Thrifted Finds: The Fabulous Dundee Bag

I love hunting for quirky, unique objects in charity shops and at boot sales, and I am always amazed by the awesome stuff people throw away.  When I find a fantastic kitschy ornament or a beautiful vintage dress for a couple of pounds, I get probably way too excited and I want to share my find with everyone I know, which is where this series of posts comes in!

To celebrate boot sale season starting up again, the first item I want to feature is possibly my favourite boot sale score, my Dundee bag.  Last summer, all the shops seemed to be selling tooled leather satchels that were far beyond my pathetic student budget, so I was pretty excited to see this pretty flowery bag on one of the stalls.

About 80% of my clothes have flowers on, so it seemed like me and this bag were meant to be.  However, it was only when I looked at the other side that I fell in love:

I adore objects that have a story behind them, but this one was possibly the best yet - what seemed to be an ordinary bag from the front had a crazy and inexplicable postcard-style scene on the back! (and more massive flowers, obviously, just in case the Dundee scene wasn't quite interesting enough on its own..)  I wonder where these bags were originally sold?

Here is a close-up of the Dundee scene.  The best part is that EVERY promotional picture of Dundee uses the more famous and aesthetically pleasing rail bridge, whereas on this bag someone out there obviously thought that that was just too mainstream and that the ugly road bridge would make for a much better handbag design...  The woman who I bought it from (for only £1.50!) was not very subtly judging me, but she was clearly just not cool enough to appreciate the tacky awesomeness!

I can't talk about the Dundee bag without including me and my friend Paul Hardie's dramatic 'promotional image', in which I look ridiculously intense...  Paul's response on facebook was 'it's even got flooers oan the actual bag bit' - the greatest seal of approval!

Faye 

xxx