To me, Easter is the most important week of the whole year! I hope you all have a great Easter! God bless!
first day of spring
Happy first day of spring! I just had to share these beautifully styled photos from one of my customers! Kayla from @oursimpledays on Instagram shared these this morning! These seriously look like they’re from my house! Her & I have the same taste in antiques! See the flower pot brush in there? Those are from the shoppe, but I haven’t sold them since last summer so I definitely need to get more for this spring!
english cottage garden
I dream of going to England someday & visiting the whole countryside to see Helen Allingham’s painted cottages in person! Hopefully someday that’ll happen, but until then I’m just going to create a cottage style garden in my own city backyard. It might not be a thatched English cottage, but it’s all I have so why not make it as pretty as I can? I love creating the cottage garden look with lots of traditional flowers mixed with willow obelisks & cloches. Verbena, lilacs, bells of Ireland, foxglove, hollyhocks, poppies, larkspur, lavender, lady’s mantle, climbing roses, & wisteria are some of my favorites. These heirloom flowers are from Botanical Interests so they’re organic/non-gmo seed & look at those beautiful drawings!
antiquing
I recently went antiquing with my kids, which was an interesting idea, & these are some of the things I picked up! I have certain thrift & antique stores that I make my rounds at. It still seems so weird to me that I can do one of my favorite things & make money from it! I love finding treasures that people get so excited about! I surprisingly find a lot of European antiques in Wisconsin since most of the people that live here immigrated from there then continued to farm up until recently. I found lots of ironstone, copper pudding molds, a few enamelware colanders, an antique shutter, a French mortar & pestle, some floral frogs, & Italian glass canisters. I'm going to start blogging my antiquing trips, photo shoots I do as well as personal things like gardening & foraging!
oldies but goodies
I was just looking through old photos of antiques I sold years ago & I found these two! I absolutely love taking photos outdoors so it's driving me crazy not being able to yet. Everything is dead, no leaves on the trees, just small buds. I've been staring at the lilac bush by my back door everyday to see how it's growing, but it's still just little leaves. In the winter I take all of my photos indoors, but it’s not even close to as fun as taking them outside! I go to the farmers market or forage all of the flowers I use, pack up my SUV with antiques & kids then I’m off to my favorite spot! It’s right next to a park so that’s my way of getting my kids to be alright with me doing another boring photo shoot! I’m going to be scouting new locations to find another spot that look European with the old stone. I found this old heirloom apple tree near a field so we go back there every fall to pick them & I used it in these photos! Until then I will just stare at the lilac bush waiting for the flowers…