Back on the Flea Market Road Again!

One of our favorite areas to visit and shop for vintage treasures! Divine mountain scenery, cool evenings, wonderful locally owned restaurants and hiking to waterfalls. And of course miles of walking in warehouses packed with vintage goodies.

Every trip to Asheville includes a trip to The Tobacco Barn. We made quite a few purchases

and of course Jeri was busy taking photos. I thought this was the ugliest lamp ever, but Laura who loves everything mid-century thought it was fab.

From ladders to letters, kitch to oddities this warehouse is stuffed with an incredible number

of items to browse through.

This juke box record player is on my wish list!

Another not-to-be-missed place for vintage is ScreenDoor in Asheville. We wandered for

hours and saw the only other Blue Horse coupons we have ever seen. (We recently bought a large jar of them!)

We always stay in Flat Rock, NC at Highland Lake Cottages. Imagine how tickled we were to find a white peacock on our back porch. Must have been a good picking omen.

Jeri loves goats - baby goats, old grandfather goats and even metal goats. Flat Rock abounds!

Just for grins I texted home this picture from our trip. I didn't mention that it was a stuffed display at the Ranger's station...

NEVER enough photos of cool signs.

Lots of large outdoor markets are filled with more new stuff than old, produce and tools, but we

did find a few vintage items.

These cucumbers were huge!

We saw a large structure at Smiley's covered with a tarp and couldn't resist sneaking underneath. It was an amazing merry-go-round! 

Jeri, Jeri Quite Contrary...

It's still really slow (TOO HOT) for finding many sales, so I have really spent more time tending to my garden. Now that summer is coming to an end, I have made a report card for myself. Some efforts were spectacular successes (sunflowers and four o'clocks), others were total failures (poppies). Enjoy the bright colors of the sunflowers, zinnias, wildflowers, four o'clocks and morning glories.

The Picking Sisters have two trips coming up to NC and to Florida, so the next post will be the vintage treasures we all love. (P.S. -Scroll to the end to see a recent sign score!)

Morning glories tangled with sunflowers and into the neighbor's yard.

B+ for the Morning Glories. Lush vines, but  not as many blooms as last year.

A+ for the sunflowers. The no-fail seeds made it easy to grow towering plants with

dinner-plate sized blooms.

Watching the sunflowers open was great fun - like a really cool science experiment.

Here's something I learned...whenever I cut the flowers the plants would

morph into one that made multiple small blooms instead of the single giant ones! 

When we were little one of our favorite things to do in the summer was picking four o'clock flowers and stringing them on a vine to make lei. They grew wild in the lane and always closed up at night. The ones I grew thrived and bloomed, but only at night. I finally looked at the seed packet and these were evening bloomers. Note to self: READ the seed packets next year.

I am especially proud of coaxing a bloom from this $1 Calla lily I bought at a thrift shop.

How rainy has it been? Look what sprouted in just 2 days...

And now the sign. It's 3' by 5' and "it's the Real Thing" from the 70's or 80's!