Oodles and oodles

Three purchases, two sales, one set of Pyrex

I did not buy a three-piece set of Butterprint Pyrex casserole dishes, complete with lids, at a sale on Saturday.

What I bought, at an estate sale, was one lot of Pyrex with the 1 1/2 pint Friendship bowl and a lid that did not belong to it, and another lot of Pyrex with the large and small Butterprint casserole dishes, the lid to the large dish, and a lid that didn't appear to belong to anything.

Then I went to a couple of other sales, including a church rummage sale that had started hours before, and there I found a medium-sized Pyrex casserole dish. With no lid. Since some time had elapsed between these purchases, I didn't exactly remember the pattern of the Pyrex from the estate sale.

And so it wasn't until I got home and unpacked everything that I realized a) the lid that came with the bowl actually went with the small casserole, b) the extra lid from the estate sale was the lid for the casserole from the church rummage sale and that c) by some miracle, I had the complete set, just like that.

Which made me pretty happy. Almost as happy as what I found Friday. Which is something old (older than I am!), something I've been looking for for years, and something that I purchased even though I did not go to any yard sales, estate sales,  auctions or antique stores. Something that, while it theoretically could be found anywhere, almost certainly would not be found anywhere but the town where I live. (Or very close to it.) And you can see it in a couple of these photos. That's all I'm going to say for now, and if anybody guesses it exactly, I'll probably faint.

Don't judge a sewing box by its cover

The apple tape measure I showed you yesterday came in a sewing box that contained some interesting miscellany - the usual hem gauge and thread on wooden spools and pin boxes and such. I like those plastic pin boxes and how they snap shut so briskly and securely. The pink box has a never-used pair of Wiss pinking shears, and there's also a very curious set of scissors, which I'll show you in a second.

First, though, a round of applause for the very nice lady at my neighborhood church thrift store, who pointed out the sewing box to me in the first place. I am not sure I would have looked inside if she had not told me it was full of stuff. It's about the most hideous sewing box I've ever seen: large, plastic, faux woodgrain, antique avocado in color. In perfect condition, of course. I can't bear for you to see the whole thing.

Here are the odd scissors. They have three blade options - short, long and pinked. There's a way to reconfigure the blades to whichever option you want, but it's not immediately apparent to me how that's done. Which could go a long ways toward explaining why you don't see these every day.

 

They were called Change-a-Blade and were made in Binghamton, New York, about an hour from here. I hope their inventor made a little money on them. It's nice to see ingenuity rewarded.

This little treasure of a thimble was in the sewing box, too. I've often wondered, when people say that they found a sterling silver thimble, how they knew it was sterling.

Oh.

A tape measure a day . . .

How

cute

is this?

One of today's thrift-store finds.

A porch makeover

I'd like to be spending all of my time here the next few days, on the front porch. We're in for a spell of hot weather, and the porch got a little spiffing-up over the weekend.

You might remember this fabric from the $3 bolt I bought at a sale a few weeks ago. So little actual sewing occurs around here that I hope you'll indulge me with an extreme closeup of one of the pillows.

Unless someone gives you a rug, I don't think you'll find one less expensive than this one. It's a dollar-store tanning mat abandoned a few years ago by my daughter, bound with some fabric I thought would come in handy some day.

In fact, if there was a theme to the porch re-do, it was "use all the stuff you thought would come in handy some day." I think the yellow lantern was originally intended to be a plant hanger. I think it makes a better citronella-candle holder. Kind of a low-tech, vintage bug zapper.

This is the somewhat utilitarian corner of the porch; the watering can and the broom and dustpan are needed on a fairly regular basis.

I should have taken a before picture of the shelf. It was a brown wooden thing with a hinged drawer, and it was free at the Swap Shop at our town dump. I took it apart and painted it white and for now at least it can hold our patriotic display of flags in a milk bottle.

I became very taken with vintage metal dustpans when I saw Beth's collection of them a long time ago. Since that time, I have found exactly one, and here it is, and thankfully it pretty much goes with the color scheme. But that left the vexing problem of what to do with the non-vintage broom. Then it dawned on me!

I remembered that I had a number of vintage broom labels. Don't ask me why. Mr. Oodles asked that, and I became annoyed. It's not a "why" question. I just do. It's not like I woke up one day and decided to go shopping for vintage broom labels. They somehow came into my possession, and I never knew quite what to do with them, and it was as if they had been waiting for this moment, when one of them would be selected and decoupaged onto the handle of a modern-day broom. And that's what happened. And when you're to the point of decoupaging, well, anything, let alone a broom handle, it's time to stop decorating. So I did.

And so now I'm enjoying a summer night on the porch. With the fireflies twinkling in the yard and the frogs singing and squeaking out in the meadow, it's a very nice place to be.   

   

A fluke?

There's a junk store I visit only when I'm feeling desperate because the place is a disaster: scary, smoky, filled with junk. If there's anything of value, which is rare, it's overpriced.

Perhaps what I should have said is that this store is even scarier, smokier and junkier than most of the stores I visit. It's not like any of my regular haunts are exactly prize-winners, either. When a flowerpot on a shelf there caught my eye the other day, I knew something was wrong.

Chipped? No. A clever reproduction? No.

Maybe it wasn't marked, and the store owners didn't know what it was?

Nope, not that. That left only the price, which was sure to be out of line.

Well, that seems more than reasonable to me.

I was so convinced that something had to be wrong with this scenario that I must have checked that flowerpot over six times before I approached the checkout. Even then, I steeled myself for disappointment. I would not have been at all surprised if the owner said, "Oh, that's not three dollars. That's supposed to be thirty dollars."

But he hit the keys on the cash register, and I paid him three dollars for the pot and twenty-four cents for our state and local government, and left with a new-to-me piece of McCoy.

Which leaves me with a dilemma: Does this mean I need to start going to this store on a regular basis? Or should I just assume this flowerpot is a fluke?