Ruby Slippers in Five Minutes

One pair High Heels
One paint brush
One bottle red glitter
Tacky Glue that dries clear
Newspaper work surface (reuse glitter that doesn't stick)

(Touch up will be necessary at each wearing, as I am doing today...)

blog clog vol IV

OK, I think I've got a halfway decent blog post in the works for the near future---a good story about a treasure-trove yard sale purchase---- but in the meantime, I bring you another clumsy edition of 'blog clog'

to clean out some of the stuff in the drafts file.

1)
Let's start where I left off.
 Tommy, from my last blog post, came in the other day with his silver dread locks all freshly chopped off, and needed something for his new look. I had just a week before picked up this midnight blue dinner jacket with skinny black satin lapels -- and bingo--
--it fit like it was tailor made for him.

Kinda Blues Bros....

(which reminds me--- Tommy's Blue Sun Trio is playing at Savoia tonight at 9 pm 214 Warren St.)

2) Seen on the street

Nothing pleases me more than seeing Five and Diamond merch out there in the world-- weeks, months, maybe years after I've sold it. Saturday I was an art opening and spotted Gretchen carrying this 1920s floral pocketbook from 5 and D


She was totally working it with her hat and those bauble necklaces. Love all those colors!

Then a few minutes later I walk across the street to another art opening and there's Dawn in one of the Koos van Den Akker dresses she bought a few weeks ago.


The next morning I was walking the alleys and saw Holly wearing her new-old Catskill varsity jacket, (drat I forgot to take a pic!) and
then on Tuesday I'm playing Bingo at PM Wine Bar, and in walks this gentleman wearing a corduroy blazer from 5 and D.

(I so love the ones like this with the belted waist in back:)

Four tags in four days!

3) Delmar Bootery.


I want to get in a plug for the Delmar Bootery in Albany.  A couple of months ago I gathered up 6 pair of tattered boots from the back of my closet and took them to Delmar. All totally unwearable, but with which I still had serious attachment to.
It sort of felt like taking sick animals to the vet, and one pair even got rejected

"Sorry, there's nothing we can do...".


The five pair that they refurbished (Took only 10 days, BTW) came back beautiful

But I'm most excited about the really old Orange ones that I bought in a vintage store on Haight Street, SF in the early 80s , but wore 'til there was no heel left.

Here's a picture of me wearing them back then, marching outside the Museum of Modern Art in some labor dispute protest thing.

(This is pretty much how I survived those horrible 80s: mini skirts, turtlenecks, vintage men's jackets, Cowboy boots).



4) If the dress fits /Letting go again

Some dresses hang around the store for ages and only get ooohed and aaawed at. In the case of this border lace dress, only a very tall person could wear it, sinse it can not be hemmed. I asked this lovely 6 foot tall woman to model it for me,and when she came out of the dressing room told her she could have it for half price. Done.


Sorta similar story with this gorgeous Best and Co. velvet coat that was very, very tiny. In this case, way too many non-tiny people decided to try it on and button it up anyway, busting out the corner waist seams on it.  Argggh. You cannot repair L-shaped corner seams, people.

So I let Ngonda have if for 75% off!

5) Resolving
One of my New Year's resolution ideas for this blog was: For every picture I post of something sold, to also post a picture of something I haven't sold yet. I doubt I can stick to it, but will try here with some winter cover-ups.
First, the SOLDs:

And now for the UNSOLDS:








6) Grrrr. I really, really REALLY REALLY  REALLY hate google blogger today.
Really.  nightmare. When are we forming a local Hudson bloggers support group?

Letting go

This is Tommy Sharp, of the Hudson City Ramblers.

Tommy bought this amazing wool gabardine western shirt from me a couple months back. It was a rather expensive shirt, but I didn't make one penny on it.
I'd bought it for myself nearly 20 years ago, in a vintage clothing store on Bleeker Street named Chameleon, where I also worked for about 30 seconds, mending clothes in the basement/storeroom.
The shirt cost me $90, which trust me, was an extraordinary purchase for me at the time.  I paid for it in installments.

Oddly enough, over all these years- I wore it only once--- maybe, MaaaaaaYbe twice,

1993ish



but in 5 years of having the shop I still haven't been able to bring myself to offer it for sale.

When Tommy came in looking for something special, I dug the shirt out of the back room, not really thinking he'd bite. I was wrong...but, I have no regrets. When I saw him sporting it on his facebook page a couple of weeks later I knew I'd waited for the right moment to part with it.

A Different Kind of Three Piece Suit

You know how sometimes you see something you've never seen before and you go "Wow, I've never seen one of those before..."
and then of course the next day you see that same thing again somewhere else?


Over Thanksgiving (in a land far away) I found this ladies 3-piece suit in a thrift store. A basic ladies suit, but with a matching coat (in a slightly larger but identical tweed).

 As it happened, though, I had bought only the coat, taken it to my car, fed the meter, and then instead of going to breakfast decided for some strange reason to go back into the store.
I guess it was one of those moments when the thrift Gods were saying
"Go Back, Go Back... you're not done... there's more in there for you..."

I always listen to those Thrift Gods.

I'd never seen a suit with a matching coat before, but when I went back in the store  the skirt/jacket/belt, which had been hung up 7 aisles away from the coat, jumped out at me as extremely familiar.

Needless to say, it was very rewarding to reunite the suit with the coat and display it all together on a dress form,  but it only lasted one day. This luck y customer snatched it up immediatly, and I snapped some pics.



As for seeing the same thing twice, the next day I was cutting up an old 1939 department store catalog to jazz up paper shopping bags with


and sure enough, there was the 3-piece "Wardrobe Suit Ensemble" for only $12.99.

Finding LoVe at the Salvation Army Thrift Store and

a Merry Christmas to all!
Five and DIamond will be open today, Christmas Eve, until 5 PM.
(I generally don't encourage buying vintage for others, but Gift Certificates are available.)

still lucky

Almost an entire year after being mentioned in Lucky Magazine

Five and Diamond Vintage

is still reaping the benefits.

These two women both drove a long way, and both had the clipping stashed in their purses...

Too cute! I love that's there's real paper five and diamond ephemera floating out there in this ever-s0-digital world. Thank You Lucky!

More than You want to know about the Cleo Costume

but I'm putting it out there anyway

Halloween isn't officially over until I've crammed my costume into the costume closet and blogged about it.

In the 6 weeks leading up to Halloween this year, this scrappy little blog received over 3500 hits, from people checking out my Barbie and Morticia Addams costumes. People definitely appreciate the effort of a homemade costume, judging from my image-google ranking. (One woman even called the shop and pleaded with me to rent the Barbie costume to her -just name any rediculous price! --I declined).

For my Cleopatra costume, I did some image-googling myself, and made an inspiration file, from which I created a sketch that incorporated all my favorite elements : A headress, a collar, simple straight skirt and sash, and meshy cape.

This did not involved any dressmaking or fancy skills. I simply pulled together a bunch of parts that all fit together into a bigger picture. Ultimately, this costume is just a combination of circles, rectangles and triangles dressed up in gold, with some dollar-store spiders, snakes, and rubber cockroaches thrown in.

90% of the materials were recycled, (big thank you to Carol Lavender at The Second Show Thrift Shop for the shower curtain and mesh!)

The first thing I tackled was the headress, built from a vintage nurse's cap I found in my own archive of tattered junk.

Painted it gold



And then just kept adding adding adding.

using gold trims and hand-cut craft materials.



The collar was a disk, made from the shower curtain and reenforced with interfacing,

and attached to a cheap second hand snaky choker necklace, then adorned with

cake decorating leaves, plastic fan parts, and the cockroaches.

Anything that wasn't already gold was spray-painted gold.

The cummberbund is a rectangle of shower curtain fabric


rouched and gathered party-popper style, with a zipper added.

And underneath the cummerbund is a thrift store slip that has a rectangle of gold hanging from the front and back, basted on.



(all parts, including skirt, are jazzed up with hot-glued details. Here, more trim and painted doilies)

Then a tie-shaped sash is attached to the cummerbund, using hooks and eyes, Jazzed up with Egyptian symbols cut out from leftover scraps.

The deco shaped mesh cape was adorned with gold x-mas beading (also from Carol) and attached to arm bangles (paper lanterns) with hooks and eyes:



I sacrificed last year's Morticia wig so I wouldn't have to buy a new one.

Here's Gretchen chopping it off during the "dress rehearsal":


And here's the lovely portrait she painted that day:


which I have to admit looks way more elegant than the actual finished product:

But I had a blast nevertheless.

Fun to make,

Fun to wear!:

(photo by Walter Hill)