grammar girl

We never ever wanted to be called a gift shop. But people call us a gift shop. Which is fine, because technically, people do buy gifts at our shop. So perhaps we should say, more specifically, that we never ever want to be categorized with gift shops that sell beanie babies, far side greeting cards, candy corn shaped candles or mini books that teach you 10 ways to follow your bliss. To stay out of this category we try to find really special, old, local and totally unique things to sell to our visitors. And when we do bring something new and mass-produced into the shop it goes through a long, difficult admission process.

So when we saw this book called ABC3D several months ago while surfing the interwebs, we knew we loved it but we didn’t know if we could or should sell it in the shop. Would visitors see it as one of those totally useless “coffee table” books that have alluring cover art but are filled with nothing but fluff? Those books suck. Those are the kind of books that get re-gifted, over and over. But once we saw ABC3D in real life, we decided that if we were going to risk our reputation by bringing in a newly published book, that this should be the one we do it with. It’s so clever and we love clever. It’s so tactile and we love tactile. It’s so us and we really, really think it will be you, too.

We’re so happy that the weather has finally gotten cold enough to officially switch our wardrobes from summer to fall.  We bought our new awesome winter boots like 6 weeks ago and it has been torturous to see them sit unused in our closet all this time.  The same day we wore our new boots, we also rifled through our winter hat and scarf collection to find something appropriate to accessorize with.  But as we dug through our giant pile of knitted wool it all just seemed so “last year”.  And as if she were fluttering around in our head as we were thinking this, we got a call that day from our friend Rebekah Dortmund of Little byRD design saying she had something really special to show us.

So we meet her in her cute workshop/basement/atelier and she pulls out these hats.  The cutest hats we’ve ever seen!  Made of old wool sweaters and embellished with vintage baubles and hand-sewn florets, each has its very own personality.  What we love the best is their little “ear-flaps”, reminicent of the styles of the 20′s and 30′s.  So great.  So great.

We should be getting a fresh stock in for the weekend (we basically sold our entire first batch in like 4 days) so come by soon for the sweetest selection.  Not spending until the economic crisis subsides?  Not to worry, we plan on selling them as long as the cold weather sticks around. So, we figure we’ll have them at least until June and this whole mess has got to be better by then…right?

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. In our case, we didn’t know what we had until we sat down and turned a few pages.

This weekend we were at a tidy little sale out in the west side of town hoping to get our hands on some really great furniture. Unfortunately, we lack some ambition in the estate sale arena and by the time we got into the house (we were like the 16th person in line) someone had already snatched up every piece in the place. This is not unusual however and so, with a small sigh, we went on with our business and searched high and low for treasures of a slightly smaller size. Down in the basement we found some books, among them a tattered copy of “Library of Health” copyright 1916. We love old medical books because they usually have some pretty amazing anatomical prints tucked between pages filled with shocking and out-dated remedies to common ailments.

It wasn’t until we got the book back to the shop and turned the first few pages that we realized we had found something really, really cool. Among the pages of the beautiful black and white anatomical images that we expected we also fell upon several pages of unexpected, fully colored, “pop-up” type diagrams of the human body. One page has the head, another has the leg, foot, hand, ear and eye, the last has the upper torso including the arms. Are we crazy to love this stuff? Because we do. We totally, totally do. As we were carefully inspecting our precious pages, we realized that while we may have lost out on all that fancy furniture that we went in for, we actually came out with the best piece in the whole house!

So we don’t know how many of you read our friend, Saint Cupcake’s blog, but a couple of weeks ago our secret love affair (read: obsessive, one-sided relationship) with the trashy-teen melodrama, Gossip Girl, was revealed. Specifically, we were outed for our girl crush on the lovely Serena Van der Woodsen, her clothes, and yes, especially her hair. We admit it. Season One threw us into a tizzy every week and we couldn’t get enough. We would lay awake at night wondering what she would wear next, how her hair was always perfectly windswept, and how, however, could we meet her? To their credit, Saint Cupcake has most cordially invited both Serena Van der Woodsen and Chuck Bass to come and visit but we feel we have to try a little harder than that.

(This is where we tie this whole story to this month’s shopping post, so keep reading…)

Coincidentally, another girl crush we have is on local gal Emily Baker of Sword and Fern and her awesome jewelry. Her pieces have that tough, yet timid, sexy and strong, bohemian meets upper-east-sider quality that reminds us so much of…you guessed it… Miss Serena Van der Woodsen! So during one of the early mornings when we were sleepless over the previous night’s episode of GG, we hatched a brilliant plan: We would ship out a jewelry box full of Emily’s baubles to Serena to wear on the show. Serena (technically known as Blake Lively) would fall in love with them, insist on meeting the smarty-pants fashionistas that sent her such lovely stuff. We would meet and hug, have a cupcake, tell her she has to get back together with Dan and stop being such a bitch to Blair and then we would all be great friends and our little shop would be catapulted to unimaginable success and we would never have another care in the world. Or something like that.

So if anybody knows Serena Van der Woodsen’s NYC address could you please send it to us so we can get this whole thing going already? In the meantime, we’re dedicating this month’s entire shopping post to Emily Baker and her jewelry for giving us hope and agreeing to be part of our master plan. We hope you like her work as much as we do.

Click on a photo below to enlarge the image and to get the details on each piece.