Brazos Valley Antiquing Adventures: Brenham

This weekend, my antiquing partner in crime, Ivan and I decided to go on an antiquing/thrifting adventure in a few nearby cities. Ivan was on the lookout for unusual curved glass frames and antique cameras, while I was hunting for vintage plastic jewelry, fabric, and mint green colored kitchen equipment. Our first stop was Brenham, home of delicious ice cream, fantastic Texas Art Deco architecture, and was at one time a great place to find just about everything random in terms of vintage and antiques. Due to graduate school obligations we had not been in some time (about a year and a half) and we were in for quite a surprise...

Old Courthouse in the Town Square

First off, our favorite store (which can be seen in to the left of the courthouse undergoing renovations), was no longer open. It appeared the building was going under complete remodeling and they repainted it to a set of unusual colors... In the past this had been where we had some of our best finds but we tried not to get too disappointed and walked around the corner to another shop that had been traditionally filled to the 15 foot ceiling with vintage randomness...

Rex the Dinosaur Greeted Us

While the place was still packed to the brim, there was noticeably less stock than there used to be. It could be we just came on a bad day as well, but my favorite item here were these lamps.

I would have loved an excuse to buy these, but for now they shall remain at the store.

 After going through 5 or six shops without having much luck we finally gave up and headed to a different town to see if we could find a larger selection of actual vintage items (and not just reproductions). Some things that I noticed, which were a common theme throughout our visit:

• Lots of furniture with a Victorian or primitive feel, limited amounts of Nouveau style furniture or classic mid-Century designs.
• Apparently everyone is liquidating their Breyer horse collections. Saw lots of these for sale.
• Higher prices (about 1/2 increase or double the price from the last time we visited). A great example of this is below.

Asking Price $950. Did your jaw just hit the ground? Because mine sure did, several years ago you could easily find these here in the same condition for less than $400

• Remarkably fewer shops with actual vintage or antiques inside even though it was listed on the door. It felt much more commercialized than previously with fakes lying around every corner.

Asking price for the obvious reproduction bread tin upon inspection? $70

 We did manage to find a few more interesting pieces that we did not purchase, photographed below. I'll probably do another post or two that goes into more details on a few of the shops we visited with better selections.

Framed board from a Hopalong Cassidy board game

Nifty little lamp.

I'll kick myself later: ~3 yards worth of vintage cowboy fabric in duvet cover form. I thought really hard, but I promised my husband not to bring home any more large quantities of fabric that were not in an easy to use form.

That's all for now! Will post more on the next town we stopped at later this week!