The Wonderful World of Brimfield

For months, we’ve had May 15th marked in red on our calendars with one word: “Brimfield!” What is this magical “Brimfield” that convinced us to both take a vacation day from work, wake up before dawn, and drive 2 hours to a little town in the middle of nowhere central Massachusetts? Only the largest outdoor antique market in the world!

The show happens three times a year, bringing over 5,000 vendors and 250,000 visitors. Obviously we were not about to miss out on the fun! And we figured for those of you who couldn’t make the pilgrimage to Brimfield in person, we’d share some of our favorite finds (the amazing, the weird) from the 10 hours we spent walking through the show grounds. But we promise this post won’t take 10 hours to read.

The great thing about Brimfield is that it has something for everyone For instance, if your thing is headless mannequins, you’re covered:

Or if that’s still too much body for you, just legs:

Alternatively, hands only:

Wait, one more wants to say hi:

As always when we see multiples of things, we tried to figure out if we could do a paired project with these hands (ala our lamp and cane chair makeovers). Naomi proposed making hers into a ring holder (obvious much?), while Sage suggested just carrying one around to deliver high fives. We thought this was hilarious, but maybe it was one of those “you had to be there and have sun stroke” things.

Despite these amazing ideas, we decided to move on. Maybe people-parts aren’t your thing, in which case may we suggest these?

If you can’t tell from this horribly overexposed photo (sorry, the whole day was so overwhelming it was hard to snap good photos), those are earrings made from bird feet.

If that’s too gruesome for you, here’s a bird in its entirety.We thought it was a turkey, but the seller kindly informed us it is an emu.

Or if you need a larger collection, here’s a whole barnyard.

We continued our track record of seeing a million items intended for dolls, and lamented that neither of us has a doll collection:

Though it might have left us out quite a bit of cash. Here’s the pricetag on that miniature bathroom set in the top left:

Another of our favorite strange finds was this wicker coffin. Not clear if the skull comes with it as a decorative piece, or must be purchased separately.

Okay, so at this point we might not have sold you on how awesome Brimfield is. The reality is that we spent most of the time pointing at everything in sight saying “I want that.”

Like this adorable cabinet, which we saw when we first arrived and visited again at the end of the day.

The dealer went down to $75 for it, but we just couldn’t figure out where in either of our houses we’d put it so we exercised restraint and left it behind.

If only we had 15′ ceilings:

We drooled over this amazing chandelier:

This cool tiled table:

This amazing post office counter (it looks tiny, but that sculpture is actually huge):

And this fantastic chest, which Sage actually brought home:

We laughed when we found this super cool magazine rack (look familiar?):

But to avoid being too much of a copycat, Sage grabbed this magazine rack of her own:

Naomi has a bit of a chair obsession, and she stopped at pretty much every chair we saw — but somehow managed to avoid buying any of them since she has no room in her house. This one she really agonized over, but ultimately couldn’t imagine a place for:

We’ve never seen one of these chairs as a lounger before, it kind of looks like a dentist’s chair….

Love these:

And this:

This one would go so well in Sage’s living room next to The Chair, but we thought it might push Sam over the edge to have yet another yellow chair in need of being reupholstered

Never fear, however, as we came across these shortly after:

The dealer had bought ninety of them from a hotel for $23 a pop, and Sage decided to take two home for a very reasonable $120 for the pair. Celebratory photo!

Also coming home with one of us was this awesome chrome shelf, now proudly displaying plants in Naomi’s living room:

Don’t mind the gaping hole behind it.   Thanks.

And the last thing we labored over whether to bring home or not was this guy:

On the one hand, SO CUTE. On the other, I guess it isn’t nice to steal someone’s dog, even if they hand you the leash while they move some furniture around.

So that’s just a taste of our Brimfield whirlwind — we have another hilarious (in our minds) story to share about the day, but we’ll leave that for another post. In the meantime, we’ll wrap up with an important question:

Would you visit a blog that you saw advertised on a flyer? It would have to be a pretty cool blog to think up such a retro marketing scheme.

Or maybe we’re just crazy. At least we’re crazy together.

(Sharing at AKA Design, One Project at a Time, Tip Me Tuesday, and Link Party Palooza)