It’s the start of a spanking new week, which means that it’s time for Maven Mall Monday! This week we’re featuring a fun, resourceful, peewee book: Lunch Boxes Field Guide (for Vintage Lunch Box Collectors).

Are you a vintage lunchbox collector? This is a wonderful field guide for values & identification! It is small enough to fit in your pocketbook or back pocket. It’s just the right size to carry along to flea markets and garage sales. It contains hundreds of color photos so that on-the-spot appraisals are super easy! In the book, you will find 500 color images of metal lunch boxes & thermos, nostalgic lunch boxes from the early 1950s through to the 1980s, up-to-date pricing for all sorts of lunch boxes, & anecdotal information about characters & shows. It’s perfect for the lunchbox enthusiast!

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Speaking of Poe, this was my best loved birthday gift from my friend Brian this year. Bestow my heart!

I am constantly trolling around Etsy looking at all the fantabulous vintage & crafty stores, and I constantly post supreme scores that I find on the What’s Ravin’, Maven? Twitter account (<– which you need to be following if you haven’t already! #bateyelashes). I never write a blog about them, yet, today is going to be different because I have to — I found a store that is SUCH a novel idea!

Actually, *I* did not find the store… Thanks to my soul sista, OO7, I was introduced to Encore Prints! OO7 posted a link to an ambrosial print of a raven, from Edgar Allen Poe‘s, The Raven, on my timeline on Facebook. Anyone who knows me well knows that I LOVE Poe! Anyone who knows me inside & out knows that I have a very special place in my heart for The Raven (even have one tattooed on my back from a necklace I bought in Nova Scotia when I was 17). But here’s the beauty of all of Encore Print’s prints… They are printed on top of vintage book pages, or vintage dictionary  & encyclopedia pages, that were on their way to being destroyed, AND then framed in these regal, ornate golden frames! (I know there’s mixed opinions about the term “upcycle”, but this is really just one of the keenest expressions of upcycling I have come across.) Once you submit your order, a kind maven named Pam will contact you and ask which background to the art you prefer. Oft times, she will have an exact page to correlate with the printed image, which I think makes it all the more precisely perfect! And these are honest-to-goodness antique book pages from 1857 – 1897 — genuine, not “vintage” from another era in the 1900s.

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Today is Groundhog Day. Today is the day we find out how many more days of winter we have left to weather. This has been such a mild winter for us in our neck of the woods, so it’s hard to fathom that Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow, but I am a firm believer in Murphy’s Law. #stickingtongueout

I am SO ready for winter to end. I am every year. There’s not much I like about winter. In fact, I abominate it! I happen to love the look & lines of winter attire, though. I am absolutely sweet on scarfs, gloves, boots & wintry hats, but I am DONE with actual winter by January 1st. As soon as the end-of-the- year festivities are over, *I* am over (the edge, the cabin fever, the chapped lips, the sunless days, and trying not to store up for the winter and hibernate in my goose down comforter cave)! I begin to feel suffocated by my clothes. Layered, thickset frippery can actually make me feel claustrophobic! In any event, there is one article of the winter drapery that I never tire or grow weary of, and that is the winter coat. Heavens to Betsy, I love me a chirpy, coltish coat! I love my bloody coats to bloody death! I wear them so much that I almost always have to get a new coat every year. You’d THINK I lived in Alaska the way I manage to exhaust them, but being a native Floridian, I always say that I have reptilian blood — I am not cut out for the cold, even a city where it only snows about 3 days out of the year. #lightweight(nottobemistakenwithmyouterwear)
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~ On this day, February 1st, my whole life changed because I met the one and only man who made it easier to love than to tie my shoes or boil water. #bewitched It may have taken me 38 years, and too many toads in-between, but you’re the dream I never let myself quit having or hoping for. I love you more than the whole wide world with a cherry on top, my Love. Thank you for being my Atticus Finch — both to me & Mini Maven. You will never know how much I love, honor, respect, admire, & adore you, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying my best to make sure you come close. Happy Anniversary, Baby – we’re hitching our wagon to a star, forevermore. XO

Toujours et toujours, je vais prendre soin de toi.
~ Angelika Frangelico *Gros bisous*

I find it positively nutty what is considered “vintage” or “retro” these days… Or, I guess I should say, IS “vintage” or “retro” these days. #gagmewithaspoon Did you know that Etsy considers anything BEFORE 1994 “vintage”? Reeeally?! 1994?! I was just moving out on my own in 1994 — getting my very first apartment off Camino Real, this kitschy, 1950’s Atomic seafoam 1 bedroom that should’ve probably just been advertised as an efficiency. (The walls were pretty much a moot point. ::titter::) But, in 1994, I was already out on my own — just a year shy of not being a teenager anymore — and I just CAN’T bring myself to swallow that jagged pill that those days of yore (that seem like last week to me) are now vintage. #grodytothemax

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