As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was in search of a fabulous vintage shop to visit in Las Vegas.  I tried a google search and ended up finding a handful of vintage clothing stores, but that was about it.  I also tried fleaquest and they had nothing listed in the Vegas area.  I then looked for a Miss Mustard Seed retailer in the area.  No dice (Vegas pun, get it?).  Finally I resorted to searching for an Annie Sloan chalk paint stockist.  And Bingo! (another Vegas pun, I crack myself up)

I found Bloom.

This is their location in Boulder City.  If you are heading out to the Hoover Dam (as many tourists are inclined to do), I strongly suggest that you build in a little extra time and stop off in Boulder City.  Not only will you find Bloom, but you will also find Goat Feathers Emporium, which is a really fun antique mall with a little bit of everything.  Not every booth met my exacting standards, ;-), but there were some fun ones, like the Rusty Bucket’s booth.

 Boulder City is very charming.  They are obviously working to market the town as an antiquing destination.  The are some very hip, retro drive in motels along the main drag, and quite a few more traditional antique shops in addition to Bloom and Goat Feathers.

I have to confess that the only thing I purchased in the antique shops was a handful of furniture keys.  I try to grab a few of these whenever I see them.  Oftentimes they will work on a piece of vintage furniture with locks on the drawers.  Aside from the keys, I found the prices to be much higher than what I am used to in the Midwest.  For instance, I saw several large vintage blue canning jars priced over $20!  Yikes!

I did buy a few things at Bloom, some fab stencils to use on future furniture projects, some samples of Annie Sloan paint so I can see first hand what all the fuss is about, some fun Cavallini paper and a vintage alarm clock because I couldn’t resist the color.  I bought the clock despite its cracked face.  I was feeling a bit silly about buying a clock with a broken face, and then, ironically, that same evening I read a recent Miss Mustard Seed post where she did the same thing!  So there.  Not silly at all.  If Miss Mustard Seed can do it, so can I, right?

It was fun to bop around the town on a gorgeous sunny afternoon with my sister.

Now that I know about Boulder City, you can be sure I will make it a point to spend an afternoon there the next time I visit mom.

One last little sidebar story.  I’ve mentioned before that I come from a long line of scrapbooking women.  My grandmother was an avid maker of scrapbooks.  Way back in 1953 my mom, her parents and an aunt & uncle took the quintessential road trip.  They were gone 21 days and they drove across the country from Minnesota to California.  They hit all the highlights, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite and so on.   They even went to Tijuana, Mexico for a day.  My grandmother chronicled the entire trip in a scrapbook, including information on how much money they spent.  $123 in gas, $38 in hotels (yep, no kidding, for the entire trip, although they did stay with relatives some of the time).   My mom was 12 at the time.  I asked her if she enjoyed the trip, and she admitted that it wasn’t exactly fun sitting between her aunt and uncle in the back seat of a car with no a/c for 21 days! Imagine driving through the desert in the middle of summer this way!  While reading the scrapbook at mom’s house, I found a blurb about their visit to Boulder City!  Of course they visited the dam, which was built in the 1930’s.  My grandmother had included a brochure from their visit that talked about the “modern” city of Boulder and how all of the buildings were “artificially cooled”.  I had to laugh at seeing the city being promoted as modern in 1953, and now it is clearly being promoted as vintage in 2014.  How times change.