Margaret Smith for Spring

Well, last week I practiced yoga twice in addition to my session with Annie and this week I have practiced zero times. I have my session with Annie tomorrow but I have been feeling awful all week stomach-wise and it makes it hard to even think about yoga. But hopefully, tomorrow will help me get back on track....

On to my new favorite subject: vintage handbags!!!
This new passion started out while I was looking for a gift to get my friend for her birthday since shipping things from Turkey is not always successful (remember this? It never made it to its owner :(, very sad).


Margaret Smith of Gardiner, Maine started making beach bags and totes as a hobby in the 1940s, which eventually led to the establishment of the Margaret Smith Company producing bags and totes of high quality in novelty prints featuring floral patterns, birds, ferns and more. Imagine if she had a blog! Considered the "vintage Kate Spade," her bags can be found on vintage websites for around $50 dollars or more. But wait! Do not despair, her bags are often on eBay for much, much less and the bidding tends to be almost non-existent and never fierce compared with other designers like Enid Collins or my most favorite, Bobbie Jerome. All of the bags below were on eBay in the past month and all sold for less than $20! All of the photos are from the sellers’ descriptions (I wasn’t sure I could post them in here, but it is such a visual topic! I hope someone will let me know if I should take the photos down).



Of course, some do go for more… These three sold this past week for between $36 and $63 dollars (this highest one still had the price tags on it). I really like the bird one on the right.

I think it could be because people are in spring handbag mode, like me, but I think some truly wonderful bags can be had for less than $20. Like this one! I bought this Margaret Smith bag about 3 weeks ago on eBay. I so wanted to buy something from Anthropolgie but as that is out of the question I thought this was a fine substitute.



Both of these babies are up currently on eBay for the next 6 days and right now have starting bids of $6 each.


Finally, The Margaret Smith Company still operates today although under a different owner, and still offers vintage style bags. The cool part is that you can pick a bag design and the fabric separately to make your own semi-custom bag!

Happy Spring!

A Regular Practice

I am struggling with making yoga a daily part of my life. But I have improved. When I moved to Turkey I was forced to do yoga on my own since I could not initially find any classes to go to here (there are some studios but I have not explored them)... This led to many weeks of me attempting or at least thinking of doing yoga everyday. And I did practice on my own - about once a week but I felt very out of touch and stiff - my move from Victoria to Ankara occurred over about 6 weeks so there was a long break. And I had never really seriously tried to start my own home practice.

I was proud of myself though for trying to do yoga on my own but it was hard to focus or even to know what to do.... then in November I started practicing weekly with Annie. This really inspired me to want to practice everyday and in the beginning of January I did manage to keep up a nearly daily practice for two weeks. But then I caught a bad cold and there seemed to be loads of stress all around. I continued to keep up with the weekly practice with Annie though. Over the last three weeks I have had an intention to do yoga at least three times on my own per week. With my weekly practice, that brings me to four sessions a week. And that seems more doable to me than aiming for a daily practice right off the bat.

Mind you, practicing on my own is messy, to say the least. I often just launch into my practice and do not center myself at first nor do I always end with corpse pose and some meditation. But for me, right now, that is ok. One of the things that Annie and I talk about often is how personal yoga is. So while I used to feel guilty for not doing yoga the "right" way, I am now starting to think of yoga as something that I must do "my" way to benefit from it and to learn at a pace that is best for me. It is silly to think that you can teach a person to play a violin concerto just after you have shown them musical notes and some fingerings. Similarly, while I have been attending yoga classes intermittenly and sometimes quite regularly for the past six years, I feel that I am still learning about awareness and breath especially in the context of my own home practice. Not that I am unwilling to push myself but in the past, I think I have been too ambitious in my practice goals and that ultimately leads to me not practicing. So like one would practice scales and etudes, I practice poses that I know fairly well and challenge myself to do more sun salutations (if I do 3, I feel really good but last week Annie and I did 5 in a row so this week I will try to do 5 in a row during one of my practices) or practice poses on my head - a fear of which I will talk about in another post.

There are some sites that offer tips for starting a regular practice like this but I have found this to be much more complex than meets the eye. Its all well and good to set up a time to practice but that always seems to fall by the wayside for me as I have a fairly flexible work schedule that leads to a fairly unstructured work day. And, most evenings I am tired and most mornings I am rushed. So what to do? Mainly, I just do it. And right now, there is no set time for me, if it feels right and I can, then I do yoga. Even if that means there is activity around me. Because in a one bedroom apartment with another person, finding my own time and space to practice is quite difficult. So, I just do it. Like I said, it isn't always pretty and most times my practice is about 25 mins long but I feel good about that right now and see the messiness and chaos of my practice as a part of the evolution of my own practice.

Shifting gears

We do our best in the housing the university has provided for us living with the white walls and beige furniture but since we are leaving in just over 3 months (!!!) I am allowing myself to get re-inspired for when we move back to Canada and things can be bought on Ebay and at thrift stores (I think I may have seen one thrift store here but I did not go in so I can't be sure).


I love the vintage-looking bedding on Anthropologie and have been spending a lot of time on Ebay lately so when I searched vintage quilts I was pleasantly surprised by some of the beautiful toppers available and not at anthropologie-astronomical prices:
I don't know how much this one went for but I really like the bright yellow...


This one really went up in price and eventaully sold for US 112. A bit high, but it is lovely so I put it up.
And this one went for US 18.50. One of the things I would like to do when we get back to Canada is to keep an eye on these and when the right one comes along at a price I can afford (the goal would be < US30), buy it and finish it. I have only made quilts twice in my life and that was when I lived at home and my Mom had a sewing machine and could help me both to focus and to finish it. Finishing projects is very hard for me - unless there is gratification fairly quickly - that is why I like to paint walls - so I thought buying a vintage quilt top would be a good compromise for me.

I have been looking at myriad vintage handbags too. I would like to post about all that I have learned about them (I have been a little bit obsessed) with some cool examples but that will have to wait.

I have also updated my links. I love reading about all of the ideas and things people are creating even though I myself am not creating very much over here. It keeps me excited and thinking about things I would like to do when I arrive back in a world that makes sense to me like this.

I have also added yoga blogs. Those seem more difficult to come by then crafty design type blogs. Or even personal finance blogs ( I have been reading a lot of those since a New York Times article came out a few weeks ago - I thought to link them but then felt it didn't really fit here). I don't know why this is. You can't quite share yoga the same way that you can design ideas but then again all communities help bolster productivity and activity so I would like to find more yoga blogs.

Anyway, I thought that blogging about yoga might help me in my practice and in really making it a part of my lifestyle. So, my intention is to blog more, particularly about yoga, and things which inspire me.

I had originally wanted to blog about living in Turkey but it just feels like a minefield for some reason (banning YouTube, sending people to prison for using addresses of respect to the wrong people, etc. etc.) and because generally things are very challenging here in a way that is hard to work through on a blog. So I will shift gears in preparation for moving to Canada and if we go on any trips, I'll post pictures as part of what inspires me.