Welcome to the Three Speckled Hens’ very first blog post! We are so excited to begin our blogging journey with you, and hope to fill this space with stories, antique treasures, and comments from our valued readers. Many of you have gotten to know us well over the years — from meeting us in person at our shows, following us on Facebook, and visiting our old website. However, we realized that we have never really told the whole story about how the Three Speckled Hens’ show was born. We’d like to tell that story today in honor of our very first blog post and our eighth season as a show.
So what do you tell your
husband when you come back from a vacation with a 5ft x 10ft cargo
trailer packed to the roof with junk? You tell him that you and your
friends have decided to start an antique show, of course. The fact of
the matter is in 2006, when we left for Spokane to attend the Farm Chicks Show, we were buying strictly for our own homes. We were driving
Susi’s Honda Element because it got the best gas mileage and the back
seats folded down in case any of us found a large piece we wanted to
bring home. Silly Hens.
We left Templeton, CA
early in the morning and over the course of several days we hit every
antique store, junk store, salvage store and all interesting looking
second hand stores between Templeton and Spokane. And of course, every
coffee house and restroom. We stayed in nice motels and even indulged
ourselves with a night in a lovely lodge on Oregon’s Rogue River. Our
criteria for what constituted a nice motel was that it had to look good,
it had to have a hot tub or Jacuzzi pool, and there had to be a nice
restaurant with a bar within walking distance. Oprah had recently
confessed her love of lemon drop martinis, and with a bar within walking
distance, every evening we did a taste comparison of that motel’s
beverage offerings. We consider ourselves official Lemon Drop
Connoisseurs.
By the time we made it to
Spokane, the entire car was stuffed with treasures. Wooden moldings,
wire gym baskets, rugs, paintings and rusty garden urns were literally
encasing whoever rode in the backseat. After the first day of shopping
The Farm Chicks Show, we knew we were in trouble. Knowing we had barely
scratched the surface of our buying frenzy, that night we rented a 4 x 8
foot trailer to pull behind Susi’s little Honda.
The second day of the
show, we indulged our love of everything with a patina, or shabby,
antique, or repurposed. At about three o’clock, we decided to start
loading up our trailer. After piling up our wares—eyeballing Susi’s
flower cart, Carrie’s upholstered vintage chair and my 6 foot high
Calistoga wagon wheel among other things—we knew we were really in
trouble. We could not begin to fit our fabulous finds into that little
trailer. There was only one thing to do: rent a bigger trailer! To this
day we praise the two young U-Haul shop attendants who stayed open after
hours while we unloaded our trailer in the parking lot and reloaded
everything back into the largest U-Haul trailer we could find. We made
it home with God’s angels riding our bumpers and a vintage cement lawn
jockey sitting between Carrie’s legs. But that’s a story for another
blog. Silly Hens.
However, the greatest
treasure we found on our maiden junking voyage together was the treasure
of finding true friends. That friendship continues today, in our eighth
year of producing the Three Speckled Hens Show. To that list we have
added the close friendships of our many dealers and the wonderful people
who wouldn’t miss a Hens show. We still have many new things up our
sleeves, so stick with us. Maybe we’ll tell you the rest of our story.
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