Leah from Rocket & Belle Antiques - {Hidden Lanes, Slow Travel Self Guided Tour Ballarat}

Hi my name's Leah Willian and I'm the owner of Rocket and Bell vintage store. Well I retired from computing, I lived in Melbourne and I moved to Daylesford and had a lot of vintage and my parents had passed away and they had a house full of vintage and my parents had collected antiques all their life so I decided I'd start selling some of their antiques and I got a little stall in the Daylesford mill market and that grew and grew and grew and then once all their stuff was sold I went out and I started buying my own vintage to sell and then I outgrew that and this shed's been in my life since I was a little girl. This was my dad's shed and it was full of all his collections, mainly cars, but we cleared it out, took many years and then I moved so moved out of the mill market and moved in here so it's now my own place. I find coming from a computer background there was nothing creative about it and so when I'm in here I feel very creative. I feel I can two old things together and it looks beautiful and then I can take a photograph of it and I love that. So being creative is really important and I find in here that just does it for me. The shed's beautiful, it's part of my history, everything I bring in here looks gorgeous. I found a little koala in a garage sale and it was 20 cents and when I did some research on it was this potter, whose name escapes me, and it was worth about $450. But that was fun finding that out. Every object that I pick up or I find is unique in some way. It has a history, it has a life and I just love to pass that on to someone else. I like Victorian, I like 1920s art deco. I love history, I love history of Ballarat so things, Ballarat things, old things. This shed is full of treasure from all eras and it's treasure from all around the world, all around Australia, all around Ballarat, treasure from Yanina's shed, it's treasure from everywhere and it's unique, it's different, it's hand-picked, special in every way. It's not brown antique furniture, it's not typical antiques, it's something a little bit different. Going out and finding something and just being enthralled by it and yeah, you'll just like see something out of the corner of your eye and you just think, oh my god, I know what that is and the hunt, that's the best bit. And then the sale and passing it on to someone else, the decoration, the creativity, everything really. I just love it.