Helen Lehndorf

Category: op shopping

  • gifts from the thrift

    How is the first official week of winter treating you? (Game of Thrones fans will get the reference here….)

    june

    Here is some vegetable bunting I made for the kitchen because….well, just because:

    vegbunting

    Here’s some stuff from the op-shop lately. (I buy most of my clothes from the op-shop also, but they aren’t all that exciting to photograph.) The sweet, the curious and the plain old strange have come my way…

    Something about this wee vintage dog appealed to me – the way he is obviously such a good dog and his face is on that angle of appealing to a person standing near….also he is standing on the tucker box – guarding it, or wanting to eat it’s contents…?

    op_june_1

     

    op_june_2

    New (to-me) art for the wall – an American Jay bird. I love the pencil of the foliage and the way only the bird is coloured. This is on wood and has a kind of enameled or something surface. Quite unusual.

    op_june_3

    A Holly Hobbie tile, mounted on wood. This will go to one of the manifold little girls in my life.

    op_june_4

    Not op-shopped, but these two sweeties were being thrown out when Fraser’s grandfather moved house, so I duly rescued them.

    op_june_6

    Finally, a strange little mushroom man. Yes, I am aware that he is quite penile in appearance…I think this is partly what appealed. He’s like a wee fertility totem! 🙂

    op_june_5

    This is why I love op-shopping – the randomness, the chance – you just never know what you might uncover. It really is a treasure hunt.

     

     

  • the birthday cloth

    I enjoy ironing. I think if you like to sew, you have to like to iron because ironing is such an key part of sewing.

    I even have a poem about ironing in my book, called ‘Sunday Night’.

    It doesn’t mean all my clothes are perfectly ironed, because I am a haphazard ironer. I only do it when I have a spare hour, which isn’t often.

    The other day was a lovely sunny spring day, perfect for a bit of laundry – I got my vintage tablecloths out of storage – thinking ahead to summer meals on our porch. I gave them a wash, dried them in the sun and then spent a happy while ironing them.

    One of my favourite cloths is one I picked up at an opshop, ‘The Birthday Cloth’:

    It has all the months of the year around the outside, with that month’s birth-flower and birth-stone. Here are a few of my favourites:

    As well as the vintagey (50s? 60s?) flowers, I love how quaint and twee it is. A cloth just for birthdays, which women must have laid on the table to serve tea and birthday cake to their friends or family.

    If you like vintage textiles, there is a great New Zealand blog called Glory Box here – where they examine all manner of fascinating stuff around textiles and textile history.

    I think it is important to USE the vintage textiles (and anything else!) you have – don’t worry about spills and wear. I firmly believe there is no point owning beautiful things just to store them. If they get ruined, ah well. It’s a good lesson in not getting attached to arbitrary things…nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever.

    I’ve used the birthday cloth a few times for friend’s birthdays. It makes people smile.

    I like imagining all the birthdays that might have happened around this tablecloth.