Brooklyn is bursting with vintage stores and once every year, there’s a day you can get your hands on their beautiful wares for cut-down prices: The Vintage Crawl.

The Crawl features about 25 stores across Bushwick, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where items have anywhere between 10 and 50 per cent off. The event makes vintage pieces more affordable, while also promoting the small businesses.

Spotting that the event was on today, I decided to head to Williamsburg to check out its vintage shops. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there since moving to the city but I’ve never actually shopped in its stores, so this was a great excuse.

I visited a handful of the shops and left with some gorgeous pieces of jewelry for gifts. There’s a range of quality at the stores; while some just have rails and rails of clothes – and not a great deal of character – others are beautifully designed and merchandized, with items that seem perfectly handpicked.

One of these stores is Lavai Maria. The clothes were so beautiful and really wearable, which isn’t the case for every other store in Williamsburg (although to be fair, people in Williamsburg probably do wear these seemingly unwearable clothes), and it also threw in a few quirky bits of furniture.

Another store I really liked was Awoke Vintage – it was simple and clean.

Afterwards I went to About Glamour, which seemed a little junkier, but there were some interesting pieces.

Then I wandered around the neighborhood, taking in the sun, the street art and a couple of other stores.

Williamsburg can be a nightmare at the weekends; Bedford Avenue always seems crammed with tourists and people who’ve made some very questionable outfit choices. While it’s become a bit of a parody of itself, it does have great restaurants, bars and atmosphere – and somehow these stores seemed like little oases of calm as they weren’t busy at all.

If you want a nice day of browsing for some treats for yourself or for some original, beautiful gifts, check it out!