The Beat That My Heart Skipped – A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations. By Rohini Wahi.

Some adorable and unique pieces from online vintage store Winter’s Moon. How unusual is the tiger tray??? It’s like a Swedish textile print…

Which girl doesn’t want to be Supermarket Sarah? Sarah, the coolest girl ever, sells an eclectic range of vintage fashion, wonderful trinkets and work from new designers online, with her living room doubling as her shop window.

Although, selling online from your own home isn’t a new concept, Sarah’s shop is anything but unoriginal. Sarah adorns her living room wall in all of her vintage wares, in colours and themes and with contributing artist’s ideas. Pick from her various shop windows and click on each item in her living room to buy.

Sarah used to work as a creative online but wanted to touch and feel the real world again. She began with a stall at Portobello market and loved meeting people and interacting with the world. Sarah’s boyfriend, an artist helped her find her voice, making her realize the online world could work for her again but this time in a new format. Sarah still has her stall  at Portobello [around the corner from her living room] which is now overflowing with treasures and delights, and she welcomes visitors with tea and cakes!

Some of my favorites from Supermarket Sarah…

Winston Churchill oil on canvas £45, Wolf Babushkas £30 for the family, The Happy Couple Cross Stitch £48, Big Pink Pig £30.

Some beautiful nostalgic things at AGoodVintage, sourced from Somerset.

A great little story attached to this find – during the 1950s, British housewives shopped at Woolworths for Ridgway’s Homemaker range of domestic earthenware. Designed by Enid Seeny, no one really recognised them as a design classic at the time. The pattern features real furniture and items from the era!

Now I love the look of battered and worn vintage printers and letterpress blocks. The trend of displaying these letters as decorations, spelling out words on tables and mantelpieces still prevails – but wouldn’t it be great to put them to use?

I found a great home made DIY project to take these letters and make them into usable stamps once more! Once made, these are such great things to have around the house for those occasions where you just need a little extra something on a package or card – or to add a personal touch to your own business cards.

You can find old printers blocks at pretty much any antique shop or Ebay or you can by them simply from Pedlars who have a large collection. Read more here at The Upcycler for full instructions – who suggests attaching the found blocks to bobbins or wooden hand stamps, but if you don’t have any of those to hand and are lazy like me, I would go for anything washable with a flat surface.

I stumbled onto the website of Tombees du Camion today purely by accident, and when I did I was elated, astounded, mesmerized and confused all at once! Mainly because I don’t speak French, couldn’t understand what was going on and what the website sold (not to it’s detriment however – I found all the mechanical and animated elements of the website added to the wonderfully mystifying experience). After some investigation, I discovered that this was an online shop for a small Parisian store on the Rue Joseph de Maistre which sells a miscellany of wierd and wonderful vintage objects. Inside, hundreds of Paper mache dolls heads, white terracotta pipes, paper fish, painted shells, tiny stork shaped scissors, vintage ephemera and oh-so-much more, are crammed into every nook, cranny and battered wooden drawer.

The website’s description of its goods roughly translated reads…

Old and forgotten, Many batches jewels, pearls, and fashion accessories, exclusive Stocks of given up factories, industrial Series, Funds of draperies in abundance, manufactured Toys of last, Material century of laboratory, Small objects of worship to profusion, Stocks of manufacturers and wholesalers, Memories of the signs of formerly, Treasures artisanal in quantity, Accumulations in any kind, Gadgets historical and traditional, Archaeology of childhood.

I know – so poetic and kind of creepy too! Interior pictures courtesy of FXGR