For Michele Rivard, owner of Knot Too Shabby in Glendora Village, that trash-to-treasure is her livelihood.
For years, Michele has scoured local
garage sales and flea markets for used furniture, home accessories,
knick-knacks and trinkets.
Michele refinishes most of the used
furniture to sell at Knot Too Shabby, where she also conducts very popular
furniture refinishing workshops. The shop is filled with vintage knick-knacks
and housewares that time forgot, but she rejuvenates.
For 12 days last month Michele took
her treasure hunt to Europe, specifically Luxembourg with visits to neighboring
France, Belgium and Germany.
Michele looked forward to “picking”
through European antique shops and flea markets, but many shops were closed for
the winter.
Fortunately she connected with a
Belgian retailer of Chalk Paint® and Miss Mustard Seed's Milk Paint (the same products
she uses and sells at Knot Too Shabby) before her trip. The retailer, Goedele
(pronounced Hoo-de-la), owned The Old Red Barn in Westerlo in northern Belgium.
Not only did Goedele recommend a
charming bed-and-breakfast, but also a year-round flea market held on Sundays
that’s considered one of the largest such markets in Europe.
Though she knew she wouldn’t be
shipping larger items like furniture back to the States, Michele learned how to
contract a broker on her next European adventure to pick up her purchases (so she wouldn’t have
to lug them around) and ship them home.
For this trip, though, Michele
brought along an empty suitcase that she packed with smaller items. Those
include about a 4-inch stack of “ephemera” – what collectors term paper items
like postcards, posters, prints, and more.
She has already used a process to
enlarge and transfer one of those postcards to decorate the top of an old desk.
Pictured above, it’s for sale at Knot Too Shabby.
Michele will scan most of the
“ephemera” to become digital files – jpgs and pds – for her to offer on her
shop on etsy.com for customers to purchase for download and do their own
transferring.
She’s also selling vintage postcards
in packs of five for $10.
You can take some of those postcards
to the next image transfer workshop offered by Michelle E. Black on Jan. 25 and
again in February.
For more details about Michele’s
trip and ways to transform used furniture, check out her blog on the store’s
website, where you can also get workshop details.
