Teen Guy's room Make-over with a Vintage twist

Hey there my retro lovin' peeps on the web!

I wanted to share with you my son's room reveal.   Over the years, although we have upgraded some of the major fixtures in the room (bed, desk, media console)  it hasn't really been redecorated since he was a toddler (he is 19 now). So this you could say was long overdue.  

   It took Peter awhile to decide on colors.  He is an avid eighties fan, so under consideration was mixed pastels (thought it would be too feminine), white walls with pastel accents (ditto),  light blue, (not mature enough) black (too dark).       He finally decided on a medium gray for the walls and a darker blue for the trim.

[Paint - Walmart brand "Color Place"
"Gray Granite"  & "King Neptune Blue"
both in Semi-gloss finish]


Some Before pictures:
                                                             

   These are the closet doors.   All the trim (window trim, door trim, & closet doors/trim) were the same wood-grain.

Green grass & Blue sky....

When Peter was little (around 3 years old) he loved Richard Scarry's 'Busytown'  series.   We had just moved into our house, and my original plan for his new room was going to be a mural on his wall similar to one of the Busytown scenes. so I did the blue & green (sky & grass) for the backdrop. Before I ended up seeing the vision through, my daughter was born and then life got very, very busy with the two little ones, so the mural itself didn't end up happening.

Wall before....

Peter, like me,  loves vintage.  With his room re-deco, there were items he wanted to showcase for decorations. He has several Cadillac advertisements from the hey-day of the brand.  He has been collecting these for the past few years. We bought inexpensive picture frames at a department store (about $2/frame) and mounted the ads.
One of his other interests is Coca-Cola memorabilia. He has retro style signs, tins, old bottles and other items.  They provided a nice pop of color against the gray walls.

After:

The room is finally all painted and his vintage decor displayed!  He finished framing up his Cadillac ads and mounted them on the far wall next to the closet in a set of three to balance the ones on the wall above his computer. He set up some of his Coke memorabilia on display in another corner along with some vintage style car models.   A few storage pieces from Ikea to house his record collection and we were good to go!

[Note - a few things that didn't make it into these pictures really help with the vintage feel of the room too. Peter has stereo components from the good old days as part of his entertainment system - a record player and 8-Track player. His record collection is prominently on display too]

The closet had been plain wood-grain doors on tracks. A couple of coats of
"King Neptune blue" make them stand out

Closet close-up (decor has not been hung up yet)

Vintage Cadillac advertisements make interesting & inexpensive decorations

some more Cadillac vintage ads

Kitty surveying our yard

Coke is it!  Some tin signs on the wall, and model cars

Some additional vintage car ads balance the decorations on the walls

Granite gray walls

Ikea cube bookcase houses his records & books

Finally finished!

Do you use your vintage or retro collections for decorations?
Please share in the comments!

Cat Lady Sewing Challenge & "Falmouth Dream Cruise" highlights

Hi Friends!

For all you crazy cat people out there,  fellow sewing Blogger "Miss Crayola Creepy" brings us a Cat Lady sewing challenge.   Within the month of October, sew an article of clothing made with fabric with cats on it.       Someone who knows my weakness, obviously!     She has a flickr group set up to for us to upload pictures of our finished projects.  Not sure what to sew yet,  so many ideas!  I will have to think about it and post later.  

Falmouth Classic Car Dream Cruise

Every September, the Falmouth Classic Car Club holds their "Dream Cruise" event,  where vintage, classic and unique automobiles are on display to the public on Saturday, and then Sunday they drive around town strutting their stuff.

Of course you know this was on my son's calendar months in advance,  and the weather last weekend was beautiful for it.    There were way too many cars for me to go into detail about the history of each, so hopefully you can enjoy the pictures we took and some thoughts I had about some of the cars we saw. (There were many, many beautiful cars.  I only chose a handful that I liked the best to post here)

I decided to wear the dress I made for the Mad Men sewing challenge last year (the lavender rose dress from McCall's pattern circa 1961) but with the exception of one of my vintage purses, I did not have time to accessorize or do my hair.

 First  up is a 1958 Chevy Impala.  It's Pink!  XOXOX

This car was a real beauty, I love the two tone pink & white they did.  Original sticker price on this baby was approx. $2500.  Six tail lights, eight headlamps, and it measures in at a whopping 17 1/2 feet. 

ooooh, how many bodies do you suppose I could hide in this trunk?

Across the lot, We saw this 1963 Impala.  I was amazed at how different looking the same car was after a mere 5 years. The length is still about 17.5 feet,   the sticker price has gone up a few hundred dollars - with the exception of one model, a 4 door, 6 cylinder station wagon model priced at just above $2000.  Says it seated 9 passengers!  (told you there was room in the trunk!)    I'm guessing that this was an economy model targeted towards families. 








This pretty gold & white two-toned car is a 1957 Dodge Custom Royal.
and it has tail fins (I'm a sucker for tail fins)    Only 4 headlamps on this one,  but still has 6 tail lights, but the top two are really small ones.  Dodge only had these in production from 1955 to 1959, then it became a trim level for the Phoenix. I had trouble finding an original price for these cars.

It's all about the tail fins baby!

This next car is a 1954 Chevrolet Corvette.  We were sure that it was a custom built job, because this was one very odd body style. But no, to prove us wrong, there was a picture of the 'before'  the rebuild showing how it looked. There is no front or rear bumper to speak of,  it is all molded.   It is a little hard to see, but the front headlights are recessed with a cage type thing in front of them.   The tailights are bullet shaped, which was common for then with the atomic age just coming around. You can see the beginnings of the tail fin trend with a teeny little fin on top of them. The rear license plate is inset with a window.    This was only available as a 2 door roadster.  It still is a good 13 feet of length though.   Original sticker price was about $2700.  (interesting enough, the weight is about 2700 lbs - so that works out to $1 per pound of car! Cheaper than deli meat, I tell ya!)

The 'before restoration' photo, showing what a unique body style that was apparently all original.

The next two cars here are 1954 Kaiser-Darrins',  sitting next to eachother on the lot - one in a pretty lemon color, the other in a lovely lime.    Made me think of sherbert!  Was 1954 just the year for the strange looking cars?   My Mom's father had a Frazer, which she described as being the 'working man's Kaiser'.  They were made by the Kaiser Frazer company,  and the Frazer models were a lot less showy.     The Kaiser Darrin's as shown here are the first fiberglass sports car produced  in the United States, beating even the Corvette (if only by a month).   The original price on these models was about $3600, really pricey in those days- higher than even the Caddy and the Lincoln models at the time. It had lots of stuff - electric windshield wipers, tinted windows, whitewall tires, tachometer - little things that probably added to it's high cost.  Apparently there were some other issues with the car as well: design flaws, mediocre performance (Alfa Romeo Spider, Jaguar, Nash-healy and other comparable sports cars of the time were much faster)  Sadly, the company had produced many more than were sold. The company stopped selling in the US the following year.  (Howard Darrin, the creator, bought a bunch of the surplus cars, souped them up using V8 engines (as used in Caddy Eldorados)  multiple carborators, and superchargers, and remarketed them as 'specials' a few years later for $4350.   These changes made the Specials go really fast.)

So there you have it, folks. Highlights of this years 'Dream Cruise' at least some of my favorites anyway.    There were, unfortunately, no classic Cadillacs, to Peter's dismay. 

Do you have a favorite classic?  I'd love to hear about it! - Share in the comments below.

xo Yvonne

Awesome resource for original pricing and other data:  http://www.oldride.com/index.html

Some info obtained on the Kaiser-Darrin's from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Darrin

Vintage Car Spotting of the Week- Spotlight on an late 60's model Ford Galaxie

Hi Friends on the Interwebs!

One of the things I enjoy about this time of year is that car buffs bring out their 'pride and joys' taking advantage of the beautiful weather. My son, Peter, is a classic car lover and a virtual encyclopedia of all things Automobile. We will be driving around and see a vintage beauty.  (Often we chase them down through parking lots or follow them for a couple miles to get a better look!) Peter will comment about how a specific year saw the last of the large engines for that manufacturer, or when emission savings devices were introduced on a certain model so the gas mileage drastically improved,  what year the tail fins were especially large, or the details about a trim package that was offered on some models.     His absolute favorites are the old Cadillacs.  His dream car is an Eldorado from the seventies,  you know - the kind where you can fit your entire extended family in and still have room for a couple of Great Danes or perhaps a VW Beetle.
 Some of these land yachts rival the length of modern day RV's, believe it or not.  (unfortunately, a lot of them get about the same amount of mileage per gallon as RV's do, too :(   Only 7 or 8 miles per gallon.)  He is saving for a fixer upper one of these now, so I will probably be continuing the saga as time goes on.

Peter's dream car - a seventies Eldo
(http://www.zmetro.com/archives/005760.php)

So, I thought I would start a new feature on  'Tea & Cat'  of Vintage Car spotting. That is to say when we cross paths of a Vintage lovely,  I will post some pictures and a little about the car in its heyday.
(with Peter's help on the specs and details).  So here is today's car,  The Ford Galaxie.

We estimated this one to be from the late 1960's.  It was in awesome condition. I snapped a couple of pictures while at a red light.

This isn't your Grand-dad's car....oh, wait, yeah maybe it is

 The Galaxie was made as an answer /competitor to the Chevrolet Impala.  It's first year was 1955. Naming convention of the time was the space age fervor that wound it's way into many aspects of our Culture.  Most of the Galaxie's were of the 500 or 500 XL designation, but later, They had cool names like "Starliner" and "Sunliner."    Wikipedia does a nice job of going through the model years and different versions here.

Even though the body did not change significantly during the 1960's, we know that the car we saw was a late '60's model by the square tail lights (the earlier 60's ones had round tail lights, they changed over in '67)

The list price for one of these new in '67 or '68 was about $4200. (the average US household income then was around $8000.)

They even have a club for Galaxie owners & enthusiasts: /www.galaxieclub.com/

Do you have a penchant for classic cars? If so which is your favorite?  Please comment below!

Thanks for reading

xo Yvonne