Shall We Leap?

My friend Marcia went garaging with me Saturday. It's always fun to have her along. She works many weekends and I don’t get the pleasure of her company often enough. Even better, she drove her spiffy convertible (a sleek black beauty of an Audi) so I had the luxury of just watching for signs.

Signs. Even if you advertise your sale in the paper or on Craigslist, you still need signs to get shoppers to you. I sometimes think I should offer seminars in proper garage sale signs. My seminars would be extensive and informative and would take about ten minutes. This is not rocket science (or even library science—something I actually know about). If you ever have a garage sale, set up your sale first, then put up your signs. Make your signs simple (the word Sale and an arrow is all you need), make them visible (heavy black on light/bright background—a red magic marker on a piece of cardboard is not effective) and big enough to read from a speeding car. Put up enough signs to actually let people find you. We had more than one instance Saturday of the single sign that pulls you into a tract…and then nothing. Sometimes we found the sale, sometimes not. Which brings me to the most important point of all:

Take your signs down as soon as your sale is over!

Okay. I feel better now!

Holiday weekends are not hot garaging times, but there are always some sales, and always enthusiastic thrifters out trolling for bargains. We stopped across the street from the first one and got out of the car as a man was leaving. “You like garage sale?” he said, grinning, as he passed us. His accent was probably Japanese. “Everybody like garage sale!”

At the next place, the husband would not have agreed. When we left and I told them good luck with their sale he growled, “We could wrap this up right now and I'd be happy.” We should get him together with Marcia’s husband, who was once left in charge of their yard sale when he didn’t want to be. He sold anything—literally—for ten cents. He’s never been left in charge of a sale since.

We didn’t run into any prices quite that good, but close. I spent $2.48. Forty eight cents? you may be saying. Well, there was a blue glass vase that Marcia liked. The cute young teenage girl quoted a price of fifty cents for it. I had twenty-three cents in change left and offered her that. It worked. (I once bought a wheelbarrow for $1.37—all the cash I had on me.) The other $2.25 went for:

A new Vacuvin wine saver thingie—lets you pump the air out of a bottle of wine to save it for later. It can take us days to drink a whole bottle, and we’ve used these for years. A pair of the replacement rubber corks is $5, so a new pump and cork for fifty cents is a deal. (I neglected to take a picture before I took it out of the packaging, so I'm borrowing one from their website.)

A recorded book to while away my time in the car (my drive to work is only four miles, so it takes me a while to listen to a whole book), which I can donate to the library when finished. And now I can brag that I bought “Ten Big Ones” for a buck.

A flashy bejeweled acorn pin. One of the green leaf jewels was missing (hence the 25 cent price tag) so I took a green marker to that spot. Before and after pics:


Three bars of soap. The small ones are Lemongrass and Tangerine. I've never had tangerine soap before. The large bar is labeled Leap! Body Bar. Why Leap, I wonder? One of the things about thrifted merchandise is that you lack the contextual clues you get in a store. There may well have been a sign to tell the original buyer what Leap was all about (“Wash with our Leap! Body Bar and you’ll feel like hopping through your day!”). But I'm forced to make up my own. Perhaps it was designed to celebrate Leap Year. Or it could be an acronym…Large Eggs Are Purple? Last Elephant Acts Perplexed? Lions Eat Angry People? Like Early April Primroses? Okay, I'll stop.

And I scored another chicken. Marcia paid for this, since I was out of change at the time. This little fabric hen looked forlorn among the mugs and plastic containers, and something about the way she cocked her head made me pick her up. That’s when I saw her enormous feet. That did it. I think she looks awfully happy to be with the metal rooster I got a few weeks ago. Her fabric is somewhat stained, but I'm going to try giving her an oxy soak and then letting her dry in the sun. (It worked wonders on last week’s tablecloth—all the stains disappeared!)

My new camera arrived a few days ago. Yes, I do occasionally buy something new. I love it. And it gave me a use for some of the felt I've made from old sweaters—part of a sleeve became a camera case.

Now I can take close-ups. Here’s a new shot of the pin Cathy asked for.
The mark on the back turns out to be the trademark of the Carl-Art Jewelry company. There’s a dramatic account of the designer here. (“Once upon a time, not so very long ago, giants walked the earth. Amazingly, many of them worked in the American costume jewelry industry. One of these giants was Carl Schraysshuen.”) My pin is probably from the Forties.

And of course, now I can take better pictures of buttons!

Button, Button…I've Got the Button!

The sound of sobbing floated out from the garage. I paused, not sure if I was really hearing someone crying, if I should quietly leave their yard sale, if there was any help I could offer. The two women in the garage noticed me just then.

“Oh, sorry,” one said, wiping her eyes. “Our mom died four months ago and we’re just having a little breakdown.”

The next thing I knew I was giving them hugs. The second woman waved her hand around and sniffled. “It was just…there was a family here a few minutes ago, and they reminded me of our family…” Her voice trailed off and she sniffed again, then said, “Actually, my sinuses have been acting up and this is making them feel much better.” In another minute we were talking about the movie Steel Magnolias and one of the sister’s business as a custom seamstress. I love the resilience of women.

I keep telling you, you never know what you’ll find while you’re out garaging on Saturday morning.

This scene was in total contrast to an earlier one. That sale was a fundraiser by a women’s organization called the Blue Thong Society, and these ladies were a hoot. The repartee was so fast and snappy that I was desolate not to have a tape recorder on me. When I arrived one of the organizers was looking at some plates someone else had donated. “You ought to give me these. After all I found you your dog and you haven’t even paid me yet. These are cute plates. How much are they?” Another of the group told her they were a dollar, but for her they’d make that ten dollars. And they were off. I was laughing out loud as I rummaged through the tables of donations, spotting a couple of pieces of clothing that looked interesting. By the time I paid up my dollar we were all talking, and I asked about the dog the one had found for the other. (You know me and dogs.)

Turns out it wasn’t a dog. She’d said job. “When you recommend someone who gets hired, you get a bonus when they’ve worked there sixty days.” How much longer is that, I asked the hiree. “Fifteen more days.” I said that ought to be a piece of cake. “Yeah,” said the first one, “especially since we’re closed all next week!”

Apparently the Blue Thong Society is something like the Red Hat ladies, only sassier and there’s no age limit. If they’re all like this group, I'd say you’ll have a good time if you join!

My favorite quote of the day was from a sale where a young man was inspecting a wet suit. From across the driveway came an indignant woman’s voice: “Hey, that better not be my wet suit you’re selling!” No, replied her significant other, you have two. She seemed mollified, but it sure sounded to me like he was selling her wet suit!

I spent $8.25, which got me:
A book I'm looking forward to rereading, and three movies.





At one of these sales, I noticed a book in the pile with labeling that looked familiar. Sure enough, it belonged to the library system I work for, and there were no discard stamps on it. As I paid for the movie I was buying I told them I work for the county library, and that this book belonged there, and I would be returning it. They said they’d never seen that book before, had no idea how it got into their stuff they were selling. Uh huh. Not the first library book I've seen at a yard sale, won’t be the last. I kind of enjoyed being the library cop though.

Two vintage rhinestone pins. One is marked 20 ½ KT GF on the back, with CA and an arrow through it. (New camera coming this week…pictures will get better…)

A small backpack to replace the one that I spilled salad in at Disneyland the other day. Backpacks do not smell good when they’ve been salad dressinged.

A cute batik jacket for me…


…and a hand-embroidered raw silk robe (these were the Blue Thong buys). The robe looked great on my friend Heather, who was staying with us while she attended the American Library Association convention over the weekend, so it went home with her.

Another vintage embroidered tablecloth. I think the stains will come out with a good oxy soak (that stuff is amazing, it even took red ballpoint ink out of a linen shirt). And if they don’t, I'm out a whole quarter.

A set of eleven antique partially-completed crazy quilt squares.

There’s a whole quilt-history lesson here; it's fascinating to see blocks in progress. The fabrics appear to all be silk. Some have suffered the ravages of time, but most are still in good condition. Crazy quilts flourished from 1876 to about 1910, and these puppies do feel old.

At the same sale I saw a big ziplock baggie full of buttons. They were fifty cents. I snatched them up. I took them home. I dumped them onto the dining room table just to take a little peek. I felt ridiculously happy looking at them. I started sorting them into ordinary buttons and cool buttons. Then I started making piles by color. Then…at some point friend Heather and my husband dragged me away from my buttons so we could have dinner. Two days later they are still on the dining room table, and all I have to do is go in there to feel happy.

Part of me thinks it's absurd to be made so glad by something as insignificant as buttons. But that’s the thing. Buttons may be small, they may be commonplace, they often go unnoticed. But practicality aside (and I'm a person who appreciates the practical), buttons can be tiny works of art. Over and over as I sorted through this stash, I'd pick up a plain button, turn it over—and be amazed at the other side. (I swear every single cool button landed cool-side down.) There are ten black faceted buttons made of glass. When I grouped them I found that there are seven different patterns of faceting among them.

There are fifteen of these terrific brown buttons.

There are buttons on cards that are themselves wonderful, including several from “Starlet Buttons…Styled in Hollywood.”


One little white button that I thought was just a regular shirt button has two perfectly placed parallel lines on the other side, a work of art half an inch wide.

Buttons. If buttons can be so amazing when you turn them over, just think how much lies unseen among all the people you encounter, and what you might discover when you look at the other side.

This Made MY Day!

I am absolutely chuffed. Catherine, whose blog is Catherine’s Vintage Style, has name me one of her winners of the “Five Blogs that Make My Day Award.” Woo hoo! Thanks, Catherine!


Apparently the guidelines are
(1)You must acknowledge five blogs that make your day or inspire you.
(2)You must acknowledge the post of the award giver.
(3)Tell the award winners they have won by commenting on their blogs with the news.

So it's my turn to nominate new winners.

Now, I did have to pause for a moment, because passing along this award felt just a teensy bit like, gulp, a chain letter.

I don’t do chain letters.

I have never done chain letters. I remember vividly the first one I got. I was in 5th grade, and my best friend Chrissy gave me this thing written on lined notebook paper, and I was supposed to copy it a whole bunch o’ times and give it to a whole bunch o’ people. It claimed to have been around the world seventy three times, and if I broke the chain something terrible would happen to me. It felt like a huge weight on my back, a ton of guilt inexplicably given to me by my very best friend. I didn’t want anything bad to happen. But I didn’t copy it and pass it along. I felt an utter failure. I wish I'd had the brains and the confidence to tell Chrissy not ever to do anything like that to me again. But to this day I've never sent a chain letter, and that includes the humorous emails that we’re all supposed to pass along to everyone in our address book.

But—here’s the crucial difference—chain letters make me feel bad. Being told I’ve made somebody’s day made me feel absolutely wonderful (more thanks, Catherine!). And that is something I'm glad to pass along.

So here are five blogs I enjoy. One is written by someone I know, another by someone in my profession, and the others I've found while tootling around the Internet. Thanks to all five of you!

The Feel-Good Librarian seems to be taking a vacation from her blog, but I love her take on “why we do this.” After all, librarians are all about the backlist, right?

The work shown on 365 Masks is fascinating. You never know what kind of mask she’ll make next!

Gemini Moon is a great place to find something nifty to read. Kids’ books are not just for kids!

Dawn Luckham makes historic costumes—absolute beauties. She doesn’t post often, but each entry is a treasure. Don’t miss what she did with a “boring tailored jacket.” And she has a very cute dog!

And Vintage, Pretty & Shabby takes scrounged and thrifted items and gives them new life, just as she does with the chickens she rescues.

So my thanks to the five of you for giving me the pleasure of reading and seeing your work. Feel free to pass along the award if you like, but not to worry if you don’t. Just keep blogging and making my day!

My Pleasure Doubled

I go online every Saturday morning to check for garage sale listings in the local paper, the Penny Saver, and on Craigslist. Then I spend a few minutes doing a week’s worth of cryptoquotes from the “Life” section of the paper. The Life section includes games & puzzles, pets, home & garden, health & fitness, horoscopes…you know, life. The stuff they used to call the women’s section before guys wised up and realized all the interesting stuff was here. When solved, the quote for Saturday turned out to be “Whatever we possess becomes of double value when we have the opportunity to share it with others.”

So there it is—the rationale for my blog! It’s fun to go out and find cool stuff, and even more fun to share it with someone. So thanks for coming along and letting me share with you.

Besides the cryptoquotes, I have a couple of other rituals. I pick up an egg and cheese croissant at a nearby donut shop, run by a couple of ladies who appear to know every customer and what each of us wants. As soon as I walk in the door one of them scurries to the back to make my “number eight.” And they give me my change in singles, so I have small bills to facilitate bargaining. I got a chance this Saturday to send them some new customers when I heard someone at the first sale asking if anyone knew a place to get donuts. Hope they bought lots!

My other regular stop is to buy gas (ouch) at the one station in the area that is consistently less expensive than anywhere else. Lately it's about twenty cents a gallon lower so I'm shelling out maybe a dollar less than I would at another station. But hey, a dollar can get you a bunch of stuff on Saturday morning! There was a gray haired gentleman getting gas at the next pump who said ruefully in a Ukrainian accent, “We work all week, then leave it all here on Saturday.”

At one of early sales, a young man was pumping up a twin-size air bed to show a shopper that it worked. She paid him a dollar for it, threw it in the back of her pickup, and drove away. The seller was ecstatic. “See,” he said to his companion. “A whole dollar!” She looked over at me and said, “I told him not to bother putting it in the sale, that no one would ever buy it. You just never know, do you?”

I'll also never know why the couple I passed with a pair of lovely, full-grown Australian shepherds had one of them in a baby carriage that the husband was pushing. The dog looked quite pleased to be getting a free ride. Wonder if the two dogs take turns being pushed.

As I drove to work this morning, I listened to the Country Fiddling CD from last week. Track 5 was amazing—bluegrass combined with electronic noises, as though the band had added laser guns. Perhaps they have rowdy fans from other planets? It reminded me of the Ozark Trilogy sci-fi novels by Suzette Haden Elgin. Highly recommended when you need novels that feature flying mules.

It was a slow Saturday, shopping wise, too hot for many people to be out either buying or selling. I did manage to spend $7.25:

My first stop netted a couple of freebies,

a little brush Christmas tree and a compact retractable measuring tape, small enough to be part of my garaging equipment. It's from an RV park in Corona. I keep picturing the RV owners carefully measuring to make sure their oversize vehicles will fit into the available space.


At the next stop I spent $1.25 on one wool and two alpaca sweaters for felting. Interestingly, the alpaca sweaters took the treatment completely differently. The one from Peru barely changed texture at all, and the one from Nordstrom became thick, fabulous felt. Now I have to figure out how to use all this felt I've got. I love my felt slippers and will make more, but I need to branch out. Some of this stuff is so sturdy I figure I could sew it together into a yurt cover and be warm and dry inside. And I may be poor enough after I retire in a few years to need to live in a yurt. You know, this could work out.







Got the Collector’s Edition of the original King Kong. Unfortunately the button you push to hear Kong growl barely emits a purr any more. Guess you have to pay more than fifty cents for a good growl.








We have a set of six brand new placemats and napkins. The red plaid is not my husband’s fave, but they’re clean and sturdy. And, from the price still on the placemats, I saved about $73 on the set over buying them at the store.

Found a box of small spools of thread in a number of colors I don’t have. I hate buying notions at a fabric store, they’re so hideously expensive. Also in the box was a lifetime supply of sewing machine needles, several bobbins that fit my old Singer 201, and some vintage buttons. I've chucked the ugly plastic box, exactly like the one we kept thread in for about thirty years, and decanted the spools into a box I thrifted last summer.

This bowl made my heart go pitty pat. It's made of glass, absolutely gorgeous. Wish my photography skills were up to showing you the details.

My favorite quote this week came from a couple of women having a sale. One held a framed photo in her hand. From the colors and amount of fading it probably dated from the late forties, early fifties. “I should keep this and hang it in my garage,” she commented. As I was wondering about the honor of being hung in a garage, her friend said enthusiastically, “Oh, you should! It's an antique. It's older than you!”

In which I find out I have a following

I picked up this ridiculous pillow, then put it down. I don't do decorative pillows. Picked it up again. Hmmm, silk, hand stitching, in perfect condition. Mere rationalizing. You can't rationalize passion. Okay, it's passion for a ridiculous pillow, but still passion.

How much? I asked. Fifty cents.

Deal.

The morning started nicely. I greeted the woman and her 10-year-old son and asked if they were having fun yet (a line generally appreciated by people who have been up since dawn arranging belongings on their driveway). “Sure, now that you’re here. You’re our first customer!”

I'm easy. I was flattered. Bought a summer reading prize (there goes another fifty cents). While I was looking around the woman told her husband he needed to get the bike out there. He raised the garage door and the bike fell out onto the drive.

“That’s one way to get the bike out,” I ventured. The chuckled.

Lovely people.

It was an auspicious start—a good fifty cent buy and friendly folks at the first stop, but I had scant luck this Saturday. Just as well, since I spent so profligately last week. ;o) And even though the pickings were slim, it's the thrill of the chase that matters, that sense of adventure when you start down the road and don’t know what you’ll see. Did you ever read the books about Freddy the Pig by Walter R. Brooks? (If not, please do!) Among many other accomplishments, Freddy is a poet, and I sometimes think of one of his marching songs when I start out on Saturday morning:

Oh, the sailor may sing of his tall, swift ships
Of sailing the deep blue sea,
But the long, white road where adventures wait
Is the better life for me…

My adventures admittedly are mild, as perhaps behooves a middle aged librarian, but they’re mine. And even on a morning where you find nothing you want to take home you may see something you’ve never seen before. This time it was—a bounce house. Yes friends, I could have owned my very own bounce house. Imagine how popular that would have made me with the neighborhood children! Alas, even deflated it would not have fit in my car, so reluctantly (okay, not very) I left it there for someone else.

I spent three dollars this Saturday and brought home:

Two prizes for the staff summer reading program—a cute cache pot, and a white corian terrier cutting board. Evidently it was a souvenir of someone’s trip to Palm Springs, for it has the maker’s name and address on the back.

One more bug-related prize for a children’s librarian, a wooden butterfly puzzle thingie. I think the daylily looks scared, don’t you?

Proof that we have eclectic musical tastes at our house…a music video by Dead Can Dance, Natalie Cole singing standards, and a CD of fiddle tunes.

And the pillow. I simply could not leave it there. I needed it. Perhaps all our searching and buying is simply a way to reveal us to ourselves, to know ourselves better. When I look at this silly Halloween cat, I'm pulled in by the wide, terrified eyes and the grin almost big enough to hide the fear behind. But now he’s with others of his kind, and can relax.

If you go garaging in the same area long enough, you start to recognize the other regulars. If you drive a green convertible, they also recognize you. I was waiting at a red light around the corner from a phantom sale (you know the ones—there’s a sign on the corner, you drive down the street, and there’s no sale…harrumph!) when a car pulled up beside me and honked. I rolled down my window. Two ladies in the car that I've seen at other sales.

“Where were you going?” they asked. I said the signs had lied on that last street. “Well heck,” they said, “we were following you!”

IT'S GENETIC!

“Richard, come help me with this,” said the woman arranging items to sell on her driveway. I smiled in her direction as I browsed. After a moment she said again, “Richard, give me a hand here!” Then she looked up at me and began to laugh. “I'm sorry, I thought you were my nephew.”

Which was a first; don’t think I've ever been mistaken for a nephew before.

The first Saturday in June is an intense garaging day. The town I live in allows sales on only four weekends a year, and June is your best bet weather-wise compared to March, September, and December. Of course the other towns around, which are all crowded shoulder to shoulder in the 948 square miles of the OC, apparently have no such rules, but this is the prime garaging season. I only got to two neighborhoods, and there were several more tract-wide sales I missed. If any of you garagers/thrifters/junkers are ever planning a visit to this area, this is the time to come. Send the rest of the family off to Disneyland and tell them you’ll join them later. Maybe I should start a new business, leading tours of garage sales for out of towners. If you do come this time of year, you’ll get to see the jacaranda trees blooming, each with their lacy shadow of fallen purple blooms at their feet.

I got in a hurry trying to get to as many sales as possible, so some of the notes I scribbled as I went are completely incomprehensible now. One of them says something like “1st good tree except for those brothers.” Your guess is as good as mine. Another might be “good climbing” or “good dinking.” I do recognize the note about the décor in front of one place I stopped. All the garden beds where most people would plant flowers were covered with white gravel and planted with a huge collection of plastics trucks, cars, firetrucks etc. It sounds like it would be tacky but there was such variety and exuberance, it was so colorful, that it came across as naively charming. Certainly the little boys arriving with their parents for the garage sale were charmed!
At another sale I saw wheels of another sort. A little girl about three years old had brand new pink plastic roller skates, and her mother was bent over, supporting her on her maiden voyage down the sidewalk. “You’re going to have a lot of fun with those,” I assured her, remembering my own roller skating days. Her mom smiled at me ruefully. “And my back is going to pay for this.”

The prize for the most California attitude goes to the dad I was chatting with about decluttering. He said how much he was looking forward to parking inside the garage. I noted it was carpeted and opined he might not want to park on that. “That’s okay,” he said. “Cars are part of the family too.”

I spent—gulp!—a whopping $14.50 on Saturday on:
Some door prizes for children’s librarians…a string of fun lights and a pair of board books

Prizes for the summer reading program I run for staff..a couple of these bookmarks that you can insert a photo into. A picture of your favorite author? Yourself to identify the bookmark as yours? Your cat?

Two lovely purple pillar candles

A handmade throw pillow cover from Hawaii

For myself I picked up a red visor (tennis visors are perfect to wear in a convertible, shading your eyes without giving you hat-hair)

A string of glass and turquoise beads (they need a new clasp, but for fifty cents I figured I could work something out) and a couple pairs of dangly earrings
A fun wire basket, looks pretty old. The ribbon has got to go! Should I line it with vintage fabric and use it in my office, or moss and plant something in it?

A trio of picture frames

A couple of items for my office at work…this pretty cache pot for a plant and a Maisy pull toy for the children’s literature toy collection

A pair of boots to sell. Got fooled on these—they’re in a Tony Lama box, but the boots turned out to be Justins instead. My bad for not looking more closely, but I'm only out a buck, so if they don’t sell they’ll be off to the thrift store.

And the piece de resistance,

a vintage Saks Fifth Avenue bag, navy leather with Lucite handle and clasp. It's absolutely delicious. I think the Coach bag I've been using needs to take a little vacation.

And speaking of little vacations…I had an email from my sister the other day. She and her husband were going to celebrate their anniversary this past weekend by going to Kansas City (they live near Tulsa). Partly, she said, to do a little gambling on the riverboat, but mostly because it was KC’s city-wide garage sale weekend.

This garaging thing must be genetic!