The Lone Star Gallery is a star to me because during the antique off-season it runs Texas Trade Days on the second Saturday of every month. It’s such a comfortably chilly time to shop Warrenton. See how the shoppers in the picture below are wearing parkas? Probably even socks! How many women in socks do you see during the Spring and Fall Shows?
The Lone Star takes up a couple of big buildings that at one time housed antique cars, and it’s a great mix of tidy booths and big old tables piled with things like aprons. I use it as the foundation of my winter weekend Round Top Field Trip agendas. I just add some pie, some culture and a stop at my usual year round retail faves and I’ve got a real nice day on my hands.
Of course you can also shop the Lone Star during the Show weeks. It’s nice and chilly then too. A/C!
My office was once in a toolshed in our backyard. It was all silk-purse tricked-out with nice paneling and a huge window, but we still called it the “Sow’s Ear.” The best part of the space was the no-sew (is there any other kind in my world?) window valence I made out of old aprons. You should try it. Just get a rod or a branch or a pipe or whatever and then use the apron ties as tab ties. It sounds kind of over-countrified, but if you use the right aprons it can look better than you’d think.
Have you heard about that One Red Paperclip guy who turned a paperclip into a house in fourteen online trades? My favorite was his trade of a year’s rent in Phoenix, AZ for an afternoon with Alice Cooper.
So how about a Texas Trade Days Trade Challenge? Buy something like the treasures in the photos below and see what you can trade it into. Good luck!
UPDATE: It really was fine. Sadly, Thunderbird Ranch is no longer open but we’re happy to have this post to remember it by!
I watched a pair of longhorns chase each other around a stock pond yesterday. Right in downtown Round Top. Because this is the southwest after all. Thunderbird Ranch Fine Art gallery celebrates all things cowboy, cowgirl and just plain cow in a charming space right on Bybee Square. I’ve spent a bit of time in the west-er parts of the southwest and this spot brings all that right to us. Denise Jacobs is the expert curator behind all of it, so go on in and ask her anything while you check out that snakeskin barbed wire piece you know you want.
If you know this folk song you can hum it while you look at the rest of the photos. If you don’t know it, you might want to spend a moment here and then carry on with the photos.
As you may know, I’m forever delighted and grateful for the semi-annual Round Top Antiques Show/Texas Antiques Week extravaganza. What a spectacle! I can’t believe so many people work so hard to put on a magnificent multi-week mega-event just for me. Oh, and you.
Wanting to know more about what goes into Show preparation, I recently asked a few dealers to take us behind the scenes. And one of my all time favorite people, Marc Elson of Loblolly General Goods, responded! So without further ado, here is Marc’s diary of his days just getting from his home base in Michigan down to his gorgeous Show booth at Blue Hills. With pictures!
…Reserve 26′ Penske Diesel. (With wind chill of -15° it can just stay running with the heat on for 8 days, or until the Texas border).
…Pack clothes for all 4 seasons and book 7 hotel nights.
…Hire three laborers for loading. That one cool industrial piece I had to have weighs 500 lbs.
…Gather bungies and rope and 300 packing blankets.
…Load furniture, lights, art, china, glass, garden, walls, flooring, wiring, tags, office, tie it all down!
…Locate every antique mall and shop along the route…..Don’t forget the windshield ice-scraper and de-icing fluid.
…Drive 1300 miles. Allow 200 miles for seeking out items to fill remaining space in Penske.
…Purchase items along the way and repack Penske. Always look for exit before pulling into any antique mall parking lot.
…Meet a ton of great people in the business.
…Dodge every ice, sleet, hail and snow storm. Plan on getting stuck in Guthrie, OK for a day..it’s an impossible place to avoid the weather in February.
As y’all know, there’s shopping and there’s buying. I’m a big, big shopper, but I get pretty scrawny when it comes to buying. I try to be especially careful not to overspend at each Antiques Show, but my well intentioned No Purchase Policy usually surrenders to a modest acquisition or two, which is still more than I have room or need for. Here’s what I bought last show, in its booth and on my wall.
No regrets, right? I spotted another great piece that I saw in Lynette’s booth in its forever home, the lounge area over at the Round Top Ballroom aka the fantastic Recycling the Past warehouse/event space.
G. Harmon served up some wonderful lobsters and crabs and other assorted still lifes. I’m also mad for his brown leather chair. He didn’t just hang around the house though; check out his streetscapes. They’re so sooty and confining and loud.
Here’s a parade of pieces Lynette brought to the 2015 Big Red Barn Winter Show.
And finally there are his clowns. What is it about clowns that feels so completely 1967? Well, in reading Smithsonian Mag’s historical recap of the clown as both a cheery and downright terrifying character in our culture it does appear that, thanks to Clarabell and Ronald McDonald and of course, Bozo, clowns did have a strong mid-century uptick. Since the 1980’s however, the killer clown appears to have taken over, resulting in reports of “a decline of attendees at clown conventions or at clowning workshop courses.” Good thing no one told the Brooklyn Juggler.
We all need to work a little whimsy into our landscapes.
I’d love it if someone would ask me to organize an International Folly Tour for them. No, not that kind of tour. I mean a tour where we’d visit a variety of famous follies, or “buildings that are often eccentric in design or construction” that look useful but are really just for decoration. Buildings like the Swallow’s Nest in Crimea or the Creaking Pagoda in Russia. Much of our tour would need to be spent in the UK, which makes complete sense in a droll, dry-humory kind of way. And apparently Ireland is jam-packed with follies, not because the Irish are such pranksters but because folly constructions were popular government make-work projects during the Potato Famine and as a result the country is a gold mine of “roads in the middle of nowhere; screen and estate walls; piers in the middle of bogs; etc.”
Round Top’s best examples of the genre can be found in the form of birdhouse-styled garden follies by Ludmil at Willow Nest. I saw my first one along the entry walk at N°3 in Round Top and fell in love with the country chic styling. Good thing I had the chance to see Willow Nest’s gorgeous booth at Marburger on Preview Day last fall because when I went back three days later it was pretty much shopped clean.
On a personal note, my house came with a sort of pitiful little structure in the yard that I’ve found looks a whole lot better if I tell myself, “It’s not a shabbily constructed gazebo, it’s a folly!” If you also have an unfortunate structure in your view, you might want to give it a try.
I’m assuming the doves were sold with their gorgeous cage but I didn’t ask so here’s hoping they didn’t become a pot pie. (Too droll? Sorry!)
Ender Tasci’s Elephant Walk booth is the streetfront anchor shop for the EX-CESS field, and EX-CESS is pretty much the anchor field for the whole Antiques Show. So Elephant Walk is a hard to miss space, if only as a slow-creep-drive-by-looky-look while you sit in traffic on one of the busy days. I find myself visiting Ender once, twice, maybe three times every show, often helping friends get some truly beautiful things at great prices.
Elephant Walk’s permanent location and warehouse is in Orlando, FL of all places. Which of course got me thinking about how much the Round Top Antiques Show is like a Disney theme park experience: Completely overwhelming visual overload, endless traipsing well beyond your exhaustion point, long hot lines at the casual dining spots, groups of families and friends desperately trying to keep track of one another, parents taking turns pushing strollers, costumed characters everywhere you look… I’ll let you decide which fields are Tomorrowland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, etc. but Warrenton is definitely Main Street USA.
This gorgeous beaded tray is a perfect example of how things get away. I saw it two days after I was super-tempted to buy the almost matching beaded stool at a booth down near Zapp Hall. If I’d known the Zapp stool had a matching tray waiting at Ender’s I would have grabbed it for sure, but in the interest of my sanity I’ve instituted a strict a never-go-back rule for myself, so I will be without either.
The good news? You've discovered The Crush List. The not so good? I haven't been actively posting here for a few years now, which means the never terribly reliable details about my crushes are even more unreliable. Antique vendors have switched venues, shops in town have moved or passed on, donkeys may or may not be in the same front yards... In spite of the risks of massive misdirection I've left the site up in hopes that it still achieves its goal - to inspire you to visit Round Top for the Antiques Show or any time you have the time.
With that said, I leave you to explore this random list of my very favorite things about my very favorite place. I’ve tried to capture the area’s special pieces and parts. Some are big deal, some are small gestures, some are legendary and some are just tiny pip and squeak.
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