We spent Memorial Day as a vendor at the art & antique market organized by Stifel & Capra in Falls Church, VA. It was HOT and HUMID, but all the vendors were wonderful and we had a good amount of shoppers who braved the conditions to visit us.
Our spot was right in front of the Stifel & Capra store – not a lot of shade. As you can see, we brought a few large pieces of furniture. No hubbies to help us this time, but we want to thank the two “Teak Guys” who jumped in to help us when we were loading and unloading.
Do we look ready for the HOT weather?
Here’s Karen checking out the cash situation before the start of the show.
This starry window was the first item to sell.
We found the chippy shutters below at a house demolition sale. There were 21 of them in three sizes and in varying shades of green, turquoise, and black. The cut-out is probably a pine tree, but we’re going with the sailboat that Janice wants them to be! Put your orders in now for them… they won’t last long.
We were lucky to be able to spread out a lot.
This cute narrow bookcase was our first piece of furniture to sell. And “Dolly” (busty dresser to left of bookcase), as usual, got lots of attention, but no takers yet. And that’s Janice in the background, remerchandising.
We were very happy with our day’s sales. Our last customer happened as we were packing up to leave. A young woman bought our tall gray distressed dresser (“Zoe”, at left in picture below) and the sweet little blue end table “Amanda” – making a good end to a successful day.
This is our last outdoor show for a while – we hope to get into a barn sale weekend in the fall. Thanks for staying with us as start on our next projects – setting up Etsy and Ebay sites, and a possible “pop-up trailer sale” in our neighborhood.
Friday is usually the start of our weekly rounds of estate and yard sales. There were only two nearby today, probably because many people are going out of town for the Memorial Day weekend. We didn’t do too bad today. Our first stop was a yard sale where we picked up some great gold letters and a German street sign.
The seller said the sign indicated a one way street, but we translated it to “one way trot”. Obviously, some things get lost in translation!
Our next stop was an estate sale. It was only the 2nd day of a four day sale, so nothing was marked down yet, but we picked up a few interesting items to add to our collection.
A vintage bread box and some spools
Leather-trimmed Hartmann luggage, toast server, small cup, and picture stand
– A small silver cup with a bird on the handle and a vintage shoe shine bucket.
By this point we were starving, so our next purchase was some road food.
This bag of chips supposedly contains 5 servings (ha ha) – it barely satisfied 2 hungry women!
On our way home, we decided to stop by Goodwill. We found an awesome leather-trimmed suitcase (see photo above). But the best find of the day was this Bega Seam-Sewer antique sewing machine. Some of the parts are missing, but can you believe the exquisite detail? This beauty will look great as a display piece!
With Luckett’s Spring Market behind us, we took a much needed day of rest, dropped mom off at the airport this morning, and said hello again to our families and critters.
Here is a quick little video at the start of day two. You may notice new stuff as we had to restock Saturday night to fill some holes.
We had two beautifully sunny days for the Spring Market, which was unusual as in past years it has rained on Sunday. Saturday was definitely our busier, more successful sales day. Sunday was quieter with more couples browsing. We sold most of our smaller items and several pieces of the smaller furniture as well as a few of the larger pieces. We had several items that drew a lot of attention but no takers. We’ve been asked many times if it is hard to sell all the great stuff we collect. While we love what we buy, and we do keep some of the items, it is nice to move stuff along, and see how happy customers are with their purchases. We received a lot of compliments on our items and our booth setup, had a lot of people ask for our business card and noticed people taking pictures of our sign. A lot of people mentioned they loved our name and asked if we were Marines. Whooha! We want to thank our Spring Market neighbor Liz of Bittersweet Design Studio. Liz was so patient answering all of our pesky questions and offering us “ice-cold” bottles of water. She made our experience that much more enjoyable.
We have had a fantastic journey to our first vintage and antique show. We learned so much on what to do and what not to do. We stretched ourselves physically and creatively. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you love what you do.
We want to thank all of you for your words of encouragement, phone calls, advice and compliments. We are humbled that so many of you were interested in what we were doing. A special thank you to Karen’s sister Kathy for shopping with us and making the popular state pillows (seen here), which sold out the first day. Thank you mom for helping clean, price and tag items, sewing pillows shut, shopping with us, making meals and working the crowd. And lastly, to our husbands for their support in putting up with our ever growing “treasure” piles that were overtaking our houses and garages, for driving the truck and trailer to the show and back, and carrying heavy furniture and boxes. We couldn’t have done it without all of your support.
Semper Stylish roadies-
Mom marketing-
For those of you that have asked what was the first thing that sold (drum roll please) it was……. 3 blue mason jars, sold within the first 10 minutes of the gate opening. And – to my sister who said the portrait of Frida Kahlo, with her unibrow, was scary – Frida was with her new owner within the first hour.
The very nice gal who bought Frida knew exactly who she was and the history on the sale of the real portrait. I told her if it turns out to be the real one she has to share some of her Sotheby millions with us.
We can’t rest too much. We signed up for a second show this Memorial Day, at Stifel and Capra in Falls Church, VA, from 10am to 4pm. This show is on a much, much smaller scale, meaning no trailer. The streets around this wonderful little art and antique store are closed to the local Memorial Day parade. So, to make lemons out of lemonade, the shop owner opens her parking lot to vendors.
With Luckett’s now just a memory, we hope you will continue to stay with us. We will post on future projects and shows. To our readers, we want to again say thank you for continuing to follow and support us on our future journeys. Not sure where they will take us.
We made it through Day One!! It was a successful day. We’re tired and sunburned, but wanted to share a video and pictures of the day:
Our kind neighbors took a picture of us as we arrived to start setting up (Karen, Semper Stylish hubby Marshall, Janice’s mom and Janice):
While we were waiting for the show to open, we each picked something we thought would be the first thing to sell. Janice picked her beautiful cloche over a round frame with sheet music base, Karen picked her orange phone table (because there was nothing else orange in the show), and Polly picked the set of 8 ironstone square appetizer plates.
Here’s what the booth looked like just before the 10am opening:
Style maven Janice worked hard to make the booth look awesome and inviting…
Polly made PB&J sandwiches for lunch today, and Karen had her first ever. Yum!
By mid-day, the crowds were not quite as crazy. Friends Matt and Christine stopped by to show their support:
Mid-afternoon, Team Semper Stylish hubby Greg arrived to help with the afternoon’s restocking:
By the end of the day, we had done a lot of rearranging to fill empty spaces.
The show closed at 5pm. We packed everything back into our 10’x10′ booth, drove to the trailer, unloaded more furniture, restocked our booth, installed and zipped up the sides, and were heading back home by 6pm!
In case you were wondering about how our “first thing to sell” bet went, NONE of the pieces we picked sold- yet!
We will let you know how Day Two goes tomorrow. Until then, it’s off to bed!
Today was set up day at Luckett’s. We spent the past several days packing, cleaning, pricing, and finishing last minute projects. My family room during packing looked like this, that’s Spritle trying to find his way through-
Now we have this-
It’s nice to have my house back.
So with the truck and trailer loaded we headed off to Luckett’s. Our designated set up time was 11:30am – 1:30pm. We arrived right as scheduled and fortunately we were able to get the truck and trailer close to our spot. We had secretly hoped for a nice shady corner spot, but, we were assigned a middle spot in a middle row. The good thing is we will be able to “pop” out both front and back while leaving room in our booth for shoppers to pass through. The set-up we had come up during “dress rehearsal” day had to be changed, but, the one consolation was we knew which pieces we wanted.
We unloaded all of our Saturday items, big and small, as quickly as we could as the rig took up most of the row. The vendor on one side of us had already set up and had their tent sides buttoned down, so we weren’t able to check out what they have. The vendor on the other side is a very nice lady with two 10×10 booths. She stated she has been doing shows for 20 years (up to 35 shows a year) so she was very knowledgeable and patient answering all our questions about what to expect.
We spent two hours reconfiguring our layout for the bigger pieces and felt comfortable leaving the smaller pieces for Saturday morning. Closed up the tent and arrived home beating the rush hour traffic.
Before we start celebrating with ice cream cake and Prosecco, we thought we would finish this post with a few last minute pictures of some of the additional furniture pieces we completed.
the Spritle sideboard before-
the Spritle side board after-
The Dolly before-
The Dolly after, do you get it? The name that is.
the Compass Rose before-
the Compass Rose after-
top of the Compass Rose-
the Frenchy bench before-
the Frenchy bench after-
the Trixie coffee table before-
the Trixie after-
the Antoinette dresser before-
the Antoinette dresser after-
The following pieces we don’t have a before picture of.
The bumblebee chest-
the Hanai-
the Zoe dresser-
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey to Luckett’s Spring Market. Can’t believe it has arrived. We’ll keep you posted on how the weekend goes.
It’s scary and exciting to write- zero days to go.
With the clock ticking down to d-day, we took advantage of the gorgeous weather yesterday to set up the tent and configure our layout. We wanted to see just how much, or little, we would be able to effectively stuff into our space and still allow movement through the space.
Fortunately Karen owns a nice white 10 x 10 tent.
Karen and hubby setting up the tent. Glad I designated myself the “official” photographer for this part.
The tent has sides which will help if it rains, however, the extended forecast is for mid 70’s and no rain. Whew! Keep your fingers crossed.
First couple pieces of furniture and our sign in place. That wasn’t too bad.
The hardest part was deciding what should be put out the first day. We thought about size, colors, style and stacking ability for height. We need to get as much in and still have our booth looking appealing and inviting. I don’t believe we have the option of restocking during the day.
Where should this go?
Mom flew in on Tuesday to help with the show. We put her to work as soon as her plane landed. Here she is making hang tags.
We fit more than I expected. Several neighbors stopped by and were awed & amazed at what we have collected – hopefully the Luckett’s shoppers will be too!
Seven hours later it’s all tagged and tucked away.
On Friday afternoon we will be setting up our space at Luckett’s. Hopefully today’s exercise will make that go a lot smoother and easier.
Thank you for joining us on our journey. Five days to Luckett’s.
With less than 2 weeks until show time, it’s time to start figuring out how we are going to price and label our treasures. To help use up some of those free business cards we ordered at vistaprint.com, we will use them as tags for our larger items. The smaller items will get tags using standard stick-on mailing labels.
Pricing According to most of the people we have talked to, eBay is the standard for getting the market value of most pieces. The vintage section of etsy is also useful. However, the prices can vary quite a bit depending on the condition of the item and how badly the seller wants to get rid of it. But at least you can get a general idea of how to price an item from these sites. For our painted furniture, barn Sales and antique stores that we visit are a good source of prices.
Our biggest challenge are the items that are hard to find for sale online or locally, such as hotel silver. That makes it rare and valuable, right??
Price coding Of course, no one wants to pay the price we put on an item – half the fun of markets is bargaining. So we needed a way for us to know what we paid for an item on the label itself. Searching the internet for ideas, we decided to use a system common in pawn and antique stores. The original cost is encoded using a 10-character word. The work cannot have any repeating letters, and each letter is assigned the numbers 0-9. For example, using the word PAINTBRUSH, 0=”P”, 1=”A”, 2=”I”, etc. So an item that cost $47 would be coded as “TU”. Hopefully we will never have to sell an item below the coded original cost.
Labeling We put 3 pieces of information on each label – a unique item id (to help us find it in our inventory spreadsheed), the asking price, and the coded cost. Here is an example of a cute little side table we just finished with its price tag.
As you can see, a lot of thought goes into those price tags you see in the stores. Next time you are in an antique or pawn store, see if you can decode their 10-character code word…
We also worked on our matching white Semper Stylish t-shirts (and extra tank top) for Luckett’s yesterday – using our trusty Cameo Silhouette to cut a stencil that matches our sign.
Thanks for joining us on our journet to Luckett’s – only 9 days to go!
With less than two weeks to Luckett’s Spring Market, we are in crunch mode with finishing all the furniture pieces we have acquired over the last several months. And acquire we have- this 18’x 8′ trailer is full.
Did we mention we only have a 10’x10′ booth at Lucketts? How high can we go?
With the furniture in various stages of readiness, here are pictures of some of the completed pieces. To help us distinguish and remember each piece, we have given them names.
The Admiral and his two lieutenants-
The picture below is somewhat pathetic. We tend to forget to take the “before” picture until after we start tearing the piece apart. Well, we were too lazy to put the two larger drawers back in as they have a locking mechanism that requires a little work to remove them.
Once again, the Silhouette Cameo came to our rescue to design the stars. For a surprise, we painted the inside of the drawers orange.
The Jake before-
The Jake after. The white borders and key drawer pulls gives this strong, practical dresser a sense of fun.
The Kylie before-
The Kylie after. This end table has beautiful, strong legs.
The Lindsey before-
The Lindsey after. The addition of the basket makes this a very cute and smart looking piece.
The Ethan before-
The Ethan after. This strong and sturdy piece is very versatile as it can be a coffee table or an end table.
The Hailey before-
The Hailey after. We love how beautiful this buffett turned out.
The Amanda before-
The Amanda after. This end table turned out so sweet with the addition of the scroll and crystal drawer pull.
While setting up this photo shoot, we had a visit from our neighborhood dog friends Tess (l) and her brother Kirby(r). Spritle and Trixie are on the oversized chair, which is covered in needlepoint upholstery.
Thank you for joining us on our journey. Only 12 days to the Spring Market.