BENTLEYS AND BELLY DANCERS

Oh well, I thought, nothing to buy this morning. I might as well just give up and head on home.

The thrifting gods thrive on such despair; all you have to do is just go ahead and surrender to their power. Around a corner, through a light, and there was a huge ‘Neighborhood Garage Sale’ sign. I've noticed the same sort of thing with the flu, when I've felt horrible for days and days, and finally I just say well, this is it, this is how I'm going to feel for the rest of my life, so I might as well just get used to it. And then the next day I feel way better. You’d think I'd learn and just go straight to despair to get it all over with.

The morning started with a bunch of repeat sales—places I know I've been to recently and they weren’t much to begin with. The first one I actually stopped at was on what is known to me as the Car Bra Street. You see, a couple of years ago I was driving down that street looking for a place to park so I could check out two yard sales. A man dashed into the street and ran after my car, waving his arms, so I stopped. When he caught up, he asked me, “Do you have a bra for your car?”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have trouble processing a sentence that has the word ‘bra’ in it when it comes from a strange man in the middle of the street. I replied something cogent like, “Um, what?”

“A car bra,” he said. (When I told this story to my friend Marcia, her reaction was, “I always wear the same bra in the car as everywhere else!”) I still looked flummoxed, so he went on, “You know, a cover that you strap on the hood to protect it.” Ooohhhh. No, I didn’t have one of those. “Do you want one? I used to have a car like yours, and I sold it, so I'll just give this to you if you want it.” Which is how I came to own a bra for my car that originally cost way more (the receipt was still in the box) than I've ever spent on a bra for myself, and how I came to call that the Car Bra Street.

Today’s sale on the Car Bra Street was thronged with shoppers. A man asked one of the sellers what an item was. “Oh, that’s for belly dancing,” she said, taking the thing from him and fiddling with it. “It’s a belt. Here, you wear it like this…” She put it on over her jeans and fastened the chain. All other activity ceased as she began to switch her hips and the dangly things on the belt jingled merrily. Everyone burst into applause. I do like a sale with entertainment.

At another stop there were two large jack o’lanterns sitting on the porch, and I complimented the dad and two boys on them. “I made the one with the eyebrows,” said the older boy, who was perhaps eight or nine. His little brother said, “The other one is mine. I wanted to make a classic one.” Which he had—it was perfect. I said I was glad that no one had smashed their pumpkins last night on Halloween, and the dad confessed that he had done some pumpkin smashing when he was in high school. “I guess it's a guy thing,” he told me. So now I'm wondering if it's a family tradition, and his father smashed pumpkins, and these two little boys will be doing it in a few years. I really hope not!

I chatted for a while with a woman who works in the textile industry; her garage was full of fabric samples. Somewhere in the garage is a box of single socks, which she was going to give to me to pass along to my children’s librarians for making puppets, but she couldn’t find the box. But she uses one of our branches, so I told her if she does find it to give it to the children’s librarian there. If she says the magic words “yard sale” they will know exactly who to send the box along to!

A few blocks away I talked to a guy whose wife had left him to mind her sale, so I hauled out the ever-useful story of the husband who sold anything for a dime and has never had to participate in a yard sale again. He liked it; I could see the wheels turning. When I picked up a purse he told me that his wife is the Imelda Marcos of purses. She has closets full. We both shook our heads. I told him I use my fanny pack on weekends, and the rest of the time I use the Coach bag I bought for four dollars at a yard sale (yes, it's a real one!). “Wow, even I've heard of Coach bags,” he said. That was about the moment I noticed what was in his garage. “Wow,” I said, “what a gorgeous car.” He beamed. “It's a 1951 Bentley. Take a look at the front of it.” I walked into the garage. Wow again. “I traded a Model T for it. Can you imagine wanting a Model T instead of this? Of course I'd worked on the T for 8 years, but still.” Just no accounting for taste!



I finally managed to spend $4.15 and brought home:

A new Dana Buchman sweater with the $228 tag still on it. EBay, here I come.

Yet another vase in yet another interesting shape. And may I say I have new respect for anyone who can take good photos of clear glass objects!

A couple of DVDs. I have to laugh these days when I encounter someone who wants two or three dollars for a VHS tape, since the last several DVDs I've bought have been fifty cents each.

An awfully cute picture frame.

This is from the sale where we stood with our mouths hanging open because the pickup truck doing a U-turn had a boy about twelve years old lying on the tailgate. I told the guy having the sale that when the kid falls off the parent will probably sue somebody, and he said the woman driving the truck had just been at his sale and was seriously peculiar.

A lifetime supply of hooks for Christmas ornaments. We won't have to resort to reshaped paper clips this year!

And—the one item I’ve really been looking for—a new billfold. My old (I do mean old!) Dooney & Bourke has gotten really shabby and it's time to retire it.



The new one’s more practical than lovely, but will be fine until something better shows up on some other Saturday morning driveway.

I actually got around to cleaning up my sweet little bench that I bought last week. We had a kit out in the garage that we picked up ages ago (really ages, maybe six or seven years) for furniture rehabilitation, so I decided to try it out.

I had hoped it would cover up the scratches more, but it's way cleaner and looks okay to me.
Before:

After:


And recovering the seat made all the difference.

From this:
To this:

I really love this fabric—it's left over from making slipcovers for a chair, and there was enough to make a cover for my ironing board too.

I'd never thought about a fabric cover for that until I saw this tutorial on the Whip Up blog. What an improvement over the gray cover we’ve lived with for years!

And—ta da!—the winner of the Disney lithograph from last week is…Kim from the Gemini Moon blog!

Finally, my favorite overheard conversation of the day: a guy held up a shoe and asked the seller how much, and the seller said, “Did you find the other one?”

MUSICAL PARROTS, AND A DISNEY GIVEAWAY

I do love overheard conversations. I walked up to my first yard sale this Saturday, which turned out to be all kid stuff—two young couples selling off what their babies had outgrown. One of the women was saying, “Did you know you can freeze breast milk for up to two weeks?”

I glanced at one of the husbands, who looked a little green. But the other guy jumped right in. “No, but I heard on the radio the other day that some guy in England is marketing ice cream made from human breast milk.” Several people—including me—made ewwww sounds. “They said he offered the recipe to Ben and Jerry but they didn’t want it.” Sighs of relief from the rest of us at knowing we won’t be seeing this product in our freezer cases, then the other husband said, “I'm just surprised Ben and Jerry turned it down.”

Maybe he knows Ben and Jerry better than I do, but it's hard for me to believe that the purveyors of Cherry Garcia would consider anything so icky.

I finished at one place and spotted a piano on the driveway across the street, so I wandered over. I don’t have room for a piano and no way to get one home if I did (antique uprights definitely don’t fit in the back seat of my car) but I'm always drawn to musical instruments. (Should there ever be a set of kettle drums on someone’s driveway, all bets are off—I've always harbored a longing for some. Never played them and would not be able to do anything more than accompany CDs but that would be okay. After all, I play along with a lot of classical music on my kazoo. Usually in the car.)

The lady selling the piano was very friendly. In short order I learned this was not even her driveway, but rather a friend’s. She recently downsized from a four bedroom house to a townhouse, and had no room for the big pieces she was selling. Her parents bought the piano for her when she was twelve, and she said it dated from the 1880s. I could well believe it of the piano, but not of the little bench near it. “The bench looks more like the Twenties to me,” I said. She agreed, then added, “I should probably just throw the bench away.”

My ears pricked up. To a thrifter, this is code for “offer a couple of bucks, maybe she’ll take it.” But wait, said the angel over my right shoulder, you don’t have room for more furniture. Remember the desk you didn’t buy? And you’d have to fix this up. But this is smaller than the desk, said the devil over my left shoulder, and it would be really cute with just a little bit of effort, and it would be such a sha-a-a-m-e for a nice little piece to go to the dump. Save the bench, said that little devil, and save the planet.

Well, we all need to help save the planet, right? So I offered her two dollars, and she agreed. “My butt spent many musical hours there,” she said. “I used to practice the piano with my parrot on my shoulder.” Your parrot? I prompted. “He was a red-headed conure named Shorty. Great name, huh, I don’t know where we got that. He loved music, and always sat on my shoulder or on the earpiece of my glasses while I played.” This was back in the day of sturdier glasses than we wear now. I asked if he sang along. “No, but he would dance from one foot to the other.” By now I had a vivid picture of a bespectacled teenage girl playing the piano for hours with a parrot on her shoulder swaying in time to the music.
(Picture borrowed from the Internet…)

She told me Shorty was re-homed when she went off to college and her parents moved to a smaller house. She has gone on being an animal lover, and currently has a blind boxer. (We used to have a blind dog, so I'm always up for a blind dog story.) She got him from the boxer rescue people, he was the one dog they had that her other boxer liked, and only after she’d chosen him did they mention that oh, by the way, he’s blind. The really amazing thing is that this blind dog had been living on the street, picked up by animal control. We both agreed that he deserved a good home, and I'd say he’s found it.

At another sale, as I chatted with the lady, I noticed a large display case in the garage with some kind of colorful display. I couldn’t figure out what was in the case. “Oh, that’s my husband and son’s Pez collection,” she said. We walked into the garage so I could take a closer look. It was absolutely amazing. Her husband is a woodworker who built the floor-to-ceiling glass and wood cases; more are planned as the collection grows. The pieces were in thematic groups, row after row. If this were my collection, it sure wouldn’t be in the garage!

I was heading home—or rather to the grocery store—when I happened on another neighborhood sale. One house had some pots in front, so I stopped. I noticed they had one of my favorite ornamental grasses, stipa tenuissima, in a couple of the flower beds, and they were clumpy with seeds. “You can take a stiff rake and comb out these seeds,” I told them, “and your grasses will be pretty again.” You’ve never seen such excitement. The young husband grabbed a little hand cultivator that was laying there and tried it, pulling out a big clump of seeds. “Hey, look at that!” he crowed. His wife ran and got her dad; evidently this was his house and he’d been the one who’d planted the stipas. I explained again about raking out the seeds, and now he was all excited. His wife said she had never liked these grasses, but she was going to go buy a rake that very day. Maybe there was something to them after all. I hope she does—this is a beautiful, low water plant that only needs a little grooming to be a show stopper. (Picture borrowed from Flickr.)

A few blocks away I stopped at one more sale. The pre-teen daughter had their tiny dog on her lap, which forgot it was tiny when a neighbor walked by. It started barking and growling. The neighbor held a leash attached to a dog collar, but no dog. “Invisible dog?” I asked. She laughed and said she’d just dropped Frosty off at the groomers (I had noticed a grooming place a few blocks away). But the tiny dog didn’t seem convinced there was no other dog there—or maybe, given its size, it saw this as the opportunity it had always been waiting for to intimidate. (At the opposite end of the bravery scale was this 6 month old Great Dane I saw earlier, which spent the entire morning leaning against his person and shivering.)

I chatted for a few minutes with the mom here about decluttering and mentioned I'd been in Oklahoma recently helping with my mother’s sale. She perked up. “Where in Oklahoma?” Turns out that her father in law recently died and left them a piece of property outside Crescent, about 40 miles north of OKC—160 acres that was originally a claim in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. If I remember my Oklahoma history from 8th grade, 160 acres was the amount of land you could claim in the run, and then you had to ‘prove it up’ in order to keep it. So the land this family now owns is probably intact from April morning, almost 110 years ago. She told me there’s no house there now, and when it rains the mud on the road in is a foot deep, but they’re going to keep the place and maybe retire there someday. I recommended that they read one of my favorite books, Miss Charity Comes to Stay by Alberta Wilson Constant, about a family that took part in the Run. The story is told by 12 year old Betsy and she is a hoot. If you liked the Little House books this is even better, so go check it out at your library, and if they no longer have a copy ask them to interlibrary loan it for you. You’ll love it!


I spent $7.75 and brought home:

A Disney lithograph of Oliver and Co. No, I did not buy this. The lady felt bad because the book I wanted to buy, a punch-out-&-assemble diorama of Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, was missing all the pieces when I opened it up. She gave me the Disney piece instead. Hmm, anybody want it? Leave a comment and I’ll do a random selection. Deadline…next Thursday, October 31. Woo hoo, my first blog giveaway!

DVD of High School Musical from the Cub Scout yard sale. Had never seen it, but we gave it a whirl on Saturday afternoon and it was totally a hoot. If we put in the second disc, we can learn to do the big finale dance. Gee, can't wait.

Very cute nursery rhyme picture frame.

Another leather jacket (not as spiffy as last week’s!). This one I really will cut up for craft projects, for though the label is Pierre Cardin, it's not in perfect condition—and it cost twenty five cents. I can cut up a leather coat that cost a quarter with no qualms.

A nice vase, not too big, and a sleek silver magazine holder for my growing collection of Fine Gardening. Most magazines I read and pass along, but FG stays forever.

A tiny wooden duck, a gift for the children’s librarian who has burnt her fingers numerous times with hot glue making activity mitts for me with little ducks on the fingers. Wouldn’t want her ever to forget those good times!

Some great pots from the folks with the stipa grasses. The glazed one was fifty cents, and the taller clay ones with the inset tiles were a buck apiece—woo hoo! I keep seeing something tall like a rose standard in those, but I don’t do roses. I'll think of something.



Lizzie takes her modeling duties seriously, doesn’t she?

And this is the vintage bench that came with the parrot story, in its ‘before’ state. I hope to have an ‘after’ picture before too long!

Oooh, I had a brainstorm while I was taking its picture…I can use it at my sewing machine!

Don’t forget to leave a comment by Hallowe'en if you’re interested in entering the drawing for the Disney drawing!

KISSING FROGS

There’s an old saying that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince—which is what this Saturday’s excursion was like. For most of the morning I was afraid I would have to report that I found absolutely nothing to purchase on anyone’s driveway in all of Orange County. (Not that one can cover all of OC in a single expedition, but what would life be without a bit of hyperbole?) I kept driving, spotting signs, finding sales, greeting sellers, looking at stuff…and most of it was the most depressing collections of junk imaginable. The kind of sales that novices stop at, look around, and vow never to go to another yard sale for the rest of their lives.

Frog sales.

But experienced thrifters know to keep kissing those frogs. I stopped at a sale that was pretty sparse, and when I walked up the seller broke off her conversation with her friend to tell me that all of the clothes were a dollar. I noticed a black leather jacket and picked it up; I've been wanting more leather for making Mary Janes and slippers. “Is this a dollar too?” I asked. She frowned a little. “Oh, that was really expensive…how about five?” I glanced down at the jacket in my hands. There were some spots of white on the black leather, possibly paint. I told her I was just looking for some leather to use for a project and offered two dollars. She nodded. “Sure,” she said, “that’s fine.” Then she added a line that still has me bemused: “I know what it is to want.”

I handed over the two dollars and left, pondering. What the heck did that mean? Did I look particularly needy? She didn’t seem to have taken offense at my low-ball offer, and I hadn't detected any hint of humor in her voice. Her house, car and clothing indicated that she is not currently in material need herself. Her remark will remain one of the many mysteries in life that I will never resolve.

But the story doesn’t end there. When I got home and toted my purchases inside, the jacket fell open, revealing the label. Ralph Lauren Polo.

Hmmm, I thought, pricey brand. I looked closer at the white smudges, grabbed a rag and damped a corner, and darned if all those smudges didn’t come right off.

Then I went to the computer and pulled up eBay, and what do you know. These puppies are selling like hotcakes, with prices ranging from $50 - $150, and cost about $600 new. So I might have to keep looking for some other leather for slipper soles.

Once that first purchase was made, more princely frogs appeared, and I managed to spend $8.25 before the morning was done.

I found a black velvet dress that I plan to cut up, because I have an idea for making this vintage coat I bought a few months ago fit me.
Keep your fingers crossed that my plan works. And if it doesn’t, well, the coat is not such a rare piece that experimenting would be vandalism. And it cost fifty cents.

Here is Noll making sure the velvet dress doesn’t fly away.

He’s been ever such a helpful boy lately—I did some rearranging and decluttering in my home office a few days ago, and he assisted with that as well.

The same sale netted a DVD of Chicken Run and a bag of kitty litter.

The label on the bag says it's ten week’s worth, which would just about put it in the same category as the bowl in the fairy tale with the unending supply of food. But even if it lasts only a week, it was a good deal—and it's all natural!

In another tract I pulled up in front of two side-by-side sales. “I know you,” said the complete stranger at the one on the right. Turns out he didn’t actually recognize me at all, but rather my car. He used to work at the dealership where we bought it almost seven years ago. They had to look all over Southern California for one with a black top rather than the brown all the others had, so I guess mine is a bit different. We agreed on what a great car it is.

The last thing I bought was a visor, which I wear in said car to keep the sun out of my eyes. (Definitely not to play golf!)

At this sale I encountered the papier mache artist I often see on Saturday mornings with her mother, who never gets out of the car. (The mother says I look exactly like her friend Alice, so I suggested she could call me Not-Alice.) I went over to the car to chat. “I'm having one of those days,” the mother told me. “I've lost my keys. I always put them right here in my purse and they’re not there. Doesn’t that just drive you crazy?” I agreed that I have absolutely no memory any more, but that I've decided just to embrace my geezerhood. And it's probably a good thing, having no memory to speak of. If I retain anything, it's the princes I've found, and I manage to forget all the frogs I had to kiss along the way.