Serendipity – a beautiful blog
by homeshoppingspy • Monday, November 23, 2009 • Decorating and interiors, Lovely websites, Stylish shopping • 0 Comments
Let’s start the week with some inspiration! Bethan’s just stumbled across Sadie Olive, a lovely blog written by Sara Duckett, a Californian photographer. Her love of vintage lace, antiques and all things pretty means every post is a visual treat.
This makes me want to rush home and tie pink velvet ribbons around my vintage cutlery too! At the moment, we store it all in French Cassoulet tins – practical, but not half as pretty!
What a lovely start to to the week! I love the vintage scales above, and the beautiful styling in these shots. On closer inspection, it turns out Sadie Olive is not just a blog – it’s a whole empire! Sara runs three shops – she sells antiques, postcards and prints of her photographs, does graphic design and sells collectibles…is there anything she doesn’t do?! She’s also on her third blog. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. – Ellie
You could glue them on to small brown envelopes for storing seed, or use them to make gorgeous greeting cards, gift tags, or even frame them for some vintage wall art. I love the bright colours and pretty illustrations on these – and you can buy French seed packets too, with a label glued on the front and sowing instructions printed on the reverse. My ‘Chou’ one is so ‘chouette’!
To begin with, I confess, we had a few map issues. Both of us are a bit ‘geographically challenged’, so we spent a while aimlessly wandering through the outskirts of the market, searching in vain for bric-a-brac. This area of the market was NOT very vintage – think pan pipe CDs, dodgy trainers, manky old nail varnishes, racks of velour tracksuits, smelly hot dog vans etc. Finally, we scraped together enough French (ish) to communicate with a local and were soon directed to the heart of the Braderie. We found ourselves surrounded by beautiful Brocante, and realised we were in Flea Market Heaven.
We kicked off proceedings in the ancient Citadelle, which was full of vintage books, magazines and postcards. I bought a pretty French novel for styling purposes only (my A-Level French is a dim and distant memory!) and Bethan stocked up on gorgeous postcards covered in elegant handwriting. We spent ages admiring some printers’ blocks and found some wicked old hairdressing chairs.
There were so many hundreds of wonderful things, it’s impossible to record, or even remember, them all! There was a lot of taxidermy – interesting, but gross – and we saw lots of lovely rustic wooden wine carriers and old metal watering cans. A gigantic chemist’s chest of drawers caught our eye, and we wished we had a van to transport a lovely cast iron bath back to the UK!
Lunch at La Braderie is a civilised affair – all the restaurants serve moules frites, then collect the shells in 
We each found some real gems. Bethan had her eyes peeled for a vintage, white bird cage – luckily, she struck gold and found the perfect one. I bought a galvanised wire log basket, and a 1930s clock. But the best buys of the day were two funky 1950s French learn-to-spell school tableaus, with retro lettering.
They were a pair, so we negotiated a deal with the stall holder and bought one each for 10 Euros. Bargainacious. By the time we were back on the luxurious 