A Dear Friend Sue Whitney of Junk Market Style

Sue Whitney at "the French Flea" Shop of Anoka doing a book signing.

Kimberly (Junk Market), Lanette & Gretchen (contributors to Junk Market Style & vendors at "The French Flea", Sue Whitney (Junk Market). Photo is at the Anoka shop May 16th at a book signing Sue did for our shop. Thanks Sue!

A Little Background on Sue

Today has been a shout out to some of my blogging friends. Very early today I did a feature on a mixed media artist, Shannon, and now I'd love to blog about my friend, Sue Whitney. She is an incredible lady, not only professionally, but as a person. Honestly, I've admired Sue for years from afar. You see, she was part of a team that used to have fabulous sales in the Long Lake area where 100's of women would line up outside of their warehouse style shop and wait for their doors to open for their occasional sales. These were held seldom enough to create quite a buzz and excitement amongst the throngs of women that would attend. It was one of those kind of deals that if you saw something you wanted, you had better have it in your hands or another gal would snatch it up so fast that you wouldn't even know what had happened. I first became acquainted with this shop purely by accident while attending a children's clothing sale in a nearby outlet and saw the signs "Junk Market". I stopped in and was a devoted follower ever since. They were about 7 months into this venture when I discovered this great place. Through a process of time, these gals became regular contributors to Country Home magazine on Junk Style re purposing projects, wrote several books, created a magazine that sold out quickly, gave seminars at Home shows and were on TV shows educating the US on Junking Style of decorating. Flash forward about sevens years of admiration afar, when I received an email from Sue's new website inviting me to become a member of it. I checked it out and quickly became an early member and began regularly posting projects I had completed for eithe our cabin or our home in the cities. So one day while working in my gardens at the cabin late last August, I was honored when Sue called me and asked if I would become a contributor on her site, which you can visit at Junk Market Style and thus a friendship was established. Through the contributorship I have had a number of opportunites to spend quality time with Sue and I've got to say this, Sue is a top notch lady and one extremely talented Junker Girl. She rocks!

Sue and Kimberly came to our new shop in Anoka last month and Sue graciously did a book signing for their latest book on this Junking movement which you can see a project idea on this site: MSNBC which Sue teaches on the Today Show.

Then more recently, Sue was back in New York with Matt Lauer doing a segment on garage saling which is fabulous. View this link showing it here.

Something pretty exciting and fun for me is in the above link with Sue and Matt, Sue chose to wear one of my jewelry designs (you can see it on my blog here ) on the set in New York while filming this segment. What an honor for me to see one of my creations on her while watching her do this fabulous segment.

For more great garage sale tips there is another fabulous link with more information here . It definitely is the season for garage saling here in Minnesota and I noticed dozens of them this week with fabulous finds.

Please comment and let me know what you think of this post and the links it is linked to. I'm sure you'll find some great new information on these links, as I know I sure learned alot from viewing them myself. Sue is a wealth of information, and I'm honored to call her my friend.

Sue is infamous for re purposing items such as a rusty bed spring. This is a re purpose that I've done and have for sale in our new shop "the French Flea". Would you believe this is bed spring from my Grandmothers bed from about 1960's. My husband and I just tore it apart last Fall and harvested 42 of these rusty springs for projects such as this. Pretty fun idea and thanks to Sue, there are a lot more great ideas in the world you can see on her Junk Market Site as well as her fabulous books.