Pasadena

There is a VERY good reason I did not post over the weekend… I was in Pasadena, California at the Rose Bowl Flea Market with my girlfriend, Sheila. Boy, did we have a fun and fruitful adventure!

It was a gorgeous Southern California day and we took full advantage of it. We arrived at about 7 AM and didn’t leave the market until well after 2 PM.

There are thousands upon thousands of booths. Load of them with gorgeous, drool-worthy vintage treasures and plenty of others with plain old junk.

Making serious “hunting and gathering” the name of the game.

And the creativity, WoW!  Look at these benches… three similar yet distinctly different wooden chairs, center arm removed, then brought together with a plywood seat to create a darling and colorful bench.  So cute and smart!

Doesn’t this old stationary bike look like some sort of torture device? My friend and neighbor, Lisa, teaches a spin class at the YMCA. Lisa, can you just imagine showing up one day and using this bike in class?!

We were lucky enough to stumble onto one of our favorite booths only minutes after we arrived. That turned out to be a true blessing because as the day wore on and the market filled with people, it became more and more difficult to see past the throngs of people and into the actual booths. If you ever go, it is imperative to be there early!

We bought our first items of the day at this booth and then just had the vendors hold our items for pick-up at the end of our day. Sheila and I each purchased a vintage grain sack and 5-loaf military baking pans. I also bought a couple of vintage Italian demi-john wine jugs and Shelia picked up an adorable grain sack lamp shade.  I was originally tempted to also snap up a very rustic green wooden scale (slightly visible in the upper left of the photo above), but ended up passing on it. The scale was huge and seriously vintage if you know what I mean!

The two guys who have this booth were so fun and sweet. As we made our way through the market, we would just refer to them as “the boys”.  At the end when we went to pick up all the things we’d left at various booths, we went back to the boys and they said we could use their dolly to gather and load up our stuff. We took the dolly to the booth where Sheila found a vintage French baby crib. We mentioned “the boys” to Coco, then the vendor with the baby crib, and she said, “Oh you mean Dustin and Chris over on aisle F?”  Yep, that’s all it took for her to know who we were talking about. Sweet!

Dustin and Chris are vintage collectors who travel throughout Europe and the States to find their yummy goods.  You can the boys at the Alameda Flea Market as well. Just ask either one of them about any product in their booth and they’ll tell you what it was originally used for and in turn make you NEED to have that item!

Oh and see that construction behind the boys in the photo above?

Yeah, the stadium is open and you are allowed to go inside. They are adding sky-boxes to one side. Sheila and I even got to sit in the iconic pink Rose Bowl seats!

We would both love to do it again – but we had a huge learning curve! I will share with you, not only our purchases throughout the coming week but also “the way to do” the market and the way not to do it! Yes, you can learn from our costly mistakes.