Once, while deep in the rabbit holes of Instagram hashtags, I stumbled upon jewelry maven Holly Shipley's little shop @DearHolly. Since then, I've run into her jewelry treasure trove while bleary-eyed at music festivals and hunting for good finds at the Dallas Flea. This Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m., she's teamed up with the Deep Ellum marketing and design firm Tractorbeam to host Shoptown, a "shopping party."
"The whole event was my friend Eric Benanti's idea, who is a partner at Tractorbeam, as a way to support these small, local businesses," Shipley says. "It's going to be a fun night: shopping, beer, oh and we'll have a DJ."
Vendors include The Office of Angela Scott, Lauren Wilkins of arrow & arrow, Stevie Moore from Elements and, of course, vintage jewelry from Shipley and her new partner-in-crime, Vicki Tollemache, who's scored all of the time-frozen vermin. The evening's selections will be curated, which guarantees an eclectic mix of clothes, shoes, bags, and a lot of jewelry. To make the night more festive, the folks from Photowagon, the omnipresent photo booth trailer, will be snapping pictures and there will be eats from the Easy Slider food truck.
The most unique thing you'll find that evening? Freeze-dried mice. "Ok it sounds totally weird, but people go crazy for these things," Shipley says. "Vicki ran out of them really quickly at the Flea."
If that doesn't whet your curiosity, Tollemache also promises an array of collectible mourning jewelry from the 1920's (think, locks of hair), and Shipley assures me "a lot of people are into that kind of stuff."
While I'm not particularly interested in a dead person's hair follicles, there's one pretty gold bumblebee ring I've got my eye on.
