We are gearing up for our busy fall season of pop up shops, and are bringing a special event to downtown Leesburg, VA! We have teamed up with a friend who lives in a wonderful historic home downtown in the commercial district to co-host a pop up shop on October 6th featuring amazing vintage and handmade finds. Our cute little town has been bustling lately with many new restaurants, breweries, and shops, especially during the monthly First Friday events. Our goal is to create a theme of warmth as we move into fall, and to design cozy spaces that you would want to hang out in. So if you’re out and about checking out the new eateries, come by and see us.

I’ll be adding more pics closer to the event, but here’s a little sneak peak.

We have been woefully lax on our blog updates this winter, but I assure you that we have been very busy making, collecting, and selling! In December we started opening up our shop one weekend/month at Sweet Clover Barn in Frederick, MD, and each month since our crowds have been bigger and better! It has been great to get to know the other shop owners and to be part of a team effort pulling off a barn sale. In March we had the chance to stage the Cottage, a cool space behind the main barn building that was probably once a guest house for the working farm where Sweet Clover is located. It is wonderful to see families roaming the grounds to say hello to the ducks, horses, donkeys, chickens, and dogs while visiting us to find unique treasures. 

Our friend the kudu made an appearance at our March sale in the Cottage, gracing the room with his presence, but not available for purchase at this event. Our goal was to create a vintage library vibe, featuring velvet sofas, biology and patent prints, barrister cabinets, vintage books, framed butterflies, and other cool items that you might find in such a space many years ago.

In addition to our monthly sales at Sweet Clover, we have been very busy filling customs orders for lamps, butterflies, arrows, and other handmade items with a story.

We filled many orders for Christmas and Valentines gifts for families looking for a special gifts. Above is a custom order for a family with four children, with each butterfly representing the personality of a different child. Most of our custom butterflies are large and exotic butterflies from around the world, but a customer asked us to create a framed Monarch because it was special to his wife. We happened to have another butterfly in the same genus in stock and added it to the frame because they looked so beautiful together.

When we began this journey and decided to offer framed butterflies for sale, we loved that we could combine nature and our passion for handcrafted items, and we think they add a cool edge to a room. However, we underestimated the special place that butterflies hold in the hearts of so many — holding significance as a symbol of love, beauty, freedom, and adaptability to change.

So, you see, although we may have been hibernating from the cold and MIA from the blog, we have not been sleeping. More to come soon on exciting developments!

It’s a fairly simple concept. When we started our little company earlier this year, we did not want to pigeon-hole our aesthetic (or products) into one defining category – antiques, handmade, reclaimed, industrial, decor, furniture, lighting, etc. Although we have made or sold pieces that fit into at least one of those groups, we instead wanted to focus on curating or creating items that we love and would want in our own house. We like things with a story behind them, either because they have a history, or because of the care and quality with which they were made.

Our garage workshop is busting at the seams, so we end up storing many of our finished products in our house, which creates quite a dilemma because I usually want to keep them! This past weekend we had the pleasure of setting up our pop-up shop at Lucketts Holiday Market, where our goal was to make our small space feel like a cozy living room filled with cool things. Ben finished up another awesome cart table in time for the market, and we filled the space with drafting tables & stools, a cute little red velvet vintage sofa, a sweet antique bench, cool old pulleys & other primitive pieces, and, of course, our handmade butterflies and lamps. We started off the weekend wondering how we would fit all of our treasures into such a limited space, and by Sunday, we were challenged with keeping our space from looking empty!

I always want my house to have candles and fresh flowers – so, since we wanted our shop to reflect things we would want to feel like home, we searched for a while for a candle maker whose aesthetic was a fit with ours. Brian at Hawk & Hatchet hand pours delicious flavors like Campfire (really smells like a campfire!), Uncle Lloyd’s Pipe, Christmas Eve, and Vanilla & Oak, just to name a few. Check out his etsy site to order direct and check out other scents, or catch us at our next pop up! As for the flower requirement, we did not have a florist on call, so some holly branches from my backyard had to do.

We had a great time at the Chartreuse Barn Spring Market Days last weekend. The beautiful weather brought out a ton of buyers and treasure hunters. We were so busy with our own shop that I did not get much of a chance to explore everything on the grounds — but from what I saw, those looking for treasures were surely not disappointed. Chartreuse features 6 historic barns/buildings filled to the brim with unique and vintage goods, and last weekend the grounds were full of even more goodies than usual (like ours!). It was a great experience for our first foray into staging and designing our space for retail, and we had a blast talking with customers about our process, our projects, and custom order requests. Here are some pics from our shop and a few from around the barns and grounds. You can check out more about Chartreuse at http://www.chartreuseandco.com.

We have many furniture projects in the works for an upcoming market in May, but I thought I would highlight a couple. Our gallery includes this photo of an old industrial cart that Ben revived with metal and glass — and a little sweat.

Well, we were able to get two more very similar wooden cards with giant steel wheels. We think these are all from the same early 20th century paint factory due to the very thick blue and yellow paint on all of them. Unfortunately, they have been sitting outside in the rain and snow for over a year, so the wood on top could not be “reclaimed”.

Luckily the wood frame and axle assembly are in great shape. This one is a little different than our previous project because it has this cool hand-hewn cross bar in the middle. A glass top will dress the table up a little and also showcase that feature.

We also came across a set of 3 metal barrister cabinets this week that we are fired up about.

Ben has created some cool pieces out of these types of military and medical cabinets before, sanding the heavy gray-green paint to reveal a shiny silver surface, or sometimes even painting them.

Stay tuned for pics of the finished products and more pieces in progress.