Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Goodbye, Martini, Goodbye

Yes, this weekend’s recurring item for sale was martini glasses. I saw them everywhere. Evidently some message went out (perhaps on the evening news; I don’t do news) that no one needs martini glasses any more. There were plain ones and painted ones and ones with twisted or bent stems.

I didn’t buy any. I’ve had one martini in my life (not much of a drinker!) and it was fine but no need for more. After a while I started commenting on all the martini glasses and one lady explained to me that now everyone drinks whiskey.

Friday’s garaging was a tad subdued because of the weather. Cool and damp and looked like it would rain any minute, which probably accounts for the subdued number of sales. Picked up a pair of jeans (they fit! Woo hoo, jeans for a buck!) and a very nice turtleneck for next winter (it fits! Woo hoo!)

turtleneckblack jeans

but the big thrill (you ladies will get this) was the two new bras for a buck apiece. Sorry, didn’t take pictures. Beige, lacy fabric. Looked up the brand when I got home because the little old lady at the sale told me her former employer (who is quite wealthy and likes to shop and then doesn’t wear what she bought) had donated a bunch of stuff for her to sell. Sure enough, these bras retail for $60 each. And they fit and are very comfy. Another woo hoo!

I easily resisted buying the (new) pair of tiny little thong panties that the little old lady was selling. She kept waving them about and we were all joking about what they must be like to wear. But no one wanted to try them out.

Saturday I decided to venture further afield and headed up to Portland for the 29th annual Eastmoreland Neighborhood Sale. One of those gorgeous old neighborhoods near a golf course with great houses and mature gardens.

A front garden

There were almost 150 sales listed. I have no idea how many I saw. At first it was easy to park and get around, but by about 10 a.m. there were literally hundreds of people wandering around. It was kind of like being at the state fair or something, if a state fair ever took place in a posh neighborhood. And when I say people, I mean all ages, plus strollers and wagons and dozens of bicycles and dogs, dogs dogs. First one I met was young Lucy the labradoodle.

Lucy the Labradoodle

My favorites were a Sheltie who appreciated my under-the-collar scratching style and Ava the flat coated retriever (she looked like our Lizzie). And I would have kidnapped this cat in a heartbeat.

Large handsome cat

He was gigantic, probably a Maine coon. Told him he could hop in the convertible but he was too busy greeting sale goers.

For all the sales I visited, didn’t end up buying much. I was very happy to find this black metal pot for my water lily. (The first leaf has reached the surface…)

water lily pot 2water lily pot

Found a wool sweater to felt

sweater to felt

and a pair of cords for the hubs in a free box. You know it’s a posh neighborhood when the LL Bean slacks are in the free box.

free box pants

Couldn’t resist a CD of classical music played on the hammer dulcimer.

Classical dulcimer

Splurged a whole two bucks on that one. Tried to get her go down to a dollar, but she said no, her reasoning being that the last lady who bought some CDs didn’t get them for a dollar. My feeling was that the other lady didn’t ask, but I refrained from arguing with her. (Even though I kind of wanted to.)

And the find that probably made me happiest was a couple of skeins of wool yarn.

Yarn for the stash

Bought from a funny guy who was very proud of his wife’s crafting abilities. There were several small quilts there that she had made and they were quite nice. He liked my convertible and pulled out his phone to show me his, a roadster from the 30s. Very cool.

Next weekend I will probably be helping a friend’s mom with her sale. We’ll see if I end up too tired to blog!

Teddy dance

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Try to Remember…

You automatically know that any garaging weekend in which I get to see Judy in bunny ears

P1050877

AND a fabulous green velvet vintage hat

P1050878P1050882

has got to be a good one. (But those fabulous vintage hats are starting to get to me. One of these days I’m going to succumb to their lure and lo, another collection will be in my house and I’ll lurch a dangerous step closer to Hoarder status. It’s a good thing that the price tag is usually higher than my flinch point for whims!)

But in addition to the hat, we had an estate sale with LINENS. Okay, I can resist the hats (so far) but some of the vintage linens do find their way home with me. But how could I resist a trio of linen tea towels, soft with age, with a midcentury rooster?

P1050922

Don’t you love it that one of the roosters is a different color? I didn’t notice until I was taking pictures. And on the same table I found a California Hand Prints cloth in a Christmas design.

In pink and gold. Wow.

P1050929

Upstairs was another treasure trove of linens (and the hats, dang it, those fabulous hats). Another lady was going through them the same time we were, and it turned out she makes little girls’ dresses from vintage pillowcases and other linens to sell at Saturday Market. So we handed her all the ones we thought would make fab dresses. (That we didn’t want.) It was in this pile I found a fifty cent pair of tea towels with stripes of wonderful colors

P1050927

and another tablecloth. This was only $2 because the sellers thought it was stained

P1050924

but I’m pretty sure what they thought was a stain in the dim light of that old house is actually part of the design. So home it came.

My other choice at this sale was a wonderful darning egg shaped like a mushroom. I’ll be using it soon to mend some socks.

P1050915

I’d have been happy with just the estate sale, but another ad on Craigslist promised that every single item at their sale could be had for fifty cents. Clearly a sale I had to attend! I figured it would be terribly picked over but when we arrived there were no other shoppers, and plenty of stuff to look at. We started with the clothes racks, where Judy found a linen shirt, and I snagged a long Ralph Lauren skirt for the fabric – printed velvet made of rayon and SILK. It feels luscious. I’m thinking sofa pillows for winter.

P1050892

I found a couple of CDs

P1050910

and a cool glass light shade

P1050896P1050898

and a grinder to use with the pink Himalayan salt I got in bulk at our grocery store to try out (about 30 cents worth will fill the grinder; I love buying in bulk!).

P1050903

Then Judy started looking through a box and exclaimed, “Look! Hand knit socks!” And dang if it wasn’t the same box of hand knit socks I saw last week (and bought five pairs). And even though I didn’t recognize the street or the house or the address, it was the same sale continued from the week before. I don’t know if more stuff arrived during the week, but there was still a heckuva lot to see. And for fifty cents I got another pair of socks.

P1050907

As you can see this pair needs some correcting, but I’ll just un-knit the one with the red toe up to the ankle and reknit it to match. It’ll be fun!

We hit some other sales as well. We bought four of these Ikea dog butt hooks for fifty cents and each took two, while cracking each other and the seller up with lame jokes about buying tails. (We’re easily amused.)

P1050893

I found some magazines

P1050906

and DVDs

P1050904

and a tiny ten cent Christmas ornie.

P1050895

At our last stop I picked up some glue sticks and a package of wooden beads.

P1050909

I knew I had wooden beads on my list of things to watch for, but I couldn’t remember what they were for. But they were fifty cents, so I got them. Came home and looked for my list to see if it said why I wanted them. Nope. Wracked my brain. Nothing. I was ready to think that whatever the idea had been was no longer something I needed to do (as in I’d gotten rid of whatever it was I wanted to enhance) when it finally came to me. I grabbed the glue gun, heated up one of those sticks, and before you knew it my vintage magazine rack had new feet!                  P1050967

Monday, June 9, 2014

The Big Splurge

As I walked up the driveway of the first sale on Friday, I heard one of the selling ladies say, “They’re two dollars a dozen.”

My ears pricked up like a collie’s. Could they be talking about…no, couldn’t be…yes! EGGS!! Lovely brown eggs from happy chickens! Woo hoo! I scored two dozen, and hopefully will get more in the future. Ann, the egg lady, had brought her stuff over to her friend Becky’s house, which isn’t far from ours. And Ann’s husband sees Becky’s husband every week, so they can hand off future eggs and i can pick them up at Becky’s. And we can continue to have happy eggs.

happy eggs

Of course I looked for other treasures at their sale as we all chatted away. And didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without. Except for that very handsome leather sofa sitting there. By my lights the price tag was pretty hefty, but then I sat down on the darned thing.

Okay, no offense to any of you whose sofa I have sat on in the past…but this was the best sofa I’d ever experienced. I got the brand name from Becky and took a couple of pictures to show the hubs. The thing is, we sold our 8 foot long MCM sofa last week to a nice young couple (hi, Emily & Joe!) and I wasn’t planning to buy another for a good while. But here it was, butt heaven. I decided to think about it.

The next fun stop was another group effort. “We had several people bring stuff over and we’re making deals!” they promised me. The first thing I spotted was a little painted house from Poland.

skittles housetoy from Poland

Which turned out to be a box

skittles house box

with two little people inside.

skittles house family

And from what I can glean online, there were probably originally nine little people and a ball, and it was a set of skittles. But two is fine, and they are going to hang out with my Funny Little People collection.

funny l ittle people

I kept looking, and noticed some hand knit sweaters but not in our sizes. And then in a box under a table I hit treasure. Hand knit socks! Wow! (My friend Toni said, “But you knit socks yourself.” Which means I know to pick them up when I find them – though these are the first I’ve ever found.) I picked out my faves. The heavy wool ones

handmade socks 5

and the spiffy black and white ones

handmade socks 3handmade socks 4

and the ones from self-striping yarn

handmade socks 6

that I believe Zoe has designs on

handmade socks 7

and the Fair Isle ones (the only pair that are too long, but I can fix that)

handmade socks 1handmade socks 2

and the wild opposite colored socks.

handmade socks 8

And then in another jumbled box I found this gorgeous embroidered runner. Vintage, I’m guessing 1920s or 30s.

mission style embroidery

Probably intended for a buffet or mantel or even a piano top originally, since the lace is only on one long side.

embroidered buffet runner

I love the stylized iris design.

stylized iris embroidery

So I took my treasures up to pay for them, holding my breath to see what kind of deal we’d be making. “How about five bucks,” she said. You bet. No problem!

At another sale I picked up this 60s era horse to resell

vintage Bitossi style horse

and a vintage tablecloth that actually fits our dining table.

vintage tablecloth with vegiestablecloth detail

And I’m hoping these adorable painted shoes will fit one of my nearest-and-dearest, whose feet are much smaller than mine (as are these shoes).

painted shoes 1painted shoes 2painted shoes 3

The lady who sold them said she loved them so much she bought them even though they are two sizes too small for her. “I thought I’d just make them be okay…and I couldn’t!” she said. Yeah, feet are like that. And feet should not hurt!

painted shoes 4

She lived around the corner from some older ladies having a sale as well. They liked my car, though one thought I was awfully optimistic having a convertible in the Willamette Valley. I explained my car’s California origin, and then they told me stories of convertibles from their youth. I think it was their house where I scored this Pyrex carafe with the cool cork ball lid.

vintage Pyrex carafe with cork ball

On Saturday I was scheduled to return to the Sheridan Library to talk to their writers group in the afternoon. And in the morning I met up with Ann, one of the ladies who came to my Shopping on Driveways program there a few weeks ago. (Hi, Ann!) She’s the local school librarian…for five more days. And then she retires and reinvents herself and she is SO excited she literally was jumping up and down. Have to confess I was a little late getting up there. A zillion sales in Salem on Saturday, including a nearby neighborhood sale. Which seemed a bit played out to me, not as good as previous years, but I did score these MCM teak table legs to try to resell

MCM legs                          teak table legsand the perfect little table to go with our vintage outdoor chairs.

let's lounge on the deck

When I got to Sheridan I asked Ann if she was okay with having the top down on the car. She gave me one of those ‘duh’ looks so we happily tooled around town checking out the local sales. She found a bunch of stuff including some great clothes, and I found Mel Torme

Mel Torme CD

and a cute fifty cent sweater with ruffled sleeves.

ruffled sweater

Then we had Mexican food and margaritas. Then we went to the writing group. I hope I made sense; it was only one margarita!

Okay, wait, you’re saying. What about this big splurge? For that we must double back to Friday afternoon, when I’d returned home and had a cool drink and looked up the sofa I’d seen on that first driveway. (An Ekornes Stressless Manhattan.) The one that seemed pretty spendy to me. As it turns out, they still make this sofa and it goes for, oh, around $4000. So it wasn’t all that spendy after all. Grabbed the hubster and went to see it again. Another guy was looking at it when we arrived, but he went off to think about it. We sat down – butt heaven again – and talked and thought, and went home and talked some more.

And went back and bought it.

P1050784P1050786  P1050785 And we love it. All of us. Maybe especially Zoe.

Zoe likes the Ekornes sofa

But she’s willing to share.

I don't mind sharing

 
Pin It button on image hover