Thursday, November 20, 2008

Doing my part to boost the economy

My friend Sandy is a bad, bad influence and yet, so much fun. Today we went to a fabulous antique mall about an hour from here, and darned if I didn't forget to bring a tractor-trailer truck with me. I could have bought that much stuff easily.

Antique stores are hit-or-miss for me...I can appreciate the beauty of fine antiques but they are both out of my price range and generally too formal for our comfortable country house. What I love are primitive antiques, pieces that are genuinely distressed from years of use. This antique mall (Through the Garden Gate in Mechanicsville, VA) is just perfect for me--a ton of little treasures tucked into a bunch of different rooms.

Our small house doesn't have room for any more furniture, and my husband the economist tells me that many, many peanut butter sandwich meals lie in our future, so I wasn't after anything big today. I actually said a prayer last night that I would be able to enjoy looking at the lovely things in the store and then leave them there, for the good of my family's finances. Well, I did leave many things in the store, but I brought a few home too, all of them Christmas-y home decor items.

Since I'm planning to participate in Boo Mama's Christmas Tour of Homes, I won't share photos today, but among my favorite purchases were a garland made from vintage cookie cutters (that thing is HEAVY) and a Christmas tree-shaped pillow made from vintage fabrics. I am unreasonably excited about the bloggy tour o' homes because I do all this decorating and then no one sees it but the four of us and the UPS man. I hope that I will have many visitors because y'all, last year Boo Mama had nearly five hundred homes on the tour. Yes ma'am, I said FIVE HUNDRED. If ten or twelve of those people drop by and leave me comments I will die of happiness. Maybe if I'd write something interesting they'd come back again.

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