A mix of glistening and hazy sunshine beats through heavy burgundy curtains – try as they may to guard out the light – flooding the living room in sweltering heat. 34° outdoors (with a “feels like temp” of 40° according to the Weather Channel), a whopping 37° in the house says the trusty thermostat. Paired with the perpetual humidity that follows Toronto summers around like a shadow, things are, as you can imagine, rather toasty at the moment!
I’ve begun work on my usual Monday Muses post, but it may end up getting posted tomorrow or some other time, as the mind tends to turn to mush (so to speak) a bit in these sorts of temps when you don’t have central AC. In the meantime however I thought I’d share a true-blue 1950s summer beach image that seems like the waterfront version of a white picket fence suburban family snapshot, in the cutest sort of old school way!
If you’re similarly melting under the sun’s relentless force, come along with me on an imaginary vacation to the sea as we try and escape summer’s wrath for at least one breezy, serene afternoon.
Wishing you each a cool, beautiful Monday - and plenty of freezing cold drinks and frozen treats, if such a day is not possible!
Happy Saturday greetings, my sweet dears! How are you each on this sizzling August weekend? Things are pretty much peachy-keen on this end. The fuse box woes I’d mentioned last weekend have been fixed, the weather hasn’t been too cruel this week, and I’m still bubbling with celebratory feelings from my husband’s birthday on Thursday.
While sweet hubby’s foot isn’t quite up to a night out, he treated himself to some take-away sushi on his birthday and last night I set the weekend off on the right foot with homemade thin crust pizza (zucchini, orange bell pepper, and sweet onion for me, prosciutto for the Mr.), which got me thinking about the fact that pizza, one of the absolute most widely available foods these days, was an absolute novelty (outside of Italy, that is!) to most people before the 1940s.
Reflecting about the fact that pizza soared to popularity so quickly has got me itching to ask both of my grandmothers how old they were when they first remember trying pizza, and when, in their respective opinions, it become a commonplace culinary staple.
{Click on the image to see a larger version and get the 1959 recipes for “baby pizza” and “American style pizza pie”. Vintage cookbook page from Eudaemonius’ Flickr stream.}
Just as pizza is a true modern day classic, so too are great blogs, and this week’s gathering of links is teaming with fantastic stories from some of the coolest vintage sites around. With posts spanning topics from lovely black and white photos of people relaxing at the beach to a handy tutorial for refilling a vintage powder compact, there’s plenty of yummy old school goodness for everyone to enjoy!
♥ ♥ ♥
* Vintage Life Magazine: The lovely MaryDeluxe brings breaking news for vintage fans everywhere in this recent Deluxeville post. Turns out that a new magazine devoted to the vintage lifestyle in on the cusp of releasing its first edition (scheduled for October ’09). “Vintage Life” as the publication is known, is a UK based glossy spanning the decades of the 1920s through to the 80s, that will be published six times a year. Subscriptions can already be placed and are available to people worldwide. Here’s wishing this fledgling magazine tons of success!
* Hosiery History – 1940s Fashion: A thoroughly pretty array of vintage ads (some colour, some black and white) for ladies hosiery fill this post from Glamour Daze.
* 40s hair accessories: This week Casey highlights an interesting topic that appeals to me a lot: what beyond flowers, were used as hair accessories during the 1940s. Full of beautiful images and inspiration, this post is a must read for anyone who loves to adorn their locks.
* Pretty Dress and Thoughts on Vintage and Retro Fashion: Blogger Angel shares a pretty dress she’s recently acquired and writes about some of her thoughts on what drives her love of wearing vintage styles (many of which I’m sure the majority of us echo as our own reasons).
* How to refill a vintage powder compact: If you yearn for the days when I lady was often heard to say “I just need to powder my nose”, than you may be a fan of old school powder compacts. Fortunately for vintage fans these charming containers can still be found from a myriad of sources (online sites, estate sales, vintage shops, etc). If you’d like to refill one that you’ve unearthed with fresh powder, follow the five easy steps in this post to ensure your powder compact functions as well today as the first day it was ever used. (*1:30AM, August 9th. Please note, by sheer coincidence I just happened to discover that a very similar post to this one that appeared in November of last year on Vixen Vintage, and thus I feel that Solanah deserves to be mentioned here as well.*)
* Tom Sawyer Champs: A series of absolutely adorable, well taken photos of some of The Snail and The Cyclops’ blogger’s favourite vintage toy finds. From an abacus to a precious brown teddy bear, there is certainly something to make everyone nostalgic for their own childhood playthings in this post.
* Let’s go to the beach: With temperatures breaking record highs in some parts of the world this past week (such as Washington State), it’s clear that autumn is still just a distant dream for most, which is all the more reason to head to the beach for some respite from the heat. If that’s not possible for you however (goodness knows I won’t be able to dig my toes into the sand this year), you can still imagine visiting the beach with the help of these wonderful vintage photos from Life magazine.
* 50s Italian Summer: This week The Cupcake Diary channels the crisp, clean looks of late 1950s Italian tourists and locals alike through images from movie The Talented Mr. Ripley.
* Golden Hollywood Glam | Jeremiah Goodman: Some of the absolute most gorgeous watercolour paintings of 1940s home interiors I’ve ever seen are posted in this beauty-filled entry from the terrific blog, Nest Party. I wish I could have prints of these glamorous rooms to put on my walls for endless daydreaming inspiration.
Vanity Fair’s “Ain’t we got style”: Karen highlights pages straight from the August issue of Vanity Fair in which modern day stars replicate looks from classic movies such as It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey. These spreads have been expertly styled and shot, and really do a marvelous job of paying homage some of Hollywood’s most timeless films – and actors.
Unparalleled elegance flows through this week’s Youtube feature, a true gem of a compilation video with clips from various 1950s fashion shows, magazine photo shoots, and Hollywood movies. Not only are the women and the gorgeous looks they spot breath-taking, but the video’s poster has done a superb job of pairing background music with these images to create a soulful film-like atmosphere that further adds to the undeniable allure of 1950s ladies wear feaatured within.
I always love putting together the weekly link list. It’s a way to share with you some of my favourite recent blog posts and also for me to draw inspiration a second time around the things that are catching the eyes of my fellow vintage lovers this week. I hope that the links above captivate you, too! Please feel free to share any articles or images that have filling your heart with bliss or your mind with inspiration lately with me, too.
Wishing you each a joyful, serene, beautiful weekend!
It’s a little bit hard to believe that we’re already well over a month into summer, less than two more to go until it will be time to wave sayonara to the dry, electric nights and drowsy, blisteringly warm mornings of this season. When shorts fade into ribbed tights, popsicles become overshadowed by straight-from-the-oven pumpkin pies, and the majestic blooms of gardens everywhere are replaced by a kaleidoscopic array of tumbling, crunchy leaves.
While this current season of extremes is still underway, I’ve found myself thinking about the elements that make summer so iconic. Those things that are the July equivalent to snowmen in December or tulips come April, and which speak to nearly everyone on as a collective whole. Simple pleasures, distinct moods, sun-kissed hues, the desire to escape the heat and yet an equal longing for it to linger, its presence like a memory that makes you smile more often than frown.
Every day of summer is a wild inspiration, the long desired relief from winter’s wrath, the fiery affair before level-headed autumn blows into town. So many places, scents, hues, people, and emotions fly into my mind when I think of this season the way it was lived when I was a child. Wisteria and honeysuckle branches tangoing on the back porch, canning peaches in a kitchen that had to have verged on 110 degrees. Countless – and I do mean truly mean countless – hours spent swimming in sparkling lakes, yet somehow never tiring in the least. Whiffs of barbeque smoke rising up into the crisply parched August air, so incredibly enticing in nature that you were tempted to start gnawing on your own shirt. Walks taken with dusty feet at dusk, the breeze from indigo clouds pushing the strands of sun-streaked hair from your face. The notes from certain wonderful, brilliant songs like “Sitting on the dock of the bay” and “I heard it through the grapevine” cascading into our laps as we sat on rickety lawn chairs around the flickering, dying embers of the backyard fire pit.
{To visit an individual image, please click on the corresponding link below each collage.}
In many respects summer has evolved for me, or perhaps simply adapted as I’ve aged. Gone are the endless barefoot hours spent scorching my soles on radiator-hot sand, in their place are kisses with my love in the shade. Where once two months out of the year scarcely seemed like a heartbeat’s worth of time into which to cram scores of activities, we now find a single weekend spent soaking up the sun all it takes to send a thousand stresses fleeing from our minds.
Yet no matter my age, there are so many extraordinary things about summer that remain truly timeless, each one a gift, a reason to smile, the fuel that will get me through another harrowing Canadian January, a Muse in the truest sense of the word.
What, my dear readers, are your eternal sources of summer inspiration?
