It's Picking Time Again!

     We have our picking mojo back with a trip to South Carolina and one to North Carolina this month. Great vintage treasures, lovely scenery in the Smoky Mountains and as always fun photos, giggles and lots of cookies. You know it's picking season when you score 5 paint by numbers AND a sock monkey.

     The latest monkey is named Elmer and he wanted to see the scenery so we propped him up to see out of his window. He is now enjoying his new family at Jeri's house.

Our travels took us to Seabrook and Beaufort, SC, Flat Rock and Asheville, NC and a Salvation Army warehouse sale right here in Savannah. Laura found this funky award for the Friendly Letter Writing Contest.

and a great weather vane for her yard.

Because my alter ago is a cowgirl, I couldn't pass up this metal bunkhouse. I added a

cowgirl and Woody and a horse (of course).

     For the woman who longs for a more genteel time when vanities were part of the bedroom, here are a few treasures we found. See below a Christian Dior wig box, a refillable Avon powder puff wand that holds dusting powder, pastel shoe tress and a box of shoe mitts.

     The barn is filling up again with new finds and we have some items in our etsy shop that we are ready to mark down. We're celebrating a great summer of sales at mysistersbarn that we are opening a SECOND ETSY SHOP. The current shop will be all items on sale and the new

shop will feature the most recent finds. We hope to have it set up by next week

and will create a post when it's open!

In the meantime...here are a few of the cuties you will see for sale in the new shop!

Some days I think I live on this street!

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!

A Rare Saturday With No Picking!

For a change of pace this Saturday, we headed to a nearby farm. Our cousin has a lovely spot in Bloomingdale, GA - only 15 minutes from Savannah. Quiet and out "in the country", it was a fun day with lots of animals. See

below photos of all kinds of chickens, geese and  pigeons. There are 2 mini-goats, named Annie and May. They love bread from a local deli and playing chase!

An owl pigeon.

  

A carb fest for Annie.

A Canadian goose a LONG way from home.

Mama Peacock has 2 babies.

This is Snoball and she is a rescue. She says a few words and has a really great personality.

She'll even snuggle while you nap.

We were lucky to bring home souvenirs from our farm adventure - dozens of fresh eggs

and peacock feathers!

I don't speak goat, but maybe May is saying "don't go"?

What We DID NOT Do in North Carolina

Jeri couldn't resist sharing her ice cream with this cute little bear.

Downtown Hendersonville is Bear Country!

The Picking Sisters went to Western North Carolina for a few days to the goat farm in Flat Rock, to see the Smoky Mountains, breathe cool air (in the 60's) and, of course, pick. OK, the goat farm is actually the cottages at Highland Lake where they have a few goats, geese and a stunning vegetable garden. The food everywhere we went was local or organic and yummy. Breathtaking views of the mountains, stunning waterfalls, great shopping, divine flowers blooming everywhere. But the picking? Not so much. 

The goats were glad to see us!

We called this goat Grandpa because of his long white beard.

Jeri herding goats.

This post is about we DIDN'T do. For example, we picked in Etowah, Hendersonville, Asheville, Lake Lure, Chimney Rock, Columbus, Flat Rock, Bat Cave (yes, it's a real place), Brevard, NC and Lexington, SC.  We just didn't find a lot of our kind of stuff.


 This is the entire haul!

Here are a few shots from Bat Cave. We LOVED the scarecrows!

What else did we NOT do? We went to Chimney Rock State Park, but didn't go up to Chimney Rock because the elevator was out of order. We went to the Pisgah Forest Equestrian Center, but didn't ride - no time. We went to Sliding Rock, but didn't slide down - no bathing suits. We went to the climbing wall in downtown Asheville, but didn't climb - too chicken. All on our list for next time (except for that climbing wall).

 Weren't we smart to climb down these rocks in flip-flops to put our feet in the stream?

We took these of ourselves - maybe we should have figured out the self-timer 

before we went away?

We loved this sign in an Asheville shop window.

These monkeys were just sitting on a coach in an Asheville yarn shop.

This place in Asheville is called the Tobacco Barn and it's huge. Here are some photos of the place, fun signs and a few grand things we did not buy. 

 

Here's the front of a Coke cooler hanging from the ceiling. Cool wall art, no?

One final stop at the US 1 Flea Market  in South Carolina on the way home. Aren't these the

 best stripper shoes ever?

We guess this sign is for the people who are wondering where they are?