What’s All The Chatter About Now?

What IS all the chatter about?  Well, if you will recall, I shared about Magpie Antique's and All Things Inspiring (click HERE) back in February.  The store has been opened since February 3rd and has since received positive feedback from many and has been dubbed one of the favorites amongst those seeking out antiques and collectibles.  I am super duper excited for this!  All of those who sell their items (including me) work really hard at finding interesting items to sell AND keep our spaces fresh, cleaned and stocked with new items each week.

With the 4th of July coming up, the store is decked out in glorious patriotic fashion and sporting vignettes in red, white and blue.

Allow me the pleasure to share……

  The owner of Magpie, Janet Dyk (pronounced like Mike) named the store Magpie because Magpies are known to collect pretty objects to take back to their nest and they like to chatter.  So after much contemplation, Janet thought it was appropriate that her store be called Magpie….after all, we like pretty things for our nest and like to talk and share stories of our quests to find that perfect object to adorn our homes.

For more on Magpie:

Magpie Antiques and All Things Inspiring

140 S. Walnut

Suite D

Ripon, California

(209) 599-4545

shop hours:

Monday – Saturday 10 AM – 5:30 PM

If you are coming from Highway 99 (north or south), you can take the Ripon “MAIN Street” exit and go west towards town.  If coming from I5, take the exit towards Manteca and then get on southbound Hwy 99.  Magpie is located on the corner of First and Walnut.  If you stop by, let us know if you read about us on my blog. 

Magpie will be closed on July 4th.

Happy 4th of July!!!!!

Till next time……

A Love Affair

It is worth mentioning that as I type this post, a crow is standing on the pitch of my roof and tap, tap, tapping away.  His perseverance to open the nut that he is working on will hopefully result in his reward for a nibble for breakfast.

Nature.

Sweet.

Beautiful.

Precious.

Tender.

An affair of the heart.

The yellow butterflies, dragon flies, large black bumble bees, hummingbirds, doves, the crows, the fat blue jay that takes afternoon dips in the bird bath…..all special visitors to our yard.  The other day two orange dragon flies came for a visit.  One landed atop a lamp base that I was working on in the backyard, the other landed atop a garden finial.  The one on the lamp base stayed there for the longest time and watched me as I worked on items near his perch.  It was the strangest thing, but I was able to be nose to nose with him and he allowed me to touch him.  Such trust.  My husband watched in amazement as I spoke to my bug guest.  We were equally surprised that he didn’t fly away.  Later he, and his partner, flew off together. Hopefully they enjoyed their stay and will come back again.

These tender moments are blessings from Heaven, from our Father who loves to bring us snippets of joy to our days.  He knows our heart, he knows when we need a smile to land on our face.  I imagine that he smiles back as he watches us take notice of his love and grace.  Ahhh, such fatherly love. 

I praise you, dear Father, for all you do.  Tears well up in my eyes with my love for you.

Another love affair of mine are my mop top hydrangeas.  This year they seem to be larger than last year.  Big billowy blooms that fill up one corner of our yard. 

Our weather is to be a scorcher this week (106 for a week!), so I decided to cut off some of the mops that were starting to fade from bright pink to a softer shade of green and pink.  Also spared were some of my Double Delight roses, as shown in the first picture.

Let me “point” out to you the faded beauty…a Peter Pan moment….this is me with my lost shadow.  :)

Drying now are my buckets of mop tops that will eventually be tucked here and there inside – some boxed up till Christmas so that they can be tucked in a tree.  One of my favorite things to do with them is to set them in a primitive dough bowl or tuck them in to silver plate trophies that are of varying height and sizes.  (To dry the mops, I simply stick them in a bucket -no water- and let them dry standing up.)

My Peter Pan shadow and I bid you adieu. 

Till next time….

The Morning Sun…….

As I walked around the antique store the other day with my trusty camera slung over my neck, I snapped photos to share on the store’s blog (Antique Warehouse blog).  It was fairly early in the morning with the easterly sun streaming through the tops of the windows that bank along one side of the store.  Later, as I was editing them, the photo below made me think of the song “Maggie Mae” by Rod Stewart.  One of the lines of the song is:

“The morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age
But that don't worry me none, in my eyes you're everything…”

Do you know the song?

Of course you do.  If not, just hop over to You Tube where you can find just about any song ever sung.  Really, truly.

Being a collector (and seller) of old things, I don’t mind an imperfection in a piece – like the wonderfully imperfect crazing on the ironstone pitcher above.  The heavy metal round object below the grouping of ironstone pitchers was a cool find at an estate sale a few weeks back.  I am not sure what it is, but it makes for a great base for a pretty vignette.  A large glass dome would be perfect on it, too. 

Now you would have thought that I placed a backlight behind the antique Clorox bottle…but I didn’t.  It’s just the way the sun hit the bottle.  Good timing, I suppose.

As I get older, I have noticed that when the sun is in my face, my age certainly is showing.  If only I liked my “aged patina” as much as I do on an old piece of ironstone.  LOL!

Till next time…