Venetian Decanter and Glasses Set

I just think this set is stunning, especially after we cleaned it up at home. Hand blown Venetian glass in a turquoise, almost teal color, with a gold, lacy applique overlaid in a beautiful pattern. It's right out of the 1960's and you can just picture it on somebody's kidney shaped coffee table, serving up some sherry.

Evocative.

I just love how some objects we find can transport us to another time like these can - one look and they definitely are NOT from a 2008 Crate and Barrel catalog. They are swinging; they are lounge music from an enormous console in your rec room; they are air blue with cigarette smoke, and ladies' hair teased into Dippity-Do gravity-defying shapes. All this from looking at a bunch of glass!

Yes, I love what I'm doing.

I hope that the photo does the set justice.

Time Travelers now at eCrater

Wow, my head is spinning, and so early in the day. I've been working on setting up shop at eCrater, and getting Google Checkout ready there, and we even bought a domain name. I think I have the forwarding set up so that it will bring people automatically to the eCrater storefront.

Let's give it a try, shall we? Try this link: timetravelersonline.net

That should take you to a very small storefront at eCrater. At the moment, we've got it on hold until all the kinks are worked out. I think we'll be opening it soon even though it doesn't have many items in it as of yet, because now that I've got the hang of all that taking photographs and writing descriptions down, the process is a bit more efficient than it was 6 months ago.

But please, take a look at the store, with all its 4 items in it. I like the look of the place, myself. It shouldn't be unfamiliar compared with the TIAS store, apart from looking rather empty... just a virtual change in geography, as it were.

I can't believe that I've done as much as I have. We've had to forward the domain name to eCrater instead of masking it because bookmarks won't work properly, and there is some glitch with the Checkout unless you do it this way. But I don't mind. I like the domain name better than the clumsy one we'd been using before, and we'll be able to take it wherever we end up. I have a feeling, though, that we'll be at eCrater for some time. They make it very easy to set things up, it's completely personalized, and all the promotion - the really important stuff - is also, totally up to the seller.

So we'll give this a try.

Quite a nice bunch of stuff

The estate sale we went to couldn't have been better. Close to home, and just overflowing with lovely, well cared for items that had seen a lifetime of love. We whizzed through the home and quickly built up a pile of some very special things to take away with us.

I took a quick photo of what we found. Briefly - some Wedgwood Jasperware ashtrays, including a Winston Churchill, and, to my delight, a Canadian 1967 Confederation one (which you had to know what it was just by the abstracted symbol of a maple leaf on it - no mention of Canada or 1967 at all). I was tickled pink to find it, because I'm a closet 1967 memorabilia collector. Also a covered trinket box, and a horse and chariot ashtray, both in the classical Grecian relief that you often see on the Jasperware pieces.

Silverplate - some serving pieces, like a large ladle, a small lade, a cake server, a sauce boat, and a sugar and creamer set. All terribly tarnished, but with TLC, some time and my favorite silver polish, they will all soon be gleaming, and will command decent prices.

A very pretty hand painted teapot in a soft teal color with gold handle and spout. So pretty and a practical size.

A covered cheese dish - something you just don't see any more. Very old, most definitely antique. It's lightly crazed all over and does have some staining from age, but I don't think it's a detraction. It's a special piece and in great condition.

A Stangl 1960's flower vase. I'm just starting to learn about and appreciate American pottery, and I'm glad I spotted this tucked away in a china hutch at the sale. It's in some very "Florida" colors - turquoise and gold - and still has the label on it from the factory. Mint condition.

A Venetian glass decanter set. Something special for company in a deep turquoise glass with gold lace decoration. It has all 6 glasses present in the set.

We also picked up a covered casserole dish that caught our eye, cream with green relief decoration. It just looked like something that people might like.

So that's the shopping for today. We are really pleased with what we found!

Doing some Shopping, and Looking Ahead

We're going to an estate sale tomorrow afternoon. What a luxury - a sale during the week and without a show facing us! It's been a while since we've felt the absence of any pressure to restock, but we have officially ended the show season. We won't be doing anything until an indoor event in Fort Lauderdale at the beginning of August.

So now we are able to catch our breath and really take a close look at what we have left from the shortened season that we just got through. I want to do a review of exactly what has sold well for us - I bet it won't be what we think it's been. I know that Bob gets excited every time we've sold something that takes up a lot of space! even if it hasn't been of high value; he's also been pretty happy when something heavy has sold, because it's meant that he wouldn't have to lift and carry it again... So does that mean we should only be buying light, fluffy things??

I can see us developing several different levels of merchandise. One level for outdoor shows, where people expect to find and see the "bargains" of the collectibles world. The $5 table at the Treasure Island show was truly a good thing for us, because it allowed us to pull together a bunch of items that we wanted to clear out of stock and reduce their prices to sell. It was the right thing to do, and it created some room for us.

Bob and I want to start doing indoor shows, which cost more to participate in - usually three times the cost of doing the same show out of doors. But you don't see the same merchandise indoors as outdoors - once inside, you see a higher quality of merchandise, expect to see higher prices, and you might not even negotiate on the prices as you would outside. All this just for airconditioning!

The good news is that we won't have to buy all new (old) merchandise in order to start selling at these indoor shows. We already have a broad range of prices and values in what we offer. We will have to go through the bins and decide what exactly is appropriate for the indoor show, and what we should leave at home - and that brings up another point: we'll likely have less space, so we'll have to be more discriminating in what we bring.

I'll also take a look at table coverings that can help make our lovelies pop! The right color and texture can make a big difference. At the higher end of the shows you see retailers getting into elaborate displays, spot lights, and cases. Again, since this is our first year, I'll be trying to keep things as simple and inexpensive as I can for now.

Realistically I think we'll be doing both types of shows, as weather permits, and where it makes sense to do business indoors and where it will be expected that we show outside.

Meanwhile, eCrater awaits. I've been toiling on putting the correct values into the dreaded Shipping Matrix, the place where you can make or break your own store. I've read easily 20 pages in their online forum about the subject, so it's worthy of extra study up front, before I get too deep into this new store. Once those values are in (how much to charge for shipping by weight), then I can start to enter some items into inventory, which will require me to enter a weight in for each at that time. If I don't have a value for weight, then I can't enter an item. Luckily, I just happened to have bought a postal-grade scale when I was setting the shop at at That Other Internet Place - which we didn't end up using, but should have, in hindsight.

But first things first. Shipping Matrix. Then I get to pass go.

Sun, Sand and Swing?

No, no, and no.

Not at 84% relative humidity and over 80 degrees F with a constant breeze. It was what I would imagine a slow roast in a convection oven would feel like. Totally unpleasant. And absurdly inappropriate to have the vendors come to set up at 7AM, when the main attraction, which is live music (that would be the Swing part of the event's name) doesn't even begin until 3:45PM. So for 6 and 3/4 hours we were pretty much twiddling our collective thumbs, waiting for the crowd to arrive. What were the Treasure Island Chamber of Commerce thinking when they planned this act of stupidity? What a complete and utter waste of our time.

Note to selves: we won't we doing this event next year.

The ultimate in recycling

As we continue to fill our landfills more quickly than new ones can be created, it's worth looking at how green it is to market antiques and collectibles. What could be more wise than to reuse an object, rather than to discard something to a garbage bin and purchase a new one to replace it?

This is more than clever marketing - this is about reducing our production of refuse in our world. If we encourage people to buy gently used glassware, linens, clothing, dishes, and decorative objects, we are preventing those very objects from becoming fodder for the overburdened landfills. It makes huge sense.

I often speak of the treasures that we find at garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. We also have things just outright given to us to resell - and these things would not otherwise be used. We aid in finding these items their new lives in peoples' homes. Buying used items means that you're not contributing to the mindless cycle of always buying new, and discarding your old, things. You're breaking that cycle - interrupting it - and also extending the life of an object by enjoying it for many years, before in turn, sending it on to another home yourself. And likewise, when you're done with enjoying something in your home, think about donating it to a charity shop, gifting it to someone else in your family if it's a precious heirloom, or have a sale of your own, instead of putting it in the garbage. Just because you're done using it doesn't mean someone else won't get years of enjoyment from it - if anything, it's kind of wonderful to think of the extension of life it will get by being passed on to another household.

It's another way, however small, to green your small corner of the world.

Internet store to live another day

First of all, wouldn't you know that we got an order on the TIAS site yesterday??!! Massive panic as we searched through multiple storage bins to find the item that was purchased - I knew this would happen! After months of packing and unpacking for show after show, never being able to pack a bin the same way twice, it's become complete chaos to try to find anything that we've listed on the website that is also something that we take to the shows.

Which is our complete internet store inventory.

And now approaches the end of the TIAS store, and an opportunity to start fresh someplace else. We are going to set up shop with eCrater, a free web store builder and a free online marketplace. With this new store will be different merchandise, however. I have seen (and did see, the entire time) the sheer folly of listing the same inventory in the old store that we were taking to the live shows. Keeping track of items sold was never a problem - I keep very detailed records - but that nightmare of actually putting my hands on something that's been carefully wrapped and packed away in a box that's buried 3 deep and 2 back in the spare room - well, that dream was realized and it wasn't pretty! The air was blue with the language coming out of my mouth, oh my!

And we never did set up our shipping rates properly at TIAS, which meant that we hadn't covered our expenses properly. So this time we'll be doing our homework more diligently, and also, having to weigh each item as we put it into the new store. The shipping rates will correspond to the postal service's Priority Mail rates, which is how we prefer to send items out.

My head is spinning at the work ahead of us. I've got the postal scale already, as I'd bought one months ago, then not used it when setting up shop at TIAS. Hopefully, this will dovetail nicely with the end of the live show season here. As we slow down with the shows, we'll be ramping up the new internet store.