The problem with brocanting in France is that it never ends. There is always a brocante, one way or another, be it a fair, a shop, someone's garage, a second hand store or warehouse… or the dumpster on every block. So if you have a brocante bug France is the place to be for utter joy. Or if you live in France and have the brocante bug badly the only way to stay focus and do other things like eat, work or do the daily things one must do to survive is to close your eyes, plug your ears and tie your hands behind your back… other wise you will go brocante crazy living here.
Take the seafoam green canape in our bedroom… did I need it? No. Though it needed me. Yes that is how the brocante reckons, it makes you think that the item at hand needs you to save it.
I am such a sucker for saving old things.
How could I leave that canape when it was calling, "Corey save me!"
All those bits of 18th century fabric that I had saved over the last few months finally had a purpose too… My friend Denise made pillows.
It is brocante's way of getting under my skin…
The demi-lune table. Natural unstained walnut, 1700s perfect condition. It spotted me at an antique fair, called my name.
I admired it. Did I need it? No.
But when the antique dealer told me I had to have it, I resisted, walked away even: Cause I wasn't looking for a demi-lune, he called out, "…take it, otherwise I am going to leave it."
How could I refuse?
And it looks so happy in my living room.
Thankfully the brocante can create a home, it is recycling at its finest. It has helped me furnish our home, and allows me a creative fun way of working. I think I will love the brocante bug forever.
How could I not.
Just think if I did not love old things I would not have gone to the brocante fair the morning the chandler came out of the truck with its 92 crystals, nor would I have ever found that darling three foot charcoal drawing in a gilded wooden oval frame.
One of a kind wonders lurk at the brocante.
The sneaky lurkers calling out, "Corey save me."
Stone carved gargoyles and an urn.
Heavy puppies. Did that stop me? Did it matter my car was two miles away?
Did it matter that French Husband wasn't there to help.
Nope.
The brocante bug gives me superpowers!
The 18th century Italian wooden crown, a glass vase filled with old French letters and documents, a fragment from a wooden statue, and recently my friend Mari from Texas told me about chucks of glass fragments. Actually left over chucks, oh Wiki says it better:
"Slag is the glass-like by product left over after a desired metal has been separated (i.e.,smelted) from its raw ore…"
So how could I not buy the taupe colored slag at the brocante?
Blame Mari.
Sure I love books. The older the better; Better yet if they have engravings.
Books often come home with me, they jump at me, run after me, call my name, hide in my car, when old books see me they throw themselves on me. It is as if I am a rock and they are barnacles.
But the one thing I adore collecting more that books is repaired 1700s ironstone. The piece above I found twenty years ago, it is wired repaired.
Oh mercy.
…to be continued as brocanting and I are tied to the hips.
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