Story sales, forgotten holidays, and raffles

Just a little newsletter to say I will be holding the first of a number of story sales on Instagram this Saturday at 11am my time (Paris)

A little background behind-the-scenes for these sales. I have been now running this business for eight years, and during that time I have accumulated a great deal of stock. Unlike just about every other dealer I know, I soak, wash and iron almost everything I sell. Sometimes when I soak and wash pieces, damages show up that I didn’t pick up on when I first bought them, which is why I do this even though it adds a huge amount of labour to my workload.

I also buy damaged things on purpose because I find them beautiful or because the quality of the fabric they are made from deserves to find a new form. And I buy multiples of things, and for years now I have bought good pieces whenever I have had the opportunity. Many of these pieces have been with me for a long time, because I have moved house a number of times and also because during covid, tbh, I developed a bit of a hoarding syndrome after almost running out of stock. And finally, I have held on to a lot because I had multiple ideas in my head for the future of this business, and because I have always been aware that the pieces I sell would get harder and harder to find.

But having now been in my new house for a year and a bit, I feel able to come to a stop, unpack properly, take stock, and reach some decisions. I started two months ago selling a lot of the deadstock antique linens and the very beautiful pieces I have hoarded on my website. And there is more of that to come. But what I have a lot of is damaged, not-quite-right, not-quite-antique, or not textiles, things I’ve picked up as I’ve gone through the brocantes, and the best place to show those is story sales. I did try running these sales on my website but Squarespace is such a poorly-designed platform, one of a host of poorly-designed platforms, that I was unable to manage sale items properly there and it became a bit of a mess. I am in the process of researching how to make my website better but because of the way I sell - in which you have to communicate with me and I invoice directly rather than through the website - most of these platforms cannot be made to work the way I want them to. They are not getting a cut of my sales and there is precious little workaround for this. Anyway, such is the terribly uninteresting behind-the-scenes of running a strange business like mine.

All I really wanted to say is that the first of these story sales will be this Saturday, and there will be more to come. They take me quite a lot of time to prepare and photograph - but I have so many pieces I need to shift. In particular I have many men’s 19th century peasant shirts, good ones, even if some of them are damaged. The majority of these were bought 4-6 years ago - because now I hardly ever find good pieces so I am glad I had a policy of snapping up wearable examples whilst there was still the opportunity. But it’s time for many of them to leave my hands.

My aim is to clear out my atelier over the next two months so that I have the space to start thinking about how I will be proceeding. Diminishing finds in the brocantes mean that this business was always going to have a finite lifespan, and would have to evolve. The end is not yet nigh, not for a few years at least, but I need to explore some options.

So, 11am Saturday Paris time will be the first one. I have a limited number of story-slides I can post within a 24 hour period so I am constrained by that. All I ask of anyone wanting to buy something is that if you ask, you commit to the sale and you pay me within 24 hours of invoice issue.

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I realised belatedly that the newsletter I released last week was posted on Good Friday. This was a bit of a silly oversight on my part but is testimony to how long I have been in France - Good Friday is not a holiday here, and it was the second last day of the Easter school holidays so I was just plugging away blithely unaware! That posting day meant that many people didn’t open the newsletter, which made me miffed with myself for forgetting because I spent ages writing that newsletter and had actually had it percolating in my head for over a year, when I first showed the 18th century document that inspired it to a school-friend in Australia who is now a European history lecturer at the ANU in Canberra. The Orange Peanut Brain Trump’s recent activities brought finally the perfect timing for the newsletter, and I was really happy with it - only to release it on a day that nobody would see it!

The other reason I am miffed at myself for forgetting the date is that I have two raffles in that last newsletter. I can no longer announce raffles on Instagram - it makes the post invisible, and so here is the only place I can publicise them. I also forgot to put an end-date on those two raffles because I am a little rusty, having not held one since January. So here, I will say, you have until Monday to go read that newsletter, enter the raffles (the prizes are a vintage Dutch indigo kerchief and three hanks of antique Belgian and French linen lacemaker’s thread - I don’t do half-arsed prizes my friends!), and help raise a bit of money for two very good causes.

And come to my story sale!

See you soon xx