Another lucky find of mine was Pip & Estella, a beautifully curated online vintage shop with products at extremely reasonable prices!

“My inspiration for the boutique’s original concept comes from one of my favorite novels — the old and worn, yet intriguing and magnetic aesthetic of the mansion, Satis House, as described in the Charles Dickens piece, Great Expectations.  In my mind, sunlight filtered images of Satis were lovely, albeit aging and let’s not forget, inspiring.”  – Sana, Founder

Stop by her shop and check out her collection. Also please check out her latest project, FD+RD (Father/Daughter reDesign). Love it!

We tend to love to just wander. That’s what we do. He’s holds the pup’s leash to keep him from darting to the couple playing frisbee across the park and I stop to take pictures at anything that catches my eye. Yesterday was perfect wandering weather, sunny and 80. Did I mention how much I love our quant little neighborhood?

Start you own online business comes with A LOT of trial and error. What works, what doesn’t, what’s most convenient, what’s the most fun, what’s the least stressful, etc…

I’ve been doing a lot of personal shop evaluation and I’m finding my self saying “they told me so” over and over in my head. They told me to start small. They told me to start with Etsy because it has an online community that helps small businesses get started. They told me it was worth it.

Ok Ok. You guys were right. I started with an online shop run by Big Cartel and love the ability to present a fully branded shop. I thought I’d be able to spend the time driving awareness to my new digital space and money to spend on advertising. I was somewhat wrong. I work full time at an advertising agency, and I’ve found that promoting a new shop is another full time job.

So I’ve decided to migrate most of my inventory over to Etsy and build a community in that space for the time being. I love browsing Etsy, creating treasuries, and bookmarking favorites, so I’m sure a lot of other people do the same thing. Let’s see how it goes. I’m willing to try several approaches until I find something that works.

Another little announcement is that I’m expanding the category of items in my shop. I started with items that fit into the “container” category and now I’ll slowly be adding more industrial vintage pieces to the shop. I’m exciting about being able to shop for more things I love. Yippee!

Oh, what do you think of the new logo? 

With warehouses in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, Big Daddy’s Antiques has a massive amount of floor space to fill with one of a kind antiques. I’ve never been to California, but if I ever had the chance to stop by Big Daddy’s I’m sure I could waste several hours perusing all the goodies. If you are like me and live across the US, the Big Daddy Antiques website has a ton of images to flip through that will give you a good idea of what’s currently in stock and what’s currently sold.

I love randomly searching the internet for antique finds and stumbling upon a treasure like this. There is so much stuff out there just waiting to be found!

While in Portland the boy and I took a day to do some touristy things, like visit the Multhnomah Falls and hike to the highest point. Seems like a good idea when the starting signs said it was only 1 mile to the top. LIARS!!! We got about half way up the constant incline climb to find a sign that said, “You are half way there. You have traveled 1 mile”. Let’s just say that was mildly discouraging to put it lightly, especially when the both of us are extremely out of shape and the boy was toughing it out mid flu/food poisoning. Oh yeah. That happened. We about died and that’s being generous with word choice. We felt like we were suffocating and our shins and batootie muscles were about to snap in half. Slightly dramatic, but not really. It was pretty, but OMG was it painful.

*note to self…1 mile by foot feels NOTHING like 1 mile by car.