Win a $100 Gift Certificate from Bumbershoot Supplies!

It’s Halloween and here is a treat for you!  We’re giving away a $100 gift certificate to purchase vintage supplies at Bumbershoot Supplies!

Just leave a comment below to enter. Be sure to leave some way to contact you (or we will have to pick again).  One comment per person please.

If you want up to 3 extra chances to win, you can tweet the giveaway and/or post it to your blog and/or post it to your facebook page.

Then come back here and leave us a link(s) so we know what you’ve done and can include your extra entries.

Your comment(s) must be received by 9 am Wednesday November 23, 2011.  We're in Seattle so that's Pacific time.  We will randomly select a winner later in the day on Wednesday November 23 and post the winner here on the blog.

We will email the gift certificate to the winner for immediate use.

International participants are welcome, of course.

The gift certificate will work on the Bumbershoot Supplies website only (not in our Etsy shop).

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Featured Artist: Patricia Mackey of Tippy Stockton

I am delighted to share with you another one of Bumbershoot Supplies’ talented neighbors, jewelry designer extraordinaire, Patricia Mackey, owner of Tippy Stockton. 

Patricia has been selling on Etsy and in other venues for some time, and she just recently launched her own website, a beautiful place to visit and a wonderful complement to her lovely designs.

Patricia says: “Some of my earliest memories are of playing with my Mom and Grandmother’s jewelry. Opening up their jewelry boxes, made me giddy with excitement.

I still get that same feeling today when I find a piece of Vintage jewelry - that piece of jewelry tells a story and I love giving it new life!

Tippy Stockton jewelry is designed and handmade from sterling silver, vintage, and glass beads. My inspiration is great color, texture and a bit of nature thrown in for good measure. You might call me a "jane of all design trades".

I love jewelry, textiles, paper - see, I told you! I began creating jewelry when I couldn't find the perfect necklace for a special event. So my imagination took over and as they say, the rest is history.”

Patricia’s metal of choice is sterling silver. Oxidized to a dark patina, she pairs it with high quality vintage and contemporary components, reflecting her love of combining vintage and contemporary into something new.

When last I checked, Patricia’s designs were available at 23 different boutiques and retail sites in 4 different states. But no matter where you are located, you can always view her designs and get a dose of inspiration and loveliness on her website, Tippy Stockton.  I hope you will enjoy a visit soon!

Featured Artists: Second Post of Mixed Media Art by The Creative Team at www.scrapping.no

As I mentioned in this earlier blog post, Bumbershoot Supplies sent goody bags of treats off to Wenche Jensen in Norway for use by the creative team at www.scrapping.no.

I have always used our vintage supplies for much more than jewelry making, and it is wonderful to see others do the same. Look and be inspired!

I love the colors of this page by Scratch, and how our flowers (daisy cabochons and fabric millinery flower) have been used to extend the theme.

This is a whimsical wedding design featuring our vintage lace and vintage Japanese love bird cabochons...

...plus another with the lace, cupid and vintage Japanese rose cabochons. Both are by AnnKristin and found here.

And finally this lovely piece is by Kristin. She used our lace, buttons, flower cabochon, cupid and those beautiful red hearts, all combined with a beeswax overlay, for which she provided detailed step by step instructions.

It’s wonderful to see how these talented team members have used the vintage supplies!  For additional designs, see my first blogpost about this Norwegian creative team, here.

I hope you will enjoy a trip over to www.scrapping.no. I’m sure you will discover some new and exciting ways to use vintage materials in your own mixed media designs.

Featured Artists: Mixed Media Art by The Creative Team at www.scrapping.no

Some  weeks ago, Bumbershoot Supplies sent off goody bags of vintage treats to Wenche Jensen in Norway.  Wenche is a lead designer for www.scrapping.no which is the largest scrapbooking forum in Norway, with over 15,000 members.  Wenche contacted us to see if BumbershootSupplies would be willing to send some samples for their creative team to work with. 

We were delighted to do so because the paper arts are dear to my heart.  Paper and fabric is where my art and crafting journey began.  (See my  Christmas cards for 2011 here.)  Wenche suggested some items her team was interested in and I added some surprises too. I packaged up everything you see above into kits like this…

…and sent the kits off to Norway. Wenche has sent me links to the mixed media designs her team is creating with these supplies and also kindly allowed me to share the photos of her teams’ designs with you. 

I just love the tiny 1950’s vintage daisy cabochons we carry and AnnKristin has captured their cheerful spirit in this layout.

This calendar page by Wenche uses our vintage Czech glass heart cabochons and vintage rose montees. The colors are beautiful!

This is another advent calendar page by Wenche, with a full tutorial, clear and easy to follow, even for me and I don't speak Norwegian :) For this page, Wenche used our vintage lace, the hearts again, and some vintage angels.

There are so many lovely projects to share. I will post another series of designs by this talented team very soon.

Bumbershoot Supplies Vintage Bead Giveaway With Beading Arts

Want some free vintage beads? Head on over to Beading Arts, Cyndi Lavin's blog, where Bumbershoot Supplies is sponsoring a giveaway! Cyndi has used some of the beads in the above photo to make an embellished skeleton key pendant, for which she will be posting a tutorial, check it out. The rest of the beads are up for grabs!

Leave a comment on Cyndi's blog so she knows you are interested.

The winner will be selected on Oct 19, 2011.

The day I pulled together this selection of beads, it was a glorious fall day in Seattle, a beautiful blue sky, gorgeous red orange dahlias outside my window, and just a hint of frost to come. Those were my inspirations for this particular color palette. You can learn more about the origin of this selection of beads in this blog post on Cyndi's blog.

Vintage Glass Beads from Kaufbeuren, West Germany at Bumbershoot Supplies

I’ve written elsewhere about the history of our beads, buttons, cabochons and rhinestones that were made in the US Zone of Occupied Germany, between 1945 and 1949.  In that blog post I also mention the various names for Germany over the decades.

Often the supplies we source arrive in original wraps. If the place of manufacture is stamped on the wrappings, the country name helps in dating the supplies. “Western Germany” and later “West Germany” were the common English names used for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), which existed from 1949 until the reunification of Germany in 1990.

We sell our supplies in our Etsy shop and on our website.  The Etsy policy regarding labeling items as "vintage" is that they must be at least 20 years old.  That means that anything from 1991 and older can now be labeled vintage on Etsy. It also means that anything made in Western Germany or West Germany is now considered vintage by Etsy’s definition.

I must confess that 1991 does not feel vintage to me! Plus, we would like to determine the age of our beads more precisely within the 60 year time period that West(ern) Germany existed.  I’ve written previously about the various approaches we take to determining the provenance and history of our supplies, but sometimes you just get lucky.

Many of the vintage West German glass beads currently offered at BumbershootSupplies have a clear provenance. They were made in Kaufbeuren, in southern Germany, southwest of Munich. They were made in the 1950’s and remained in a warehouse there for decades, until the warehouse was closed and the contents of the warehouse were purchased by the supplier who provided the beads to us. Not too many steps involved, and a clear provenance.

We currently have a total of 28 different beads from this warehouse. You will be able to identify the Kaufbeuren beads most readily on our website, because over the next day or so, Jim will add a link to this blog post to the description of each of the beads.

Products related to this history can be found right here at Bumbershoot Supplies.