Tip - Retail Notebook: Give kids a blast from the past

Filled with vintage and reproduction children's clothing and toys, Retroactive Kids shares space with WS Kids Salon and offers a backroom Art Lab for children's sewing and craft classes. Toys at Retroactive Kids include vintage and reproduction puzzles, spinning tops and tea sets, old board games and -- in a nod to changing culinary sensibilities -- wooden playsets with pretend sushi. Surprisingly in this high- tech era, kids who visit the shop are especially fascinated with read-along, audiotaped storybooks and plastic Fisher-Price record players from the 1970s, which sell for about $45. Vintage clothing includes children's saddle shoes and high-topped sneakers, OshKosh overalls, jeans, dainty dresses and little-boy shortsand-blazer sets for dress-up. For mom's shopping pleasure, the shop also carries some vintage handbags, aprons and enameled pins from the 1950s and '60s. Other attractions include new clothing, changing pads, nursing drapes, baby leg warmers and other accessories designed by Seattle "mamapreneurs" -- women who combine cottage industries with motherhood. Two popular items are soft-leather toddler shoes by "See Kai Run," an internationally known firm started by a Columbia City mom, and ZuZu Petals, a stunning line of vintage-fabric dresses and coats by local designer Lily Hotchkiss. The store's extrememakeover decor now reflects its festive wares, thanks to weekend work parties that transformed the gray-green warren of office cubicles and fluorescent lights into 1,600 square feet of wide-open, tomato-red walls.