Nostalgia at its best...Bottles

Old bottles have always fascinated me. As a child, I remember walking back the dirt lane to the woods  where an old gravel pit held decades of unwanted items. Although things were thrown there as trash, to a child they were treasures. I searched for old bottles, carried them home and washed them outside in an old galvanized tub.

I still search for bottles and have some special ones. My kitchen window sill is home to 3 old blue Geritol bottles and all summer long they are filled with single stems of flowers from my perennial bed.

A clean clear bottle is great for displaying old photos. My Grandparents, Parents, and my Grandmother as a young girl all reside in a bottle. You can easily do this yourself by making a copy of a photo and rolling it up as tight as you can to get it into the bottle. Use a pencil to help unroll and   position the photo so it fits to the contours of the bottle. The Green Awning Gallery has bottles that will work for this project.

I made a bottle chandelier to hang by my front door. I found a light fixture I liked at a Thrift Store, took out the inserts that held the bulbs, turned it upside down and stuck the bottles in with silicone. After it set, it was easy to hang as it already had a chain. 

I copied an idea from my friend Jodi Repp.  You can display bottles in your flower beds by sticking dowel rods or metal rods in the ground at the angle you prefer and putting a bottle on them. Jody is the owner of   Exotic Scents Flowers and Gifts in Montpelier. Find her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Exotic-Scents-Flowers-Gifts/190831752096

Bottles look great displayed on a shelf, used as a container by your sink for your liquid soap or filled with marbles or other collectibles. Of course there are many bottle trees out there for purchase or you can make your own. The list goes on and on as far as uses for bottles.

The Green Awning Gallery recently purchased hundreds of bottles of all sizes and colors. All bottles will be 25% off the first week of July if you mention our blog! We also are busy pricing items purchased from two more estates. 

I enjoyed my time in Texas and now that I am home, I plan to add a new post each week, probably on Wednesdays. Until then....

Nostalgia at its best...Feed Sacks

My first post from The Green Awning Gallery features printed cloth feed sacks.  I remember going with my Dad to the hatchery to buy feed and seeing the colorful feed sacks stacked in rows. And I can almost smell the chickens and feed and  feel the dust up my nose!  

These sacks were used by thrifty farm wives during the depression and the war years. If they needed more material to finish a project, they would give their husband a scrap with instructions to get another bag of feed with the same print. The owner of the hatchery was used to a farmer sheepishly pulling a scrap from his pocket and asking for feed in a bag with that print.

Some prints had borders and were ideal for making curtains, tablecloths and dish towels. Other prints made lovely dresses and mens shirts. The not so pretty prints sometimes ended up as boxer shorts for the husband since he chose a print his wife did not like!

I have about 100 feed sacks with 28-30 different prints. All are approximately 36" x 22" or 27" inches so when the stitches are removed they would be a yard long and 44" to 54" wide. If you remember these as a child, you will enjoy the childhood memories they invoke. If you are too young to remember, you will be amazed at the resourcefulness of our parents and grandparents.

Of course this is just one category of the hundreds of items at The Green Awning Gallery. I plan to feature items periodically that inspire nostalgia, but you will want to come in frequently to see the "new" estate items that we continue to purchase and display in our store.