Every Piece Has a Story. My Job Is Tracking It Down.

I have always been a collector of interesting things. Not necessarily expensive things, not necessarily rare things... I collect things that make me stop and wonder:

A piece of jewelry with a hallmark I don't recognize.

A hand-stitched garment that clearly took someone forever to make.

A stone or glass that behaves differently under ultraviolet light.

A piece of glass made with a material nobody would put into household objects today.

Something beautifully made by someone whose name has been forgotten.

I want to know more.

Who made this? When? What is it actually made from? Why was it constructed this way? Who would have worn it? How did it survive long enough to end up in my hands?

That curiosity is really how Carissa's Collection happened.

I don't just want to sell you any old thing... There are already plenty of places to buy vintage things. What interests me is everything from discovering an object to putting a price tag on it.

Sometimes that starts with a tiny maker's mark inside a ring. Sometimes it's the shape of a clasp, the way a seam was finished, the color of tarnish on a piece of metal, or an inclusion inside a gemstone.

Those details are evidence, I love evidence.

If someone tells me a necklace is from the 1950s, I want to know why they think that. If a ring is being sold as ruby, I want to see how the stone behaves. If something is supposedly sterling silver, let's test it. If I can find the original catalog or advertisement, even better!

Sometimes the research confirms exactly what I hoped. Sometimes it absolutely does not.

That's part of the fun.

"I don't know" is a perfectly good answer! One of the strangest things about selling vintage and antique objects online is how quickly uncertainty disappears. An estate-sale story becomes provenance. A seller's guess becomes a date. "Looks like" becomes "is." Then another seller copies the description, someone else copies that one, and suddenly the internet has ten sources for a fact nobody actually established in the first place.

I don't want to do that.

There will be things in Carissa's Collection that I cannot completely identify. There will be pieces where I can narrow the possibilities but can't prove which one is correct. There may even be things I change my mind about when better evidence turns up.

I'll tell you.

"I don't know yet" doesn't make an object less interesting. Sometimes it makes it considerably more interesting. Old things carry more than monetary value.

I think we've gotten very accustomed to treating objects as temporary. We buy something, use it for a while, replace it, and eventually somebody throws it away.

Vintage objects interrupt that cycle.

A necklace that has already survived sixty years doesn't need to be manufactured again. An embroidered garment represents materials, labor, skill, and somebody's time that already exist. Repairing, preserving, wearing, studying, or reimagining these things gives that work another life.

There's something else I find valuable that is harder to measure: Objects carry information.

They tell us what people valued, what materials they had access to, what technologies they knew, what they considered beautiful, what they could afford, what they wore, what they saved, and sometimes what they loved enough to keep for generations. When we lose the object, sometimes we lose that information with it.

So yes, I sell old things, but I also think preservation matters.

This is a collection in the literal sense.

Carissa's Collection isn't going to be limited to one perfectly coordinated aesthetic. That would require me to be an entirely different person. You'll find vintage and antique jewelry here. You'll find textiles and clothing, especially pieces with interesting materials or construction. You'll find silver, scientific glass, artifacts, carefully identified replicas, and occasionally something so weird that I bought it largely because I needed to figure out what it was.

There will be beautiful things.

There will be historically important things.

There will probably be ridiculous things.

Sometimes the same object will manage all three.

What connects them isn't an era or a color palette. It's curiosity. I want this to become a place for people who still stop when they encounter something unusual and ask questions.

What is that?

Who made it?

How did they make it?

Why does it look like that?

How did it get here?

And occasionally:

Why on Earth did anyone think putting uranium in glass was a good idea? (It was.)

Those are the kinds of questions I want to chase here.

I'll show you what I find, how I research it, what the evidence tells us, and what remains a mystery. Sometimes you'll know something I don't, and I hope you'll tell me.

The story only becomes more valuable when we share it, and so does the object.

Welcome to Carissa's Collection.

Let's see what we find.