Hats and Hope

Winter is hard for thrifters, isn’t it? At least for those of us who are driveway-type thrifters. We’ve drooped our way through the holidays and into January, waiting for sales to start up again.

So on Friday when I told my husband I was going to an estate sale, he raised his head an inch off the pillow and said, “Wow!” in a reasonably excited voice before falling back asleep, surrounded by dogs. (He’s the night person around here, I’m the morning person.)

It wasn’t much of a sale, in that there was nothing either Judy or I wanted to buy, and certainly not for the prices they had on things. We did rather enjoy the hats though.

The lady was evidently active in the red hat club and had a fairly extensive wardrobe for it.

Not wanting to give up after only one estate sale, we went on to the humane society thrift store, which we refer to as the doggy thrift store because the local cat rescue also has a thrift store, known as the kitty thrift store. (Wouldn’t want to get our thrift stores confused.) Fortunately there were more hats there. This is what Judy looks like when she’s dressed for invading a foreign country and righting all wrongs.

This is what she looks like two seconds later.

We thought the yellow price tag added a lot to the visuals.

Judy scrounged up three cloth napkins she liked and while she was paying for them I looked at the stuff on the counter. Which is where I found the only thing in the store that made my heart go pittypat.

Yarn. Really nice yarn.

Because I’ve taken up knitting again, after a hiatus of…oh, at least 30 years. I have no idea why or when I stopped, but I picked up a skein of wonderful alpaca yarn when we visited Hood River a few months ago. After all, what could be more wonderful than alpaca socks? They turned out pretty good.

And I realized I like knitting. And that socks are a great project – they don’t take too long and you can use them immediately. So I knit some more, with yarns a bought at yard sales last year.

Then I started looking at knitting web sites, and discovered Ravelry, which has a search engine that lets you put in the amount of yarn you have then shows you lots of projects you can make with that much. So after I finish the third pair of socks,

I have another project in mind for the doggy thrift store yarn. (Somehow I’m thinking mohair for socks might not be a match made in heaven.)

And this year, when I’m at yard sales, I’ll be looking for luscious yarn.

We may have created a monster!