, watch the Food Network, or simply consider yourself a foodie...see this movie. If you do not love to cook (or any of the other variables previously listed)...skip it.

Personally, I love to cook. I wish I had room in my tiny East Village apartment for entertaining so I could have dinner parties. My mom says this will happen. She's so certain, my Christmas present was a cherry drop-leaf table with additional inserts. It seats 12. Well, if it had chairs it would seat 12.

Do you have a favorite children's story?

The Children's World of Books - Close Up, originally uploaded by a.vague.reCollection.

You're not the only one. Mildred L. Batchelder did, too, and Barbara Cooney loved to illustrate them. Together they made this rare illustrated print of The Children's World of Books for the Seattle World's Fair.

Feel the Flickr Love

What a wonderful, loving world this is! Really, we'd only been on Flickr a few days when three of our photographs were invited to be included in two different groups! It's amazing. We're thrilled!

We hope you'll check out our Flickr images, but we also hope you'll check out our Etsy shop! Better yet, ask us about our listings. We love to share stories, and we really do love each piece.

[Okay...so that was a previous post back when we were on WordPress. It's still exciting, though. To top it off...read on:]

Most recently we were invited to participate in the Flickr group paperNstitch. Now isn't that nice? We love being part of a community, don't you?

Wednesday Wanderings

Randomly driving around North Carolina the other day, we stumbled upon an estate sale in Warsaw. Honest, serendipity had a plan for us. There it was; how could we pass it up?

Maybe we should have, though, because we certainly didn't have enough time to inspect things closely. Oh well, live and learn. I'd like to think we learned our lesson, but I wouldn't be surprised if our excitement carries us away next time, too.

One of the things I love most about random drives through America are the village, town, and city names? What do you think is the most popular town or city name in America?

We're Tweeting!

That's right, we're on the ubiquitous Twitter! Find us and follow us @vaguerecollectn

A New Day...A New Blog

The day isn’t exactly new, it’s true. But we’re glad you’re here. We are working on our official web-home. In the meantime, you can find us on Etsy. We’re still on Twitter and Facebook as Mom and Misha (our startup name). Hope you’ll find us there and move with us as we streamline everything into a vague reCollection.

a vague reCollection is a unique collection of unburied treasures found during mother/daughter anthropological archaeological expeditions. One person’s buried treasure is our treasure to bring to you.

Through this blog, we hope to keep you up to date on our latest travels, hints at our latest finds, and updates on things we’re adding to our Etsy store. Oh, and we’ll let you know when the official website is up and waiting for your first visit!