My Texas Bucket List

So one of the many reasons I started this blog was to serve as a chronicle of my last years in Texas before I graduate with my last college degree (yeah, there have been a few...) and have to move away due to lack of jobs within my specialty here. Anyways, to try and enrich this experience as much as possible, I have decided to make a Texas "Bucket List" with all of the places and things I want to do before I finally move on. I will probably update this list from time to time and mark off items or add them based on new ideas, but for now here's my list:

Eat as much Barbecue as possible - (beef barbeque preferably, I am not a fan of pork)

Watch the Fireworks one 4th of July at Washington on the Brazos - I've been trying to do this for years and it never seems to work out for me, maybe next year

Photograph some of the "dying" towns - if you've grown up or traveled in this area you know what I'm talking about, the tiny train and farming/ranching towns of Texas that are disappearing back into the sands.

Have my grandparents take me on an in depth tour of Galveston and take video their stories and of growing up on the Island.- this is something that I have been meaning to do for a long time, and I wish I had done it before Hurricane Ike, but hopefully I will get a chance to before we leave. 

Go to a Jerry Jeff Walker concert at Gruene Hall - because well they're both legends.... 

Chicken Challenge. - If you are not familiar with Texas A&M traditions it involves the Dixie Chicken.

Saying goodbye to the Forsyth Galleries - I think I've been slowly doing this for the past year or two since I have stopped volunteering there, but it is still terribly hard and it hurts at times. I made some of my closest friends and created some of my best memories here. This is a place that allowed me to travel the world and introduced me to the art community without judging me for not having the proper background of a traditional student docent when I joined. I just hope it can remain that way for future students....

Texas Reds Festival - at least it's in October so we'll only get mild heat stroke now?


Spend some more time hanging out with my cows - because they are awesome and I do not visit them enough.

Austin City Limits - I want to go to a live taping of it. It's been close to the top of my "wish list" for years..... 

ACL Music Festival - (This is different from Austin City Limits TV Show taping) - and we actually got tickets this year! I have never gone before because I have always used the "Oh I'll go next year" excuse, and since this will run out in another two years, I'm so excited to go it is not even funny, we got single day tickets for the Saturday. We will be hopefully getting to see Stevie Wonder, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Wanda Jackson, Gillian Welch, TV on the Radio, Fitz and the Tantrums and more....  

We will see what else I end up adding to this list but for now I am pretty happy with it. To sign off tonight, I have one of my all time favorite Gillian Welch songs in honor of our ACL tickets. Oh and yes, I promise there will still be a Feedsack Friday post!

Catching Up!

Hello Everyone!

Just popping in to say yes, I am still alive. I survived all of my final exams and have finished submitting grades! I have been quite busy the past few weeks and once I finally got back into the blogging mood we had the "Blogger-gate 2011" with the long outage. Anyways, last week I was providing guest posts for my dear friend Cassandra over at Delightfully Gluten-Free. If you ever were curious about what type of make up I wear, here's a link to my post on Gluten-Free Beauty!

I should be back to my normal blogging regime, and yes Feedsack Friday will be back this week! I promise I'll have something good!

Anyways, to leave you today I have a few outfit photos from spring break when my husband and I went to visit the McNay art museum in San Antonio. If you ever get a chance to visit, I would highly recommend it. The McNay is absolutely beautiful and has an excellent collection of early 20th century American, and modern art, as well as one of the most fabulous pate de verre glass collections that I have seen outside of Europe.

 My outfit consists of Nudeedudee's fabulous knit top, a pair of Level 99 capris I bought from Anthropologie ages ago, as well as my Miss L Fire Mahalo's that are far more comfortable than they look! I promise! (If you haven't been able to tell from previous posts, I'm a huge Miss L Fire fan...)

Be afraid no make up!

One of the entrances to the McNay, it was originally a home that housed a large collection of art that was later endowed to create the permanent collection of this museum.

Feedsack Friday! and a few Victory Garden Photos!

Hello Everyone!

I hope all of you readers are  having a fabulous holiday weekend! In honor of Earth Day and the Spring-like weather (or technically more Summer/desert-like here in Texas at the moment...) I have a few photos of one of my favorite floral feedsack designs photographed in my garden.

The Tomatillos are plotting to take over the entire porch!

So far the Victory garden is going quite well, I have only had one casualty. One of my tomato plants is mysteriously dying. I am not quite sure why but the Roma tomato plant as well as the cherry tomato plant are thriving. I have tomatillos setting right now as well, I cannot wait to make home made salsa from them in a few weeks! More of my recent photos can be found on my Flickr AND my tomatillo bloom photo I posted a few weeks ago was featured in a post on Offbeat Home! *insert bragging link here*

I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday and now it is time to go make a pretty drink and go sit out on the porch!  I will leave you with one last photo of the eggplant that is about to bloom...

The last memory of the cool season...

The summer heat has officially arrived in Texas. Lately it feels like the whole world is on fire, mainly because of the 90 degree weather and because I have been waking up to ash covering my garden each morning from the fires spreading across the state.

 Today's outfit post is of the last "cool" day that I expect to see until November. It was taken a few weeks ago at the local winery where we went out for birthday drinks with a friend. I am still getting used to this whole posing for photos aspect of this blog but eventually I will get better. Here I am wearing my favorite Nudeedudee rayon puffed sleeve blouse, denim sailor style pants from Allure Original Styles, vintage Orlon sweater, Miss L Fire shoes, and snood from Arthelia's Attic!

Hope everyone is having a lovely week! Here's one last photo of the vinyards. As you can tell it is a bit dry here, hopefully we will get rain soon...

Round Top Madness! Part 2

So now the post that you have all been waiting for - the goodies!

My first purchase of the day I do not have a photo of because it's in the sink waiting to be washed, but I was able to get an awesome deal on a Fire King Jadite mixing bowl! It's the same style as this one seen here on Etsy. I'm really excited, I love jadite. When I get a bigger kitchen I'm hoping to get a whole set of them in different sizes to use for my everyday baking.

Next I hit the Bakelite shop while the boys were off looking for camera parts. Here I purchased one bangle and two broaches.

Green carved bangle and AMAZING pineapple broach.

I could not resist this tropical wonder, I can't wait to wear it out!

And another photo of the great anchor I found.

 After chatting for a while with the Bakelite lady, I wandered down to find one of the vintage fabric stores that had an amazing collection of feedsacks. I was good and only purchased two that I absolutely love for less than what I would have paid if they had come up on eBay which made me really happy. This red and blue cactus feedsack below is absolutely outstanding. The color is perfect, I don't know any other way to describe it AND it is still in feedsack form. I think this is one that I will keep in the collection rather than use as a project it's so beautiful.

I do love my southwestern prints....

 The other feedsack I purchased was the cutest novelty print I've seen in a while. It's not still in the sack form but it will be great for a project. I'm thinking it would make a gorgeous puffed sleeved blouse from Miss Kim....

Isn't this adorable?

 Those were my "big" purchases for the day, my husband on the other hand found all sorts of goodies. He got a new vintage leather camera bag (which I don't have a photo of) that's got some great leather tooling with a southwestern theme. He also purchased two large ceramic crocks, a 1960's Navy wool coat, and this amazing photo album that he wants to use for some form of art project, which means I get dibs on all the awesome photos! This is filled with vintage photos from vacations that appear to be from the early to mid 1950's. I'm planning on scanning some of these in, there are some great photos of the Redwood National Forrest in here.

 Last but not least, we also purchased a pair of these chairs seen below. They're absolutely gorgeous. We've been needing two extra kitchen chairs for some time as we have only had 3 that function so it makes for some awkward situations when guests are over. These we got for a great deal, $50 below the asking price.

Overall we had a great time and I cannot wait to go back next year! Hopefully I'll take more photos of the festivities rather than just running around and looking at things (even though that was lots of fun...)

Round Top Madness! Part 1

Tents and buildings line the sides of the road for miles and miles.

 Thanks everyone for all the great comments on my last post! Last night while looking through all the photos I had of our adventure as well as all the goodies we bought I figured I would break this up into two posts. If you love antiques and all things vintage, Round Top is definitely one of the events you must go to at least once in your lifetime!

Anyways, we arrived Saturday morning on the next to the last day of the show around 10 A.M. We decided this year to hit Warrenton first, as it was the farthest away and traffic at the Round Top Festival is notorious for being horrible. Last time we went, we made the mistake of stopping at some of the surrounding towns first and ended up sitting in a line of traffic so slow we moved less than 3.5 miles in an hour. By going to Warrenton first (which was farthest away from home) we were able to hit some of the most popular shops early in the day without sitting in traffic. Our choice of going on Saturday this year rather than Sunday also improved the selection. We discovered that most of the vendors pack up on Saturday before the last day of the show (Sunday) so that they can leave quickly, because of this everyone was willing to "negotiate" or "make a deal", unlike when we went on Sunday last time. It was bargaining heaven, I did not pay full price for anything we purchased!

Below are a few of my terrible photos I took while running around shopping that day. My husband took more "artistic" photos but since he has not edited them I'll wait to show you the links to those later. I think the most important thing to remember if you go to Round Top is to have a specific list of items you want to buy and a budget of what you want to spend on each item. This is really what kept me in check all day. There were home accessories, vintage western items, cooking equipment, furniture, and gadgets everywhere so it was easy to get distracted.

$60 Vintage Mixer with original instruction book - My husband would not let me take it home :(

Bakelite Heaven

 For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen some of my live Tweeting about the Bakelite vendor I found. She had some of the most amazing pieces I had ever seen in person and I'm really glad I had put a budget on what I was allowed to spend. Since I bought several pieces (which I will post in a little bit), she gave me 20% off each piece and I was able to stay in my budget (YAY!). She had some of the most beautiful items, one of which was the carved clamper bracelet with matching earrings. They were absolutely gorgeous to look at, but way out of my price range. What I did fall head over heals in love with was the red anchor pin which I was wearing in my last post.

I loved it so much I had to wear it!

 She also had a large selection of bangles and necklaces as well as some great books on identifying different styles of Bakelite. I stayed and chatted with her for a good 45 minutes until it was time for me to meet up with the men again for lunch (they thought Bakelite was boring so they had left me to go search for vintage camera equipment). I am hoping to run into her again in a few weeks at the City Wide Garage Sale in Austin which she recommended I go to. Apparently it is a great place to find even better deals than Round Top....

 Here are a few more photos of how some of the shops were set up and some of the goodies I saw like the vintage girls sunglasses on the original card seen above. One thing about Round Top though is there is never a shortage of glass collectibles. It is literally EVERYWHERE. This year I was not really focusing on it as much as I had on our previous adventure when I was shopping for centerpieces for our wedding but I still grabbed a photo so you could see what it looked like.

Who needs Anthropologie when you can stock up on kitchen accessories here?

 In terms of vintage clothing, we saw lots of late 1890's through early 1920's items but from what the Bakelite lady told me, we missed out on most of the good stuff from the 1930's - 1950's. Apparently the opening weekend is the time to come for the good vintage clothing deals because they sell rather quickly.

The furniture we saw was fantastic. I could have furnished 3 houses with everything I fell in love with that day. One piece in particular was the one seen below. I absolutely love this style and one day hope to own something similar but for now I have no room! 

Here's an example of one of the outdoor tents filled with hidden treasures.

 I think one of the greatest things about Round Top is all the hidden gems you can find. A lot of the times some of the vendors who are not experts at every item they have can overlook a few things. For instance our friend Ivan who came with us found 2 working vintage light meters for his camera worth 5 times the price he paid for them as well as a rare vintage camera in working condition worth over $350 that he paid $60 for. If you search through some of the more cluttered and random shops you can find some spectacular deals.

I love the stuffed vintage horse!

 Finally I shall leave you with a photo of my favorite item that I have no room for but one day would love to own of the day! It's a piece from one of the old grocery markets or feed stores that serves as a counter top as well as drawers holding stock. The glass squares on the front would be filled with whatever item was filled in the drawer, and when people would come into the shop they would point at the drawer, tell the worker how much they wanted and the worker could pull the drawer out from the other side to fill the order. Growing up the feed store we went to had something similar, but not nearly as fancy as this. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of going in and looking at all of the current seeds available for planting in one of these. One day when we get a "real" house and get out of grad school I would love to have one of these in my kitchen to store dry goods.

Thanks everyone for reading this! I'll have another post up soon with photos of the goodies we bought!

End of Day Outfit Post

A few weeks ago my husband, a close friend, and I braved the crowds to go to the Round Top Antiques Festival. For those who have never been to Round Top, it is a 2 week antique and vintage festival similar to a roadside antiques show with miles upon miles of vendors. This is one of my favorite shows to go to since there are always great deals to be found and this year was no exception. Over the next few days I'll be posting photos of some of our finds and photos from the event, however tonight I'll be posting my only outfit photos of the day.

When dressing for Round Top this year I decided to go for what seemed comfortable and functional to me. These photos were shot at the end of the day after traversing the heat and wind of central Texas.

 Looking back, I totally should have worn my hair in my navy blue snood from Arthelia's Attic since my curls turned into a giant fluffy poof, but other than that my outfit choice was perfect for the day.  I was able to move around without becoming too hot or miserable and I still got lots of great compliments from all of the vendors. Here I am wearing my navy blue culottes, Nudeedudee blouse from her new Ready to Ship styles (that are now on sale!), my favorite handbag which I have mentioned before, as well as my favorite pair of Miss L Fire shoes!

You can also see the lovely Bakelite anchor broach I picked up from a fantastic vendor while I was there, but I will save the rest of the photos of our purchases for tomorrow.

Hope everyone is having a fantastic weekend!