Vintage vendors

Lately, Sharon Blythe has started to notice her stuff piling up.

In her home. In storage, too.

It was time, the vintage dealer deemed, to unload.

"I thought 'I'd better sell all of this in a big place,'" the Hayden Lake woman said on Monday. "And that I should invite some friends."

She did. And so was born the idea for the first Vintage and Garden Show scheduled from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Saturday at the Greyhound Park and Event Center in Post Falls.

The event will include 80 vendors peddling vintage items for indoors and outdoors, Blythe said, some restored, some still bearing original paint and aging patinas.

Blythe assured those who come to haggle will find pieces that qualify as quirky, romantic, singular, and at prices that likely don't compare to brand new products.

"(Vintage) is a hot new trend," said Blythe, owner of Romance Your Home and organizer of the show. "We see people loving it because it feels like taking things once loved and repurposing them so they can love them again. It's like a connection to the past we sorely need."

Blythe is easily tempted herself, she said, adding that's why her space quickly accumulated pieces from across the country.

"I can't resist a good buy," she said with a chuckle.

With motley pieces to sell, Blythe and several other vendors were practicing decor arrangements in a storage garage on Monday to prep for the show.

Items positioned around the room included rustic dressers, a make-up stand with flowered carvings, a mushroom sculpture, a crank-powered sewing matching and an apple-red stool, looking oddly alert atop a patterned rug.

"Does that tempt you?" said Blythe, a Hayden Lake resident, of the steel lawn furniture and watering cans she is carting to the show. "Gardens are just as important to people in the Northwest as their interiors."

Fellow vintage dealer Sally Barlow of Coeur d'Alene said she got into the business to appease her whims as a chronic furniture arranger, many items hung in her own home before they're sold.

Like the classic car grill tacked beneath her counter, and the car doors and fridge doors hung on the walls.

"There's a lot of history in it, and memories," Barlow said of the items, and added that she has some hand-painted furniture she thinks will go over big at the show. "I like to be unpredictable."

Taking a break from rearranging, Marie Widmyer of Coeur d'Alene said vintage dealing is a hobby for her, to give a second life to items that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

"The side of the road," Widmyer said with a laugh of where she finds most items she has restored. "That's part of the thrill, trying to recycle things."

Widmyer hopes to find a home for a vintage chair she just painted a vivid orange, she said, a color she assures will really make a room with the right placement.

Vintage has broad appeal because it offers items that are bona fide one-of-a-kind, she said.

"You can go to a store and buy new things, and it all looks the same," Widmyer said. "It's just hard to find things that are different."

After Blythe eyed the items around the garage on Monday, she and the others measured the space.

Forty feet long, she noted.

"A lot of room," Blythe said with a growing smile. "Want to go out and buy more stuff?"