Birds Of A Feather

Janel and I found a whole village of thrift and reselling shops today. Most of the reselling shops were too expensive to justify buying anything for our purposes, though they had lots of nice stuff. We had some luck with the thrifting, though.

I shot this with my iPhone, so please excuse the quality.

As I started unwrapping everything and setting up the shot, I had to laugh at the multitude of birds. See how many you can spot!

Some highlights: a Kosta bud vase with an etching of an archer, four Ingrid mugs to go with an Ingrid picnic ball we already have, a Tonala Mexico Vase, three Lenotex mugs, a Curoc of Monterrey roadrunner dish, a long Blissware of Hollywood tray, a huge Dansk enamelware pot (minus a lid...), and my first piece of Royal Copenhagen pottery!

There's a couple mysteries to solve in the group, and I'll probably post about them individually.

On To The Next One

I've spent the past few days playing with my photo setup. I took a whole batch of pictures using natural light and realized it wasn't a long term solution since it didn't even really work in the short term.

First attempt using natural light with this Nemadji pot.

I'm not ready to sink a bunch of money into real studio lighting, so I went to Home Depot yesterday after work and picked up two clip-on lamps and some 60w daylight florescent bulbs. I then spent the remainder of the night after yoga and dinner happily snapping away, daylight be damned!

Same pot, but with the new lighting. Not totally satisfied, but now I can shoot when I want.

Here's some more photos from the second set:

Hello World!

Boy are first blog posts daunting. Where to start? 

My name is Zach, and I am starting a vintage reselling business with my wife, Janel. We're calling it Cosmic Shift. 

We've talked about doing something like this for a while, and a series of events beginning earlier this year finally convinced us. Without going into details, a number of moderately catastrophic circumstances beset us, one after another, so significantly we felt the cosmos had shifted–thus our name. With things going so poorly, we decided we might as well do what we really want in life.

So this is where we're starting. We've been obsessively thrifting, researching, thrifting, researching, ad infinitum, and we're both ready to open an online store and desperate for the revenue!

Here's some photos of our progress:

 

Our Kitchen table is overflowing with goods stacked three-high; whatever shall we do?

I put up shelves in our studio last weekend for storing inventory. Now we can dine like proper civilized folk once again.

Then there's the details: branding, business-y stuff, photography, etc. Janel's placed a moratorium on the constant thrifting until things get rolling; we'll see how long that lasts...

It'll be a few weeks before the store goes live. In the meantime, we'll post here with updated progress and previews of stuff we've found.