Using antique and vintage treasures

One of the perks of photographing new designs is using some of the treasures we find in our antiquing hunts. Both Jimmy and I love to go antiquing - flea marketing - treasure hunting...whatever you want to call it.

I thought it would be fund to point out a few of the background details in some of the patterns we've released over the last little bit.

It'll probably be fairly obvious that I have a definite "thing" for transferware dishes, wooden boxes, vintage sewing notions (of course) and silver. Jimmy has a "thing" for musical instruments and musical paraphernalia, old hymn books - actually old books in general, Arkansas and tourism stuff.

One of the newest is the brown transferware cheese dome in the background of Arbor Lane. One of the oldest is the green stripe fabric in the background - I found it almost 20 years ago! 

There's also a little vintage jewelry box that the pillow is sitting on, and a couple of small shaker boxes we found not too long ago.

For Topiary Row, you see one of my wooden boxes along with another piece of vintage fabric. You can also just see in the photo below a few vintage spools of thread.

For Sewing Sundries, I broke out a lot of my vintage sewing notions and played around with them. The little book of English Watson needles is one of my favorites. I also have a little white ironstone butter pat holding a few old spools of thread and a vintage button card

Pollinator's Garden has a wonderful old book as the background - one of Jimmy's music theory books. There's also more ironstone, vintage buttons and a needle packet. The organza placemat under the book is one of a set I found probably 30 years ago in an old barn sale. I found a whole stash of vintage linens that day for a ridiculous price - something like $20 for a bushel basket of linens. 

I could go on and on like this about almost every cover we've released. But maybe I'll save them and do another post or two like this one.