Back From Brimfield's Massive Antique Market!

Yesterday I woke up at the crack of dawn to get ready to go to a massive, thrice-yearly antique market in Brimfield Massachusetts. When I say massive, I mean massive. I was there for 4 hours and only got about a third of a way through. There are hundreds and hundreds of booths, tents, carpets, and backs of vans in some cases at this event that's touted as the "largest, seasonal outdoor event of it's kind in North America." People come from all over the country to spend their money there.

I've been going ever since I was about 8 years old, at least once, usually twice, and a couple times three times a year. Of course, when I was little I hated it. The walking, the heat, the general boringness of following my parents around and not being able to look at the few things there I was interested in at the time. As I got older, as was allowed to wander this massive event on my own I grew to love it and look forward to it, especially if I had some spare cash and a fully charged camera to bring!

These pictures really don't capture just how huge the market is, but it captures a few of my favorite finds there.

I loved the pink tent! Everything in it was really cheap too, nearly everything was $5. I couldn't stay in it too long though because the sun shining through the neon pink tent made everything inside it ultra pink and glowy!

This print is supposed to be a woman delighted with her boudoir dolls, but it looks more like a woman shrieking at tiny dead people.






The three pictures above are all from the same tent, a tent that seemed to be completely filled with medical dummies and erotic books from the '70s. I'm not going to lie, I thought it was the most awesome tent at the antique market.
















I loved this tent as well, as I'm sure you can tell by all the pictures I took of it. All of the dummies of various sizes wearing antique clothes was so striking. I didn't notice those boater hats until I was resizing the pictures! I wish I did notice them while I was actually taking the picture because I probably would have claimed one for myself.


Every year there is an area set up with dozens of statues and fountains, it looks so cool! This was only a small part of that area.




The two above pictures are from another tent that I like to browse every year, it's a tent specializing in religious art, icons, and antique relics. I can never stay too long in there though because the prices, as you can imagine, are incredibly high. That little blue box in the middle, yeah, there were more than two zero's in the price.








The three pictures above are from another great tent, it's so pink and girly and French. It's also set up like a fabulous pink boudoir.


Cute little girl figurines. I didn't even notice the nurse in the middle until I was resizing! I can't believe I didn't see that either when I was staring right at it.






These are probably going to give me nightmares for a while.


I was on the lookout for an antique bonnet and found this one, but it's a small child's bonnet so I decided I didn't need it. Until, of course, I was resizing the image and noticed the price tag said it was only 14.95! Of course I would have bought it if I knew it was that cheap!






Oh look another boater hat I didn't even notice until I was resizing! I was too intrigued by the sassy lady-head planter to notice, an object I have always just skimmed over in the past but was completely enamored with this year.

What did I buy this year? I'll save that for tomorrow's post! Here's a hint though: A whole lot of useless stuff! Some years I come home with nothing but a couple antique photos, this year I found a ton of really good deals and neat things, so stay tuned for that post.

Etsy Spotlight: Silent Cheesecake Designs

It's no secret, I really love Etsy. I love it for the hand crafted pretty things, for the unique vintage pieces, and most of all, I love it for the incredible craft supplies. So I'm going to be occasionally spotlighting an Etsy shop that caught my eye on one or another of my many window shopping trips through Etsy. I will mostly be focusing on hand crafted shops, but the occasional vintage or supply shop will also be featured.

The first shop to be featured is Silent Cheesecake Designs, a shop combining a few of my favorite things into unique and strange jewelry. Specimen vials, Victorian curio, and real organic materials combine to create beautiful jewelry.

Silent Cheesecake's signature pieces are glass vials filled with a variety of specimens suspended in beautifully clear wax. The specimens are all real and range from leaves to flowers to insects to bones to small sea life. The wax is beautifully clear and relatively free of bubbles or distracting debris as I have seen in some embedded object jewelry.

Another frequent theme in Silent Cheesecakes's shop is beetle wings. Beetle wings are an infrequently used jewelry material, but I find that whenever they are used the result is stunning. Real beetle wings have an incredible luster and texture that just can't be faked.

If you are looking for something a little more subtle than a mouse skull floating in clear wax, you can pick up a small pendant featuring either real butterfly wings or a mini print with pressed flowers on the back.

Something else that Silent Cheesecake carries, and something I'm always on the lookout for, is beautifully detailed bird cage necklaces. She uses small rusty birdcages and decorates them with unique beads and animal vertebrate. The end result is stunning and unique and almost like a contained curio cabinet you can carry with you!

Silent Cheesecake carries a wide assortment of pieces, and has a rather full shop of around 6 pages. The prices are very reasonable for such unique pieces and range from very affordable $10 earrings to more expensive and much larger pendants. If you admire the look, but are a bit squeamish about wearing real specimens around your neck there are a variety of pieces with the same aesthetic that use no organic materials or only pressed flowers, so you can still wear an equally beautiful piece without having to go all out and wear something you might not feel comfortable wearing around your neck. Personally, I love the organic pieces and have my eye set on one of her vial necklaces with real octopus tentacles in it!

Ophanim Post Cards

I got my post card order in the mail today! It's quite a big stack but the price was really good, so I couldn't resist. The art and design is all done by myself, it's this particular picture that I made just to get printed up. I have 2 more designs I would like to get printed up, but one is in the works, so when that one's done I'll most likely get them both printed up at the same time.

My post cards!


Look at how many I have!


The back, just my shop name and a little bit of info as well as some URLs.

I will be giving these away as a pretty little freebie with all orders from my Etsy shop!

Swan Lake Inspired Bonnet

I recently finished a half bonnet based on Metamorphose's Swan Lake print in bordeaux. If you're unfamiliar with what this gorgeous print looks like, here it is:

This print, in this particular colorway has been a dream print of mine so it was really fun to get to create something based on it. It has a lot of colors and a whole lot of roses, and even a few feathered birds!

Can you spot all the birds? There are 3 of them, one on each rose corsage. This particular bonnet is a much shorter design than most of my bonnets, the crown just reaches the top of the ears, making all the over-the-top decoration look even more cute and over the top!

Packaging, Art, and Cameos

I've been doing a lot of work giving my shop a little bit of a makeover. I'm trying to work on packaging and what I guess you could call advertising. It's a lot of hard work, but it's sort of fun! I honestly feel a bit like I did when I was little, coloring and cutting out fake coupons or circus tickets in preparation for for a game of pretend. But this time my shop is actually a real one, selling things I've hand made. I'm actually trying to keep as much of my packaging hand made as possible. I've got a nice printer, a paper cutter, a big stack of cardstock, and a hole puncher that makes tiny little holes! What can I do with that? Well, I've found that I can do a lot of things with it that create a, hopefully, professional look to the things I make and sell.

For my line of sweet stuff, I've made fancy little cards to clip some jewelry onto. They then go into little 4x6 ziplocks that I found in the craft section. My more classical or gothic jewelry will be packaged up a bit differently, I'm not quite sure how yet, but I have printed up some tags with a pretty engraved style design on it.

I've also been working on some postcard sized prints for my shop, and just for fun. I will be getting these printed for me, one at a time, because it would kill my printer and it's just cheaper to do these in bulk. A whole lot of tags can be made from a couple sheets of paper, but these are a bit bigger!

Click either for a larger picture.

I plan on doing one for each style my shop caters to, Classic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, and Gothic Lolita. The Gothic Lolita one is still in progress! I plan on giving these away with orders from my shop as a little thank you. I drew and colored them myself, and it's been quite some time since I did very much art, but I hope that these are nice enough for people to want to keep and tack up somewhere, and not crumple them up and throw them away XD You can also check these out, and any other Lolita art I might do, on my Deviantart account.

One final project is to make all these cameos into something pretty! I've had the bare cameos hanging around for a very long time and finally found a place selling the fancy backs in the size I need. The next step is to fancy them up a bit with chain and beads and maybe some rhinestones, then put some on pin backs and others on necklace chains. Maybe even make a hair clip or two!

Special Photo Shoot

I've updated my shop with a number of things, most of which are completely new things that I hope to make a regular item in my shop!

First up is the Sweet Garden half bonnet. This is a simple, all pink, half bonnet decorated in a very OTT Sweet Lolita manner with lots of extra roses and a scattering of pink chiffon bows.

The first of my shop's new items are mini tricorn hats. I've been wanting to get into making mini tricorns ever since I learned the art of millinery, and I made this photo shoot as an excuse to finally get myself in gear and make some. I found it a really fun experience! I'm still trying to get the technique down, but so far, so good! I've made two for sale, a gothic black mini tricorn, and a sweet blue and white one.

I also am starting to stock cake slice hats. I really love making things out of felt, and I love the silly over-the-topness of the cake hat, so I couldn't resist making my own version of the Lolita classic. The first cake slice in stock (that sold out within an hour of posting!) is a super sweet pink and blue slice.

Another new thing for Ophaim is jewelery with a sweeter style. I really enjoy making cute and pastel jewelery, my favorite to make at the moment are little polymer clay teddy bear themed pieces.

To keep with the theme of a few new, sweeter, pieces being added to Ophanim, I've also included some small deco'd tins. I've discovered decoing to be a really fun hobby. I don't know which style I like more, the cabochon and rhinestone kind, or the whipped cream and sweets kid!

I recently got together with some lovely Lolita designers and models, check out my Lolita blog for pictures from that awesome event!