Glaston-Ready (Well, Almost!)

 

What was I thinking? In my last post I wrote that it was three weeks until Glastonbury but I must have been on another planet - it was actually just a fortnight away! There I was thinking Lord Jon was being a little too eager when he spoke about having the van packed next week. Anyway, we're ploughing through the prep required for trading at the biggest festival on the planet, the repairs are done, the stock's been selected and we're currently halfway through the pricing. The weather's been a bit of a disaster but with a dry weekend forecast, Jon'll be giving operation funk up the outside of the tent a go.

Mindful of the impact of a week of manual labour, hard work and hedonism will have on our 55 year old bodies, the swimming continues, I've changed up my daily Wii Fit routine making it more of a muscle workout with press-ups, jack knives, lunges and balance bridges and we're eating as well as possible, helped by the £1.50 Lidl *Waste Not* boxes. Below are the contents of two we bought this week:

Honeydew, Gala and Ogen melons, padron peppers, a trio of sweet peppers, white onions, pak choi, baby leaf & rocket salad, bistro salad, a conference pear, two heads of organic broccoli, romaine lettuce, carrots and spinach leaves. 

A week after getting back from Glasto & we'll be off to our next festival and (hopefully) as our stock will be seriously depleted the hunt for all things vintage, quirky and cool continues. I wore my Dilli Grey Emma maxi for a hunt of the chazzas on Tuesday and the manager of the charity shop where I bought my basket was thrilled to see it. 

The earrings are recent acquisitions - there's a shop in town which sells brand new clothes and jewellery for £1. As you can imagine, most of the stock is pretty awful but there's a few decent pieces like these pink wooden beauties & the multicoloured tasselled wonders. 

We found so much good stuff on Tuesday that we were struggling to carry it back to the car - if I had more time I'd photograph and share it - I'll just have to ask our customers if they'd mind posing in it if & when it gets sold. And I promise that I wasn't looking for things for me but...since they reopened after lockdown....the chazzas seem to be bursting with XS clothing so it's daft not to snap it up when I can. This puff sleeve shirred cotton top with metallic embroidered dots was £2 (it was marked up at £4 but the lovely lady who works on the counter decided it was too expensive so charged me half price!)

I wore it under my charity-shopped Lucky Brand dungarees with my new earrings and six year old Lotta of Stockholm in apple green clogs to nip over to B&Q and B&M Bargains on Wednesday morning before spending the rest of the day locked away in the trade tent.

Jon went over to his mate's garage to do some work on the other campervan leaving me to my own devices. After pimping up three pairs of shorts with some vintage sew-on patches bought from a car boot sale years ago I cracked out the sewing machine.

Although I only saw the highlights of last weekend's Jubilee celebrations, I loved the bit with the Queen meeting Paddington Bear. By weird coincidence I found a 1980s Paddington duvet cover in the £1 charity shop on Tuesday which I'd unpicked and washed then, using a 1971 Jiffy pattern, turned it into a maxi dress. This'll be on the mannequin in our trade tent when we roll up the shop front at Glasto. Regular readers will know I've been making clothes from vintage curtains and duvet covers years before The Great British Sewing Bee made repurposing old fabric trendy!

Of course the most exciting thing about the Queen having tea with Paddington was learning that she keeps her marmalade sandwiches in her handbag. Her Maj always carries a Launer handbag, made in Walsall with the workshop a five minute walk from our front door). You can read more about our town's centuries-old leather goods manufacturing industry in my blog post HERE. It's a shame the brand go by the name Launer, London when Walsall's over a hundred miles away from the country's capital.

On Thursday morning, after our swim, we popped into Walsall's legendary vintage clothes shop, Second To None, which has hosted many a bloggers get together over the last twelve years, and caught up with the owner, June to do a bit of business.  

This amazing 1970s cotton maxi dress caught my eye and it couldn't be more me, could it?

It's vintage Dorothy Perkins who made incredibly groovy gear in the 1960s and 1970s and then lost its way. When I was a teenager in the 1980s it was the place you shopped when you weren't cool enough for TopShop. 

Gah! Look at some of those clothes, I wish I had a time machine!

I wore my new-to-me dress for another flying visit to the chazzas this morning where, once again, we were struggling to carry all the swag we found back to the car. We spent the rest of the day continuing to price stock which, I'm delighted to report, we've finally completed - just over 1,000 items labelled & ready to sell (how we'll ever get it all in the van is another story!)

I'm off to drink rum. See you soon!