Travel Charm Bracelet

I've decided to share my charm bracelet as well.

To me, the most interesting bracelets are the souvenir travel kind.  I thought it would be fun to recreate my own travel bracelet with charms from the places we have visited.

We traditionally take one vacation a year during the last week of August.  When our kids were younger, this represented the uncovered child care week between the end of camp and the beginning of school.  The girls are in high school now, but I still look forward to that week as the official end of summer and start of the new school year.

Since I retrofitted my bracelet, I had the luxury of scouring eBay, Etsy, and Ruby Lane to find the perfect charm for each trip.  I will describe them now, moving from left to right:

1) Bovina Center, NY - Bob and his family spent a week at Bovina Center every summer when he was young.  They stayed on Mrs. Todd's dairy farm, and he loved playing there with his cousins. We took the girls back to the farm when they were toddlers, and they loved it just as much.  To represent this trip, I found a celluloid Elise the Cow charm from the 1939 NY World's fair.

2) Montreal - We went to Canada in 2015 and toured Montreal, Toronto, and Niagara Falls.  In Montreal we visited the science museum and saw an imax movie about pandas who were bred in captivity and then released into the wild.   Before releasing the pandas, scientists tried to teach the pandas some basic survival skills.  And to do so, the scientists dressed in full sized panda suits that were smothered in "panda scents" so they could approach the pandas without suspicion.  (The suits looked a bit like the Elmo costumes in Times Square.)  The narrator described the process of covering the suits in panda urine.  During this description, the camera focused on the face of one of the scientists who was dressed in full costume, but carried the head piece as he walked closer to the panda habitat.  His expression was both miserable and  priceless.  And to remind me of this experience, I chose this retired Pandora panda head, which looks very much like the costume.    

3) Niagara Falls - This was part of the same Canada trip in 2015.  There are many vintage charms available from Niagara Falls, both New York and Canada.  I chose this art-deco Bates & Klinke charm from the 1940s/1950s.

4) Nantucket - Nantucket was our tradition for a while.  We rented a house there for a week during the summers of  2012, 13, 14, and 16.  We live in an apartment in Queens, so it was a nice for the girls to experience stairs, grass, and their own rooms.  We rented bikes for the week, and toured the island by bike and on foot.

Our longest bike ride was from Nantucket to Siasconset, roughly 7 miles each way.  It was a beautifully scenic ride which took most of the day to complete.  But since our girls are from Queens, they were unaccustomed to biking, and one of them (I will not reveal which) spent the majority of said ride and therefore said day screaming "MY BUTT HURTS!" So I chose this "Entering Siasconset" road sign to remind me of this magical moment.

5) Yellowstone - We visited Yellowstone National Park in 2017.  Yellowstone was extraordinary, and I was completely amazed by the landscape and geology.  Here is a picture of the girls enjoying Sulphur Caldron:

But my favorite part of the Yellowstone trip was seeing the bison up close.  For this reason, I chose a bison Cracker Jack charm from the 1930s to represent our Yellowstone trip.

6) Disney World - We went to Disney World and Universal Studios in 2018.  There are many Disney charms available, but I opted for this Mickey topiary bead.  It reminded me of the beautiful landscaping that we saw at the parks:

7) First Robotics National Competition - Detroit, Michigan- Megan is part of an all-girls robotics team called the Fe Maidens.  They made it to nationals in 2018, and I went with Megan to the competition.  This was a fantastic experience, and I found this Pandora robot bead to mark it.

That summarizes our travels to date. I still have room on the bracelet, so more to come in 2019!

Finishing Touches

Completing a miniature project is much like finishing a long, wonderful book that you don't want to end.  So for this reason, I found a few more spaces to fill and details to obsess over.

I realized with sudden urgency that I had to include this chicken portrait.  I took him from the Tempura Wok and Cookery book.

I also wanted to include this plush elephant that I found at the kickoff.  I decided to make him the shop keep:

And finally, I decided to include one of my early advertising charms. This one is from Little Brown Jug whisky, and appears to be from the 1920s.  I am donating this affectionately from one collector to another.

And now, the final blocking.

A Prize in Every Box!

Cracker Jack boxes included prizes from 1912 to 2016.  I collect the earlier prizes, circa 1912 - 1939.  My favorites are the tin litho toys designed by Carey Cloud.

I like the early premiums because they were made to be useful.  Some of the toys were compatible with the Marx-scale dollhouses:

Others fit the one-inch scale houses.

They also made charms for bracelets, which doubled as game pieces.

I have incorporated Cracker Jack miniatures into several of my houses.  Examples are below.  The animal charms also make nice nursery toys for 1:12 scale scenes.

Dunham's Cocoanut Dollhouse

This house deserves a post of its own.

Dunham's Cocoanut distributed these dollhouses as packing crates for their product in the 1890s. When the coconut was sold, grocers gave away the empty crates as advertising premiums.

The houses were 1:12 scale, made from wood with lithographed wallpapers.  They also came with cardboard furniture, but the furniture is hard to find.

My Dunham's house is below.  I filled it with a mixture of antique miniatures  and cardboard furniture that we made ourselves.  I used a vintage coin bank for the stove, which seemed appropriate for an advertising premium.

My favorite room is the second floor - please see the below closeups of the fish tank and moose.  But  my photographs do not do this house proper justice.  Please see here for a better view.

 

Marx Hometown Series

Marx made the Hometown series in the 1930s.  These were similar to the Newlywed rooms, but featured stores and town buildings.  There were eight scenes total, including a department store, drug store, grocery store, bank, meat market, police station, fire station, and movie theater.  I do not own the fire station or theater, but the rest are shown below.  The walls and floors are beautifully detailed. You will probably notice that not all of my furniture pieces are original.

I display these with the Newlywed rooms in our Ikea CD tower.  Since we live in Queens, I decided to make an apartment building.

Up next: my Dunham's Cocoanut house!

Marx Newlywed Series

Antique dollhouses are my fancy.

One of my favorite dollhouse sets is the Marx Newlywed Series from the 1920s.  These were small-scale sheet-steel lithographed rooms, sold either individually or as a set.  There were six rooms total,  but they were designed to sit in a carboard house which held four at a time.  The rooms came fully furnished, and were compatible with some of the tin-litho Cracker Jack premiums of the same era.  (More about that later.)

My Newlywed rooms are shown below.  I love the detail of the walls:

Library 

Parlor

Bedroom

Kitchen

Dining Room

Bathroom

I also added several Cracker Jack prizes for the furniture.  I placed the grandfather clock in the library, and the chair in the bedroom.

I have not been able to find an original cardboard house, but the rooms display nicely in an Ikea CD holder.

My Collections

The Goreyosity Shop exhibit appeals to me largely because I am interested in Gorey's collections.  To provide more context to my interest, I will spend this week showcasing some of my own collections.

War Bond Posters

I began collecting war bond posters when I was in college.  I found many of them at yard sales in Albany and New England. My favorite sales were at houses that had belonged to the same family for multiple generations.  For these houses, it was not unusual for the attic to contain posters or advertisements that had sat untouched for decades, quietly evolving from stacks of clutter to coveted ephemera.

Below is my newest addition, a WWII poster drawn by Dr. Seuss.  Here also is a link to my posters from WWI.