Vintage Finds, Booth Displays, and Home Vignettes Lately

Hello, vintage lovers! Today I'm going to share a mashup of vintage and antique finds since my last Panoply update. Some of these finds will be shown fresh from the picking, others as displayed in our antique mall booth spaces and, lastly, a few which ended up in my personal collection, temporarily or for good. Find a comfy spot like the Art Deco girl below, grab a drink, and let's go on a virtual shopping trip!

Louis Icart's 1926 "La Robe de Chine" (The Silk Robe)

Panoply Booth Spaces and Antiquing Lately

Good morning! In just another week or so I can officially say Happy Fall, Y'all! The autumnal equinox will arrive on September 23rd in my time zone here in the Northern Hemisphere. Today I'm sharing Panoply's latest antique mall booth spaces with you. 

By the time you finish reading this post you'll understand why it's been such a crazy past few weeks for me. Grab a drink, sit back, and enjoy a little armchair browsing / shopping!

Panoply 2022: It's a Wrap!

It's time to collage all my blog posts for 2022 as a final step before closing the book, figuratively and literally, on 2022. This blog is primarily my personal journal, and my final step each year is to have all my yearly posts bound in a yearbook style format using Blog2Print (no affiliation, I just love the product and service). 

I only blogged 24 posts (counting this one) in 2022, the same as 2021. Perhaps that's my new norm. It is my hope, though, that there is entertainment and inspiration within these posts for you, my readers. My blog is non-revenue producing by choice.

Recent Panoply Booth Displays

I don't even know how long it's been since I've taken readers on a tour of our booth displays at the antique mall where my Panoply sisters & I have rented space since 2008. That's about to change right now. We cleaned and reset most of our entire 500 sq feet of rented space on August 31, so let me take you through our current vignettes now. (Photo heavy, deserves beverage and possible snack while viewing).

Purse Collections Excavated from Storage

Last week I shared my summer 2022 collected home and all the furnishings I've placed since winter. In that post, I mentioned I would show you how I styled various curio cabinets in my 'girly' room with my vintage and antique purse collections.

Full disclosure: what I'm about to share with you is still only a portion of my collection of vintage and antique purses. 

But today, I'm excited to at least have these displays to share and show you. The gateleg table in the left frame of the collage below was a new, old love since moving into this cottage house. The DuBarry Beauty Preparations display case sitting on it was something I've had for years. I've also owned the French curio (middle frame) and purse 'tree' (right frame) for several years.

Let's look at what's inside the DuBarry Case first. There are three shelves with layers of handbags.

My bezel-set French rhinestone handbags ...

French-made sequin, beaded & enameled purses, as well as two of Whiting & Davis' Star Series (Silent film stars Renee Adore and Charlie Chaplin)...

On the bottom shelf are my first purchases of beaded 'rug' and beaded figural (after Francois Boucher's 1737 "Charms of Country Life"). The beaded figural handbag also has a matching compact and hand-painted snuff box with the same figural depiction.

Atop the beaded 'rug' and figural are my chatelaines. I did an entire post on these fascinating accessories, here.

The leather chatelaine was a recent acquisition in the past couple years, and it is actually on the mannequin in this room's reading corner with other early 20thC period clothing and accessories.

On the table beside the DuBarry case is a small display stand of mostly 'finger' - or dance - purses, as they were called in the 1920s-1930s. These were worn by Flapper women while they danced, often by the ring attachment at the end of the design of many. 

Here's a sampling of some of my finger and dance purses. They ranged in functionality from being an entire makeup compact to carrying just a coin, some even with built in clocks!

The French curio has a plethora of purses, vanity items, and other related antiquities relating to the [mostly] Flapper Flapper era.

Here is just a sampling of the many snuff boxes, vanity compacts, and unique leather purse fit for a small pistol (with the imprint still clearly visible) from this case.

On the wall where my girls' photos are hung, I have another curio that is mostly vintage and antique children's purses and vanity items.

Children's purses and vanity items are not easily found, as children would wear their items, so finding them, and in good condition, is always a treat. The collage below is just a sampling of mine, with recurring themes such as Clara Bow faces, Scottie and Airedale dogs, and children's classic stories and rhymes. Materials may be oil cloth, felt, vinyl, leather, plastic, silk and/or metal mesh.

In the corner near this curio is my purse 'tree'. This displays most of my vintage and antique mesh purse collection.

Again, here's just a sampling of those on the purse tree:

A couple other displays of French beaded and mesh bags are atop the French curio and to the left of the children's curio. I also have a shelf in my bookcase dedicated to reference books on purses and chatelaines.

As I said, what I'm sharing today doesn't even begin to touch my collection of beaded purses, some of which are true collectors' rarities, and book referenced pieces. Here's a sampling collage I created some time ago, a few of which are repeats in today's post and are not beaded.

I have many beaded purses that I need to figure out how to display that are either in individual Riker boxes (no affiliation, only linked for illustrative purposes), or individually wrapped in a storage box since downsizing. I think perhaps a wall shelf for lean-to displays might be a good thing for those in the Riker boxes. 

I've even had a mess of a World War I beaded purse I bought and had restored (top left in collage above). I did an entire post on that restoration, and to see the before and the history behind the purse, see this post. Here's a photo of the after: 

She's a beauty now, but was a complete mess before. I was able to - years later - win a hankie serendipitously at an auction, which now accompanies this purse. It's made of silk, and the note inside the original gift box reads: 

"To Mrs. W.B. Rullings 

Wishing you a Mery Xmas 

& Happy New Year. how is the 

electric lights. Ha. Ha. From a 

Soldier Friend Raymond Whitcomb

2nd Rgt Engn bat AEF" 

(AEF is an acronym standing for American Expeditionary Forces)

I have been a member of the Antique Purse Collectors Society since 2008, and consider it a privilege to be friends with many of the collectors featured and even authoring some of my reference books. I've inventoried my entire collection via photo albums and an Excel spreadsheet, but there's always room for improving my cataloging system. If you are interested in the other links to various posts I've written on my purses, the list below will conveniently take you to each of them.

• Flowers and Bird as Inspiration in Beaded Purse Collection
• A WWI-Era Beaded Purse Restoration - Before and After
• Chatelaines - Keys to the Castle (and a Collector's Heart!)
• Crossover Collectible: Purse Ephemera
• "A Panoply of Purses" - 1st Edition, 2013

Thank you for allowing me the guilty pleasure of visiting some of my old friends that have been in storage for so long. If you've stuck with me all this time, you are gracious readers, indeed. Leave me a comment, let me know if you have an obsession a collection like this or any other, such as dishes. Believe me, there's more from where this came. 😜

Rita C. at Panoply

A special thanks to Pam of An Artful Mom Thursday Favorite Things Link Party #548, Bev from Eclectic Red Barn Thursday Favorite Things #548, Amber from Follow the Yellow Brick Home Thursday Favorite Things #548, and Barb from French Ethereal's Share Your Style #353 for featuring this post!

Parties I Share With: Pieced Pastimes, Love Your Creativity, BNOTP Met Monday, where showing befores and afters is a key topic!, All About Home Common Ground, All About Home Follow the Yellow Brick Home,  A Stroll Thru Life, My Wee Abode,  French Ethereal SYS, Happiness is Homemade, Traffic Jam Weekend, Katherine's Corner TFT, Eclectic Red Barn TFT, Follow the Yellow Brick Home TFT, Grace at Home, My Thrift Store Addiction, Our Hopeful Home, Karin's Kottage, County Road 407 Farmhouse Friday

Summer Vibes in Our Collected Home

Happy summer solstice day for all you in the Northern Hemisphere! Right now I've got summer vibes throughout our home. Today I'm inviting you inside my collected home for a little tour of updates I've made since the first of the year. It's kind of a vintage armchair shopping (hence, collected) / home tour thing, since it's our first summer in this new home. Grab a beverage, and come virtually inside!

Front entry summer 2022

Vintage Shopping Finds: Design on a Dime

Sharing vintage shopping finds and antique mall booth displays is really the reason why I started this blog. One of my Panoply sisters lives out of state but is still very active in buying and selling with my other Panoply sister and me. So, the main purpose of blogging was to share vintage finds and collective booth displays for her to see. I know it's something many of my readers enjoy too, so this post is an attempt to catch up in sharing the finds that I was drawn to buy in the second half of 2021. 

Pearson sofa (with ivory pillows only) - estate sale Nov 2021

What's different about this post, though, is that these finds ended up being ones that are currently being used in my new home, not for sale.....yet! My recent vintage shopping goals have been to fluff our new nest. You may want to backtrack to see a mini tour of my home in winter, here. Otherwise, armchair shoppers, get yourself a drink, and let's go shopping! 

Panoply 2021: It's a Wrap!

Once again the Christmas decor is packed away, and now it's time to collage all my blog posts for 2021 as a final step before closing the book, figuratively and literally, on 2021. Soon I'll have all my posts bound in a yearbook style format using Blog2Print (no affiliation, I just love the product and service). 

I only blogged 24 posts (counting this one!) in 2021. That's even fewer than last year. I suppose I didn't feel I would be entertaining or informative enough to sustain your interest, so 24 it was. Plus, I found myself super busy by late summer with another move!

Panoply Vintage Finds in Covid Times

The last time I gave y'all an update to my Panoply vintage finds was in an August 2020 post. I've done a lot of shopping since then! Whenever my Panoply sisters and I shop together, we often do a show and tell once we're back at home base, so that's what I have for you today: highlights of my vintage finds in Covid times since last August. It's a long post, but lots of eye candy. Grab a drink, let's go armchair antiquing!

Tales of the Traveling Tote #26: Antiquing, and Giveaway

Welcome to the Tales of the Traveling Tote #26, and Happy March! Our tales began in 2015 (go here to get the story behind it all), and here we are in 2021, still journaling our tales each quarter. You can go here for my personal travel history with my totes, Miss Luna C and Miss Charley C.

Probably the most significant trips I've made in this past quarter are two outings for the COVID vaccine. That's both me and Mr. P. pictured below (and Miss Charley C), getting our second shots in the latter part of February, almost one year since the pandemic began. BREAK OUT! We are now counting the days until we can feel a little more relaxed to eat out, shop in person, and actually travel! Let's just hope these vaccines will be effective against variants.

Most of my readers know one of my favorite pre-COVID activities was antiquing and vintage shopping. My two Panoply sisters and I have rented spaces in the South Charleston Antique Mall since July, 2008 in WV. The 3-story (+mezzanine), 18,000 square foot building (pictured below) was formerly a retail department clothing store in its heyday. Now its purpose is an antique emporium!

Since my travels during the past year have involved little more than my [mostly] weekly trips to the antique mall to restock and fluff our booth spaces, I thought it might be fun to have Miss Luna C take you along for a mini tour of our antique mall. I'll share several of our dealers' spaces, and give you a look at our current spaces as they're styled for early spring. Miss Luna C was excited for this excursion, and I hope you are too!

Our starting point on first floor is the corner of one of our spaces. We'll circle back at the end of our trip to see more of our spaces.

Still on first floor, we go to the far back and find one of our favorite dealer friend's booths. She buys a lot of big furniture, as you will see in another photo. Miss Luna C sits on an English washstand in the corner.

More of the same dealer's goods, let's see what's cooking (besides Miss Luna C in the large apple butter kettle!). Crates, curios, brass beds, large stained glass windows......

Pictured below is some of the really big furniture this dealer hauls in. Look at that massive secretary and corner cabinet. My sisters and I don't sell large furniture like this, and we never did. We now limit furniture items to what may fit in an SUV.

Moving up the stairs to the mezzanine level, this cigar store Native American is on the lookout for good deals. 

Ahh, yes, just up a few more stairs to second floor, we see a dealer who sells all things Fiesta, which is manufactured in West Virginia. 

This was late February, so he had already made green the starring color, but just around the corner of this aisle display, there was still a bit of red and white for Valentine's Day. He switches his color scheme displays monthly, and stocks more colors on the racks behind these. 

Miss Luna C wants some rock and roll. This dealer stocks an excellent variety of vintage vinyl LPs.

This dealer nearby has a vintage library with a couple chairs for customers to peruse the inventory.

A West Virginia antique mall without vintage glassware would be like a candy store without candy. Blenko, Viking, Kanawha, Rainbow, Fenton - they're all in our antique mall. Check out these fun facts on this iconic WV artistry on the state's Tourism website. We have several dealers who sell vintage glass.

On the third floor of our antique mall, we have a dealer who caters to us dish lovers! Check out that Windsor Ware harvest fruit in the cabinet! There was a beautiful china set on the table too which I hurriedly walked past without taking a photo. It had a pink rim and roses.

This booth has a nice set of chairs hanging on the wall. That's a trick we often use (and are currently doing in one of our spaces!). Those barrister bookcases like the one on the floor below the chairs are consistently hot commodities at auction, estate sales and even antique malls. It won't last long here.

Coming back downstairs to first floor, we'll make one more stop, right next to my sisters' and my booth. This dealer specializes in postcards. Miss Luna C is propped up on the section of travel postcards.

I promised a few photos of our booths as they are currently styled, so the rest of the photos you will see are of mine and my sisters' rented spaces. This first space is what we refer to as our main booth. It's directly beside the dealer with the postcards.

Not pictured in the photo above, but barely visible on the right are one, double-sided rack of our vintage linens.

Directly behind the right side louvered dividers of our main booth is our mall's service elevator, and the aisle turns right. If you think of the floor layout as shaped like a U, we would be situated at the base of that U. You'll perhaps have a better idea of that as I show the additional spaces. We have a space directly beside the elevator. We refer to this section as our "mantiques". The guys (and gals, too) gravitate toward it.

Directly across the aisle from mantiques is yet another space. This space is sort of a mixture of vintage  country/farmhouse/primitive items, seen below. Through the shelf and louvered shutter divider at center, you can see the staircase that leads to the mall's upper floors.

See the backside of the lamps on the right? Here's the front of that table (picture below), which is on that aisle that turned right from the service elevator I mentioned earlier. 

Lastly, we end up where we started this mini antiquing adventure, at our space on the corner of another aisle, at the foot of the staircase. From here, you can look back all the way to our mantiques section. It's one continuum, with a left turn at mantiques taking you to our main booth. 

Behind the repurposed chifferobe pictured on the corner above, we have the space behind it also. The wall is pictured below. There's that chair I mentioned we hung on the wall. We work around space restrictions such as the HVAC system ductwork, and optimize what space we have.

I know that was a whirlwind tour, particularly of Panoply's own spaces, but I want you to now read about our giveaway and take some time to visit my tote tribe sisters! I'll try to show our antique booth spaces in more product detail in a future post. We have a lot of fun inventory, both vintage and antique.

NOW, ONTO THE GIVEAWAY!

(Update March 8, 2021: Barb at the Sewing Knit Loft was randomly chosen as our winner by Jackie Williamson. Thank you to all who left comment entries!)

The Traveling Totes Tribe is offering another giveaway and Jackie at Purple Chocolat Home is our giveaway sponsor this time. One lucky reader who leaves a comment on Jackie's post today will have their name thrown into the hat for an opportunity to win this MacKenzie-Childs Tulip Tea Kettle Dish Towel. This is a perfect accessory for welcoming spring in your kitchen! 

Be sure to check out my other traveling sisters' posts to see what they've been up to during these past few winter months.

Debbie with Miss Aurora @ Mountain Breaths

Emily with Miss Courtney Childs@ The French Hutch

Patti with Miss Kenzie and Miss Taylor @ Pandora's Box

Jenna with Miss Coquille @ The Painted Apron

Linda P with Miss Lola @ Life and Linda

Rita with Miss Luna C @ Panoply (you are here!)

Sarah with Miss Merri Mac @ Hyacinths for the Soul

Jackie with Miss Madi K @ Purple Chocolat Home

Ricki Jill and Countess de Monet @The Sketchy Reader

Join us again on June 1, 2021 for another edition of the Tales of the Traveling Tote. I'm dreaming of a real vacation!

Thanks so much for your visit. I love reading your comments, and be sure to leave one on Jackie's blog for a chance at our token gift. Stay safe, and Happy March!

Rita C. at Panoply

Sharing: Pieced Pastimes, Love Your Creativity, BNOTP, All About Home Common Ground, All About Home Follow the Yellow Brick Home, Apple Street Cottage, Grandma Ideas, A Stroll Thru Life, My Wee Abode, Thistle Key Lane, Bluesky at Home, Zucchini Sisters, French Ethereal SYS, Katherine's Corner TFT, Grace at Home, My Thrift Store Addiction, Our Hopeful Home, Karin's Kottage Centerpiece Wednesday, My Hubbard Home FWF