Aqua Blue Heaven Friday: Pull Up A Chair!

Welcome to Aqua Blue Heaven Friday, lovers!



Are you sitting down for this?! (That's gonna seem alot more witty in a minute.) Let's cut through my usual random rambling and get right to the good stuff. Trust me. You'll be glad I shut up in a timely manner today, when I bestow unto you,


this!:





Mid Century Modern Style Lounge Chair, currently available on Etsy from seller Lunar Lounge Design. It looks dead-on vintage 1950s, but no, it's just a really good repro. I love it. Love it. But if you're not vibing on that particular color, you can take your pick of any of these fine hues:

Way-Out Wednesday: Give Me Some Credit.

Today's Way-Out Wednesday pick isn't vintage or way-out at all, in the sense of the day's usual theme of creepy/strange/bizarre- but it is kind of way-out in the "those crafty Etsy bitches did it again! why didn't I think of that? what a coolio idea!" way. I'm talking about ye olde upcycling again, only this time I promise not to rant about how much I despise the "going green" catch phrase. (OK, I lied. I loathe the trendy catchphrase "going green". Now I'm done.)

This time, those wily artsy types took old credit and gift cards, hacked them to bits, added some metal hardware doodads and voila! Wearable art that came from, essentially, junk! I know, I make it sound easy, as if I'd ever attempt to make something like that. Hell, I don't even have any credit cards to hack up, having long since lived without more than a Visa check card for years now. Plus, my credit sucks, so there's that. (Though it's laughable, getting those "you may be pre-approved for a Visa Platinum card!" spammy applications in the mail. I laugh at the irony, you nutty credit card companies, thinking I should have credit. Ha! You fools!)

See how cool crappy plastic cards can look? These chicks even get color-organised! Now that's talent! I can't even organise my sock drawer.



Discs Upcycled Credit Card Bracelet







Red, White & Black Upcycled Credit Card Bracelet








Bright Party Colors Upcycled Credit Card Bracelet

Life In The Fastnacht Lane

Happy Fastnacht Day! For those of you who don't what it is, Fastnacht Day is generally a Pennsylvania Dutch thang, and is the day before Lent starts, with it's historical roots going back to Germany. (AKA "Fat Tuesday" for my Mardi Gras peeps.) Fastnacht literally means donut, so the day before Lent (the day you begin fasting), people would rid their kitchens and pantries of the things to be given up for Lent- most often sugar and fats (lard) were kicked to the curb. So in a rush to get their last kicks in, deep-fried donuts were made and scarfed down on tuesday.

I'm sure there's a lot more to it than my pathetic little explanation, but this is what I remember from being a kid, when my Mom would make homemade donuts in an electric deep fryer that sat on the counter and I swear to all things holy they were the best damn donuts I ever ate in my whole entire life. (Screw you Krispy Kreme, you ain't got nothin' on lard-fried donuts in a 1970's deep fat fryer!) I could Google the background of Fastnacht Day, but that just means, like, effort and fact-checking, and that's just not how we roll around here. So the details are a bit sketchy and incomplete. But whatevs. Any excuse to eat donuts is fine with me! And if you don't eat at least one donut today, the terrorists win.


I wasn't even planning on looking for any donut-themed vintage to share, because when have you ever in your whole life seen any 50's donut novelty print dresses laying around? That's right, homies- never. But shock and surprise, while it's not exactly a to-die dress, I did find this cutesy little Vintage 50's Doughnut Ladies Folksy Table Runner, currently available on Etsy.



The pictures are crap, but can you make out the cute, plump folksy women in their cute, folksy kitchen making cute, folksy polka-dotty donuts? Also: I swear on a stack of fastnachts I'll never use the word "folksy" again.

Prints Charming Sunday: Presidential Sweet.

Welcome to Prints Charming Sunday- and also Happy Valentines Day! I hope your roses are free of thorns and your chocolates free of fat. Wow, that sounded like a really lame Hallmark card.

I'm not going to rock a Valentine's Day novelty print theme today, because I've already done it over the past week or 2 and frankly, I'm kind of over all the hearts and pinks and cutesy. Instead, I'm thinking about tomorrow, which is President's Day here in the US, honoring our country's forefathers and whatnot. I thought about what could represent the day in a novelty print and came across plenty of red, white & blue bicentennial/1776-1976 vintage stuff but it's just wasn't exactly was I had in mind. And then I remembered the Colonial/Americana theme.

The Colonial/Americana theme for home decor made it's way into the home starting in the 1950's and carried on well into the 1970's, from the oversize plastic gold-painted eagle plaques to the Americana drapes, which also matched the fabric on the hulking, heavy wood furniture. Good...lord. Fug. And while I appreciate the patriotism of it ... it was not pretty. Yet, it was more common to see that in the average Joe Schmoe home in anytown, USA than the idyllic, mid-century modern/Heywood Wakefield/atomic/boomerang decor that we like to assume homes looked like in the 50's. The colonial crap was cheap, easily accessible and the furniture wore like steel. So there you have it.

So in honor of tomorrow,today's vintage Presidential-y novelty print is this Vintage Americana-Print Sailor Blouse:



It's not too gaggingly colonial, not too cutesy, but the perfect combo for old-timey sweetness. Blouse is currently available on Etsy from seller Decades of Baltimore.