Some Girls Wander

Carnival Dress

After looking for just the perfect thing (and a few misfires) this dress is the one I found to wear to my opening for Lost On the Midway earlier this month. I can safely say it's one of the most beautiful dresses I've ever owned. 

Cotton cardigan - via Modcloth with vintage knitted collar added
Striped 30's silk dress, golden heart locket & bag - vintage
Tights - Hue
Shoes - Remix

It is a gown from the 1930's made of rows and rows of scarlet satin ribbons sewn to a dark cream-colored underpinning. That lovely waist panel is silk-satin, too.

The colors alone were completely spellbinding -- the perfect (and unusual) warm, rich red with yellow-y cream. And all of the details are just so pretty - the ruching at the bust, especially. I knew it was the perfect opening dress for a carnival-themed show, so I nabbed it and altered it to suit me and make it wearable.

I was really sickly the actual night of the opening, and I was so sad that there weren't any good photos of the dress from that night. I wore it out last weekend on a date, and Josiah was sweet enough to take a few for me, so this dress would be documented at last!

A Child's Book of the Teeth

I picked up this little book o' toofs at the last big antique fair.
I love teeth!

It's a rather exhaustive little manual/textbook regarding everything a young person might wish to know about the current and future inhabitants of their mouths. Good ol' World Book!

Publishing year: 1920

It is very heavily illustrated, both with charts like the one above, as well as these fantastic little cartoonish teeth-men (and some tooth-ladies), like the ones on the cover.

 

I think what we are seeing above is a very pushy wisdom tooth.

This is my favorite part of the book - "Nicknames That Teeth Have":

 

The owly "wisdom tooth" illustration is pretty wonderful.

The "Army of Prevention"!

And I'll finish with the wonderful end-papers:

I love patterned endpapers, but lately I've been really dazzled by ones with a larger scene or image, like this.

Vintage Halloween Costume Patterns

I've been amused by/obsessing about these for the past few days. Via the Pattern Shop.

I'm no good at roller-skating...

But I think I could be good at wearing this dress.

I spied it a few days ago in the incredible Fab Gabs vintage shop. If you haven't happened upon their beautiful collection yet, you will probably get all kid-in-a-candy-store about all the dresses, slips, coats and things. The photos are really good at conveying fit, form and details, the listings are generous with information about the garments, and the whole shebang seems like one very classy operation.

Now, this candy-striped dream needs to appear on my doorstep!

* Edited: I just saw this dress in their shop - gasp!
Too much goodness in one place.*

Shoes & Ships & Sealing-wax

It's alive! A zombie-blog!

That was quite an absence! I have been so consumed with other projects recently, which intersected with a growing feeling that a blog purely documenting outfits and talking about clothes wasn't really a blog I had the interest to sustain these days. That's a wonderful kind of blog if that's where your heart is, but it just isn't where mine is right now.

So I decided to do a complete overhaul of this blog, and fashion something new from it. It has a snappy little new look, and I'm really excited about this existing more as a scrapbook of anything and everything old that I love. Right now, I'm foreseeing lots of vintage clothes/ensembles (of course) from my own closet and from other places, as well as scans and photos from old children's books (which I've amassed a growing collection of over the past couple years), photos, and ephemera, this & that.

I love a good hodgepodge, and I'm excited about this one.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax-
Of cabbages, and kings..."