Oodles and oodles

Open for business!

I know you just saw some of these things, but not with price tags on them.

That's because they're now in a case at an antique mall. My case, in fact.

Renting a space is something I've thought about for a long time, but not very seriously until just a couple of weeks ago. All of the stars aligned, and before I knew it, I was packing boxes and driving them to the Ontario Antique Mall, near Rochester. And as of Thursday, I'm one of their 1,000 dealers.

So if you happen to be taking the Thruway across New York this summer, take Exit 44 and head a couple of miles south on Route 332 and watch for the mall on the right. It  really is a nice, bright, clean, enormous place that's worth a detour. And go visit Booth 604 and say hello to my stuff, because it felt very, very weird leaving it there and driving away today.

I'm pretty excited about taking this step, and also a little shocked that I did it - can you tell?

 

 
  

Bits and pieces

A few kitchen-y finds from the past weekend - some shiny chrome canisters

and some striped dishtowels, still with the department-store price tag (59 cents).

Actually I was afraid if I started out with a Christmas photo, I might lose some of you, so I'm sneaking them in. I haven't found any good wrapping paper for ages, but the drought is over. I can't decide which I like best. The skiing snowmen with puppies are about as cute as it gets.

 

Of course, parading snowmen are pretty nice, too.

And this one is just so pretty.

Not Christmas, just Christmas colors - a green flower pot and bunches of glossy millinery fruit. They're good colors together, any time of the year.

   
 
   

A little old lady saves the day

So I'm looking through a bin of pretty unremarkable buttons, for lack of anything better to look at, or so it seemed, when a little old lady approached. "If you like that sort of thing," she said, "you might look in that box."

And sure enough, sitting on a chair was a big cardboard box marked "Old Sewing Notions - Priced As Marked," which the nice old lady, with her elderly eyes, had spotted, and I had not. And it was chock-full of lovely things, like little boxes of silk thread (on the right) and these excellent medallions of darning thread.

Lots of thimbles.

Yet more thread, and a lot of tatting shuttles, including this one with the beginnings of a project. Probably if I put my mind to it, I could learn to tat, but it's not a high priority. The box of thread in back has lots of bright colors and advertises the fact that they're all the popular anklet colors. The thread on the right is gorgeous and has little gold metallic bits woven in.

Embroidery scissors.

And best of all, this wonderful thread caddy and pincushion. The frame is metal and it rotates, so you could spin it around and view your various thread choices. Although it seems as if the center holes would be good thimble-holders, they're only big enough for a smallish thimble, and they block the rotating action, so maybe they're just for decoration? Or serve another function?

In conclusion - let's hear it for little old ladies! Personally, I'm going to try not to honk my horn angrily at them at red lights or run them over in the supermarket aisle. For this week, anyway.
  

Aunt Jane's attic

Sometimes (when I don't have much else to think about, driving to a sale) I wonder what I could find that would make me happier than anything else. Jadite makes me pretty happy. So do Christmas ornaments. And sewing notions. But I think what makes me happiest of all is a box of sparkly Christmas things. (And I apologize right now for what will be an unseasonable onslaught of all things Christmas this week, but I can only show you what the sale gods deliver to me.)

By sparkly Christmas things I mean beaded picks and ornaments with a burst of tinsel on pipe cleaner stems and these great cardboard and foil candle holders that I want to do something really great with.

And all these lovely ornaments on stems.

You know, I am the last person in the world to get all weepy and sentimental at estate sales. I cannot stand it when people walk around and sigh and say, oh, it's so sad that it comes to this, an attic full of boxes and strangers looking through them. (These are never family members, who are entitled to say whatever comes into their mind. Usually the family members are well past their grief and are thinking how glad they'll be when all these boxes are gone.)

Anyway, I think all this hand-wringing is baloney. An estate sale is just stuff. I sure hope I mean more than the stuff I leave behind. And if somebody I've never met likes it and wants to buy it, all the better.

I do like it, though, when I feel as if I'd have liked the person whose estate sale I'm attending. And I felt like that at the sale I went to Friday. To the extent that when some other people in the attic started analyzing the late Aunt Jane, as the woman was known, I wanted to defend her. "Don't you dare call her a compulsive buyer! She was not a hoarder!" I wanted to tell them. "You didn't know her like I did!" (Which was, of course, not at all.) But I had to admire the spirit of someone who loved holidays as much as she did. Even if she did buy way, way, way more stuff (most of it, apparently, in the last 10 years or so) than pretty much anyone could ever use.

 

At some point, though, I did kind of wonder. Everything you're seeing here pretty much came out of one box. And to find it, I sorted through possibly 40 boxes of brand-new, untouched Christmas merchandise. (Not to mention the 20 boxes of brand-new Easter. And Halloween. And St. Patrick's Day.) She had collected enough electric window candles to light a high-rise. Box after box after box of stick-on bows. Bundles of holiday dishtowels. None of them ever used. Did she forget she had them? Did she think she'd need more?

I'll never know, and I'm not about to analyze someone I've never met. I'm glad she kept some of these old things around, because someone indeed did find them and was thrilled by them. And maybe the reason she kept buying ornaments and figurines at the dollar store was that she had some impulse to celebrate every holiday, and it made her happy.

 

So here's to you, Aunt Jane. Thanks for keeping this old stuff around. You had a beautiful house. And I bet nobody liked Christmas as much as you did. Well, hardly anybody.
 
  
   

Rated G for Great

Keep reading. If you dare.

Although you probably know me well enough to figure there's nothing too shocking coming up.

Just a shoebox full of noisemakers, some of them with their original tags. I'm not quite sure of the reason for the "Adults Only" warning on these noisemakers - maybe the tin edges? - unless it's that nobody in their right mind would give objects that make this much noise to kids.

G also stands for Good Graphics. (And that Glorious shade of Green.)

Some of the noisemakers are older ones, with wooden handles. I love the design on the one on the right. I believe it depicts a line of dancers (with, I hate to point this out, pretty heavy thighs) performing some kind of patriotic review while wearing top hats and monocles. It was made in Japan, so there may have been a cultural gap to bridge.

I love these. Especially the colors.

The best find of all, though, was a wooden horn painted in Halloween colors.

This may be the weekend by which all other sales this year are judged.  I think I have different stuff to show you every day this week. Definitely a G for Great weekend!

  

   

House tour

I hadn't planned to post this morning, but I had such good luck on one quick stop (home by 8:45 a.m.!) I couldn't help myself. I found three Christmas candles, a Gurley angel and two deer made by the Tavern Candle Co. Tavern made candles very similar to Gurley, and, to my mind at least, they're not quite the equal of Gurley. Still cute, though.

Also found a paper mache candy container, a yard-sale first.

And speaking of Santa, we should take a look around this house that he's visiting.

It's not in a particularly expensive neighborhood, but a desirable one.

Not much to see out back, but it's always good to check on the utilities and make sure the windows aren't broken.

You've got to love any house with a picket fence. Especially an aqua one.

The roof looks strong, especially with the weight of all that batting snow.

Santa's visiting a pretty nice house, I think.

So nice it's probably a shoo-in for the Top Ten All-Time Favorite Christmas Decorations list, and that's not an easy list to get on.

   

Friday finds

Good sales on Friday. Some of my favorite finds - a flower hook, a Jadite pepper shaker (cheap because it was sans the salt shaker), a little McCoy pot, another little pot, and in the middle, a vase that's glass painted to look like Jadite. I have a few of them, and they mix in with the Jadite so well you can't tell the difference. (Extra points, by the way, if you can spot the Brittany nose.)

Got this little table, too. Less than a month into the sale season and I'm giving up on my no-more-furniture pledge. I'm addicted to little tables, and I don't want an intervention.

A pile of pillowcases, pretty in pink.

 

A stack of flowered dishtowels, too.

A ridiculous number of plastic party baskets and watering-can favors. (Sorry about the glowing yellow back there - they really caught the sun.)

This bag was in the box of party favors. I know a lot of you are Wegmans fans, so I thought I'd show you the store's look long before it was the darling of upscale Eastern communities.

And look! Filled with plastic parasols. My daughter's 16th birthday is tomorrow, and I'm thinking how cute these would look on her cake. 

   

Happy things

I had a good run of finding some Christmas things Wednesday. It's a little hard to look at Christmas out of season, but they're such happy little things I didn't think you'd mind. This is a cardboard candy container with his head on a spring.

 

 Pixies. Like new. Orange with polka dots. I don't think any more needs to be said.

I was attracted to this Santa because he has a spun-cotton head almost as big as a ping-pong ball. Even if his nose is smashed. That must have hurt.

I liked his price tag, too.

 
He was easy to fix. It's good to have a healthy supply of replacement noses and beards in case of emergency.

It feels wrong to love something that's plastic and pink, but I can't help myself. I love these. 

 

Three cheers

I'd have mentioned the fact I was taking a blog break except I didn't know I was. I just got in-over-my-head-busy. The kind of busy that wakes you up at 5 a.m. without an alarm. The kind of busy that resulted in me spending 20 minutes and $2 on sales last weekend. It was time and money well spent, though, because I got a giant watering can for free.

My $2 went toward this swell little fan in perfect condition. I'll turn it on so you can see.

Refreshing, isn't it?

Anyway, I did squeeze in some shopping today. That's a new striped feedsack. Same place I got my last one, and the one before that. It's as if these church ladies say, "If any feedsacks come in, make sure to put them on the shelf out back for Barbara." Thank you, church ladies. These blocks might not look like anything unusual, even though I took pains to make a special message for you. Just wait 'til you see what they do, though.

Each square has stars or stripes, so you can arrange them into flags.

One of my favorite finds so far this year.   
 

A good night

It's a good night at an auction when a) you get to take a previously unknown shortcut on a road named Whiskey Hill b) the box lots you want are among the first ones to come up and c) you bring home buttons, including some in a Christmas tin.

It's a good night when the box lot of buttons has some surprises, including a collection of needle books. That's a very patient elephant, letting the chimpanzee stitch up his ear like that.

And it's a good night when your Jadite collection takes a big leap forward with a single bid. (These are pieces 40 through 55 now, or something like that.)

Oh, but what you really wanted to know was: Who won the bedjacket? Through the magic of the random number generator, here's the comment left by the winner: Enter me please! I think its adorable! I'm not sure but this might be my first time commenting in the year or 2 I have been reading! Cheers!!!

Miss Acorn, I just sent you an e-mail, but if you read this first, send me your address!

Finally, thanks to all of you who shared your nickname stories. Corkie, Whitless, Peggy - the indignities just go on and on!