One Less Lovely Thing in the World

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Lynette

    Let me tell you about this sweet little shop called Sweet Pea Rose Cottage.  It sits in a charming vintage shopping center fashioned out of a former motel so the shop has several small rooms all in a row.  Each room is decorated in specific vintage themes and are filled with delightful vintage items as well as handmade repurposed lovelies, such as dressed-up picture frames and bracelets made from old buttons.  It’s as charming as the name suggests and the shopkeeper Raylene is just as charming and treats every customer like a new friend.  She has put her heart and soul into the shop and it shows.

     Sweet Pea Rose Cottage closed its doors two weeks ago.  Another victim to the current economy.  Raylene didn’t have the money for lots of advertising.  She relied on word of mouth, like most small shops do, as well as the high traffic through the shopping center.  Raylene did everything a shopkeeper should do:  good unique merchandise, reasonably priced, and beautifully displayed.  Add great personal customer service and a delightful owner—she truly did a wonderful job.

     The closing of her shop has hit me hard.  My heart goes out to Raylene.  I know how devastated I would be if I lost Penelopes.  When you pour your passion into a shop it becomes such a big part of your life.  Raylene would wistfully mention to me how women would spend 20 minutes perusing her shop, oooohing and ahhhhing over every item, tell her how much they loved her shop, and leave without buying anything.  It brings home hard how much we need to support the small businesses that are special to us.

    Thank you Raylene for giving us so much pleasure for the past three years with Sweet Pea Rose Cottage.  I know there are some sad hearts in Portland tonight.  There is one less lovely thing in the world.

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Merry Cherries and Strawberry delights at Penelopes

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Lynette

 

    Fresh from Penelope’s…our latest display!  We decided to capture the summer magic of cherries and strawberries. You can see charming kitchen towels and paperback book covers with a cherry theme…made by my very own mom…our seamstress extraordinaire!

I love faux pastry, don’t you?  These tarts look good enough to eat!

The centerpiece of our display is this vintage Strawberry platter!  Another charming item is a strawberry market tote made from a vintage kitchen tablecloth.  Many more goodies to see…so come take a look!

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This question of empathy

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Lynette

“People identify themselves, in some subliminal way.  You know very soon into which category they fall.  You know that you would like to see them again; or you definitely would not, or you don’t much care either way.  Sexual attraction doesn’t much come into it; that’s another matter with its own agenda.  The basic thing is simply this question of empathy, as though the other person wore some coded emblem that you recognize.  It can happen with someone who serves you in a shop, or a person you talk to at a party, or a neighbor or colleague or the man who comes to read the meter.”

—-Penelope Lively, Making It Up

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Staying cool at the Expo Antique Show

Posted on July 10, 2010 by Lynette

 

Welcome to our booth at the Antique Expo Show in Portland!  In front are vintage postcards I have framed with copper foil and you can see some of the books with gorgeous covers.  Yesterday was quite challenging as the temperature flirted with 100 degrees and we worked hard to load all our goodies into our booth.

Royalty books have been a big hit in our booth.  We also have lots of charming vintage children’s books from England.

One of the crown jewels in our collection is this 1867 illustrated bible.  Imagine the hands that have turned the pages of this treasure.  We have several other vintage bibles too, as well as beautiful silverplate.

Another interesting collection in our booth is these vintage cameras.  I think they would make a fun summertime display. 

Some of our latest acquisition of books included books that were severely beat-up so we packaged them up to keep them safe from further damage and are selling them as TATTERED BEAUTIES for art projects, collage, and scrapbooking.

Jeanne, my friend and fellow ephemera lover, helped in the booth today.  She brought a suitcase of paper goodies and sold all of her vintage movie magazines first thing this morning!

Hopefully the rest of the weekend goes well.  It has been fun so far and a fabulous surprise to have my friend Sue in the booth right behind us!

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3 cheers for the red, white & blue at Penelopes!

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Lynette

 Our newest display at Penelopes…..Fourth of July!

    Our favorite artist Lori Mitchell outdid herself…..we have the most charming Americana figures you have ever seen!  A lady liberty, two different Uncle Sams, a drummer boy and little girl Betsy Ross all are on hand celebrating our country. 

     We have mixed in cobalt blue glassware, Liberty blue transferware plates, vintage American history books,  white milkglass, colorful red, white, and blue vintage bracelets, and so much more.  We even did our tree in Americana….come take a look!

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Constantly Astounded by the World–travel quote

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Lynette

       “That evening, sitting at the bar with the MTV winners, I began talking about a record I had as a kid.  It was called “Bozo Under the Sea.”  Bozo met all kinds of fish who could talk, and occasionally we boys and girls had to turn a page in the book “or poor old “Bozo is going to drown.”

I did the high-pitched shivery voices of the jellyfish for John and Chuck, who chuckled politely in their miserable way.  The setting sun bruised the sky, and it occurred to me that diving these reefs was like shaking hands and saying “howdy” to the ten-year-old I had once been.  He’s an enthusiastic little guy, constantly astounded by the world.  The kid, I know, considers me a bit of a Bozo on land as well as under the sea.  I don’t get to talk to him much anymore.

         “How much longer you going to stay?”  John asked.

         “A  while,”  I said.

         “Why?”

         I didn’t tell him that I liked diving with an imaginary ten-year-old.  I didn’t tell him that after twenty years, I still needed to be astonished.”

                               —-Tim Cahill, Pass The Butterworms

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Fresh in at Penelope’s…Vintage Travel

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Lynette

Memorial Day weekend is upon us, and now is when our thoughts turn to travelling, whether it’s to the beach or to a far-away land.  Here at Penelope’s we celebrate travel with our new vintage travel display….from Seattle World’s Fair 1962 tumblers to many books and maps about other places……mosey on down and take a look!

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A french a evokes polished ebony

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Lynette

“Vladimir Nabokov noticed that he associated certain letters with certain colors in childhood, when he told his mother that some of his alphabet blocks were the wrong color.  She saw nothing odd in this (possibly we are all creative in, and only in, those areas in which our mothers saw, at least to begin with, nothing odd), and when they compared notes, they found they agreed on some letters’ colors.

For Nabokov, “the long a of the english alphabet …has the tint of weathered wood, but a french a evokes polished ebony.”  Nabokov saw the letter u  as “brassy with an olive sheen… oatmean n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites…passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thunderous z, and huckleberry k….in the green group, there are the alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t.”

–Roy Blount Jr.,  Alphabet Juice

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slow-poke thinking

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Lynette

 

There’s always one on every road.  I see at least one every day I drive to my shop or around town.  When traffic starts slowing down you can bet there’s someone up ahead driving slow and causing a logjam and making the rest of us bunch up as we try to get around and get back to our regular speed.  It drives me nuts, no pun intended.  I am no speed demon but I certainly like to go the speed limit and usually five miles over.  It’s amazing how one bad driver can slow down loads of us decent drivers.  It’s the same way one negative thought can slow us down and stop all the positive thoughts from getting through.  I am not always good at getting those negative thoughts off the road and out of my head.  I spend too much time on them……to the detriment of all the good thoughts I could be thinking.  It is so hard not to obsess.  Even over silly little things.  Why do we do this? Why care if that clerk at the supermarket was rude or if I spilled mustard on my shirt or dropped my cell phone in a parking lot?  Well the cell phone is a little bigger deal but in the grand scheme of things it’s not a tragedy.  I need to learn to push those slowpoke thoughts off the road so all my creative, positive, artistic, joyful thoughts have a clear path.

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Chicken & Broccoli Alfredo – Recipe

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Lynette

Here is a fast, easy and healthy recipe that has become one of my regulars.  There are so few ingredients I have memorized the recipe and can easily remember what to pick up at the store on a hurried night.  I make it lighter by subsituting Pam non-stick spray for the butter, non-fat milk, and the low-fat version of the soup.  If  I want to make it decadent, I use  half-and-half instead of the milk. I use at least  twice the broccoli called for.  This recipe was an ad in one of my magazines…courtesy of Campbell’s Soup.  Enjoy!

Chicken & Broccoli Alfredo

1/2 of a 16 oz. pkg. linguine

1 cup fresh or frozen broccoli flowerets

2 tbsp. butter

1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into 1 1/2″ pieces

1 can (10 3/4 oz.) Campbell’s Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/4 tsp. ground black pepper

1. Prepare linguine according to package directions in 3-qt saucepan.  Add broccoli during last 4 min. of cooking time.  Drain linguine and broccoli well in colander.

2. Heat butter in 10″ skillet over medium-high heat.  Add chicken and cook until well browned, stirring often. 

3. Stir soup, milk, cheese, black pepper, and linguine mixture into skillet.  Cook until mixture is hot and bubbling.  Serve with additional Parmesan cheese. (salt to taste)

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