Try to Remember…

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

AND a fabulous green velvet vintage hat

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I found a couple of CDs

and a cool glass light shade

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!).

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.

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.)

I found some magazines

and DVDs

and a tiny ten cent Christmas ornie.

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

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!