“Ladies and Gentlemen, when you hear the Shadow’s blood-curdling laugh, you can be sure that exciting entertainment will follow!”
A few weeks ago I brought home some audiocassettes from Mom and Dad’s. I was telling the Son-in-Law about this Old Time Radio’s Greatest Mysteries cassette set from from the 1930s and ’40s and he expressed interest in hearing them at some point, so I got out my cassette player and some other old radio show cassettes I have, including Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow, and Sherlock Holmes!
I found these Agatha Christie audiobook cassettes at Mom and Dad’s as well, they are Miss Marple stories read by one of the actresses who played Miss Marple (the best one, in my opinion).
I got this tape at an estate sale.
I’m looking forward to listening to all of these!
“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does NOT pay. The Shadow knows…”
On Sunday we went to the Polk Flea Market at the Polk County Fairgrounds. The flea market is held on the first Sunday of the month, and we hadn’t ever been to this one until now.
The market opened at 9:00 a.m. for general admission ($1.00) and we got there around 9:12. You can pay $5.00 admission to go to the early bird times on the Saturday and early Sunday morning. Obviously many people had done that, because the parking lot was quite full by the time we got there! We went inside and started at the far end.
Whenever we go to estate sales or flea markets there is always a theme — some item we see over and over. This day’s theme was dark red dishes and corn-shaped cast iron cornbread pans. I didn’t get a photo of any of the cornbread pans at the market, so I’ll put on one from Etsy so you’ll know what I mean. We saw so many of those I even exclaimed to one of the sellers about it.
Photo from Etsy. Click to go to the listing.
I saw this deer head on the wall and had to look at it more closely, it has a weird antler. The seller there had a taxidermy business advertised on his shirt said said his son had mounted the head. There was another head that the man informed me was the three-point buck he had shot on his son’s third birthday. He said his son had passed away and he had no room to keep all his things. That interaction was rather sad all around. I’m not a fan of hunting but I understand it’s important to some people.
In one of the side rooms of the main building I found this vintage “Sift-Chine” sifter. The seller said it had been in their kitchen for years. I asked was he downsizing then, and he said yes, most of the people in the place were! I already have one of these sifters with the green stripes, but the price was so good I couldn’t pass it up.
We made our way to the other building and found all sorts of goodies! At the antique mall last week I had seen a vintage melon baller with a green handle, and from what I could see it was priced at $10 or $12. In that booth there were a number of green-handled kitchen gadgets, but they were attached to a board on the highest shelf. It would have been hard to get it down anyway. At the flea market we headed into Building “C” and I found this for just $1.00!
The lady that sold me the melon baller also had this in her booth — haha! It’s an egg baby! Well, it’s really just an extremely weird pincushion. I wouldn’t want to put pins in something with a head! She also sold me an old photo dated Easter 1946, which I bought just because 1946 was the year our house was built.
Written on the back is “Baby Frankie B., Noila (?) Jean, Bobby, and Helen – Easter 1946” Why do people not print the names clearly and put last names on the backs of photos? Let that be a lesson to you!
Here are all the other nifty things I got at the market. The ambulance is a Fisher Price Adventure People toy from the 1970s, we played with the same one at the neighbors’ when we were kids, My sis had the Adventure People medical people but not the ambulance, and I had a hiker set with backpacks and a rock climbing rope. Fun! The green bed and yellow chair are Weebles accessories from the 1970s, the stretchers, bed with white figure, and wheelchair with yellow figure are Playmobil toys also from the 1970s, as are the cow and dog. The little white vehicle is a gurney from a Tonka Toddlers set (and the nurse cap in the back may be as well). I don’t know where the brown rubber broom came from. The two nurses are also Adventure People. The things that attracted me first to the box of goodies were the 1970s Fisher Price Little People sinks, chair, suitcases, and scale! I have been looking for the suitcases for a good price, and the furniture is always welcome into my collection. 😀
But the most important thing (besides the FP Little People things) was that the lady who sold me the melon baller and the photo told us about Google Lens, which is an app where you can take a photo of a thing and Google will tell you what it is. It’s unbelievable how much research that will save when I’m looking to list things on Etsy! It brought up the Tonka Toddlers item right away. I might never have figured that one out if it hadn’t been for Google Lens. What a blessing!
Here are some other things I saw that I hadn’t seen before:
Flamingo Pink Pyrex!!Square Pyrex bowls! I have a round yellow one but had never seen square ones.
After the flea market we decided to stop in West Salem to get a pizza at Walery’s Pizza. We are very partial to their pizza! While we were waiting for the pizza, I noticed this over by the game room. I hadn’t seen one of these since I was a kid!
I decided I needed to get an egg. It was 50 cents. You put your money in and the chicken clucks and “lays” an egg.
Inside my egg was a strange temporary tattoo. I used to love those when I was a kid, but I don’t know if I would have liked this one, ha!
We had a fun time on Sunday and it was nice to spend some time with The Hubs, who has been working quite a lot lately. I’m looking forward to the next market when I think I will try to get in on the early bird time on the Saturday!
Ceramic village building — isn’t it cute?I have three boxes like this for sale — they have that cool vintage look!
This is our Jackie, the namesake of my shop. She went to the Rainbow Bridge in September of 2014, just shy of her 15th birthday. She was a good girl and we loved her very much.
This last week on Facebook Marketplace I was looking for some books to use for decorating this Christmas, and while I didn’t find the Christmas decor I was looking for, as I was scrolling I found two postings I was interested in. The first was a lot of Hardy Boys books, old and newish, for $10. Now, I had seen this posting awhile back and the set was $30, and I had passed on it then even though it was a good deal, but now for $10 I couldn’t resist!
There are over 30 Hardy Boys books — 15 from the 1960s (reprinted more recently), two from the ’30s, a few from the ’90s, a few from the ’80s, and one from the 2000s. This is a grand addition to our collection — after all, someday I will have grandchildren and they will want me to read to them! (I will also probably want to read to them “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry, like my grandma read to us when we were little girls.) When The Boy was little we read all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books we had.
The other score I got was a lot of random books and old magazines for $20. The girl I bought them from said she didn’t want to just donate them, she knew someone out there would want them. The magazines are from the 1920s, ’30s, and 40s. I’m very interested to look through all of them! The ads are super fun 🙂
A number of the books I don’t think are sellable on Etsy so I’m going to try to get the used bookstore to take them, there are some modern children’s books that I’m not that interested in and some other more modern weird books. You never know what they’ll take at the bookstore, though!
There is a dictionary mentioned in my last post that is almost 100 years old, and another old book, “Evangeline” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that was published in 1895. It is a pretty book and in good condition for being 127 years old!
There are some music books and sheet music (hey, I have a ukulele!)
Some old kids’ school readers…
Kids’ school books.
…and a ton of old recipe books. In years past (and I suppose now as well, but not so much) companies who made kitchen appliances or who sold things like baking powder or other food-related products put out little recipe books that showed how to use the product the company sold. They include booklets from Pillsbury, Rumford (baking powder) and General Electric, among many, many others. I’m hoping I can sell many of them on Etsy, as I don’t need them here at home.
Many recipe booklets from the 1930s on to the ’70s.
When I went on FB Marketplace I was originally looking for some books in certain colors to decorate with, we are doing black/white (buffalo plaid) and blue. I found two blue books at the Great Junk Hunt last weekend and thought that would be good, but when I started looking through them I found that one of them was about eugenics, and I didn’t want that one! It went the way of all things. The other one, “The Master’s Violin”, seemed fine. Yesterday we went to the Farmhouse Show in Turner, Oregon, and all I bought were some books, and kettle corn for The Boy. I found a nice blue book, “Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates”, published in 1903. It is a very heavy book, and has shiny pages, which is unusual. It will look fine with the other blue book. I might see if I could find some black and white books as well.
Blue books.
The other books I bought yesterday were some kids’ mystery books à la Nancy Drew, but featuring a girl called Judy Bolton. I hope the grandchildren enjoy being read to and reading as much as I did as a girl!
This week I got a bunch of goodies from Facebook Marketplace. I got a large group of Hardy Boys books from one seller, and a lot of old magazines, recipe books, and other random books from another seller. One of the random books was this Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary with a publication date of 1925.
Honor Book
Mary Collison was such a good speller from Detroit in the 1928 National Spelling Bee that she won this dictionary. It was awarded to “one of the best spellers in the schools of the Detroit Metropolitan Area” by The Detroit News. The dictionary is three inches thick! (I’ve always enjoyed dictionaries. In middle school when I got caught talking and had to copy the dictionary, I didn’t mind a bit. I think the teacher knew it, ha.)
Lots of words in here!
It has nice little illustrations and is still very usable, although the binding is damaged and some pages are coming out.
I had never heard of a fulmar until I read this page.Binding not in such great shape.I found a surprise or two in there!
I have the dictionary for sale on Etsy, and hope someone else will think it as fascinating as I do! I’ll share some of the other goodies I got in a later post.
Today I attended The Great Junk Hunt, a vintage show and flea market held at the Oregon State Fairgrounds. It is, according to their website:
Voted top traveling vintage market in the USA by Flea Market Style magazine!
Recently named one of the TOP 5 2019 Flea Markets in the U. S. and voted one of the Top 15 Flea Markets 2016!
Listed as a must attend Flea Market in America by Flea Market Decor magazine!
I’ve been to the market once but it has been a few years. Marnie had other plans today so I went (gasp!) by myself! I wore my fall black cat/pumpkin shirt to be festive.
Last time I wore this shirt I received many compliments! Today not so much.
I paid $12 for a ticket for the early bird entry (an hour earlier than general admission) and got there at 8:20 to be in line for the 9:00 opening. They had even earlier-bird entries available yesterday, but those were even more expensive and in the afternoon, and I prefer to go places in the morning.
I waited in line and listened to the ladies around me talk about their teenagers and lawyers and other things. It started to rain a little and people ran to their cars to get coats and umbrellas, after which it promptly quit raining. It was definitely very chilly and my eyes were watering from the cold! I’m glad I got there early because there was quite a line behind me as 9:00 rolled around. The show encompassed two fairgrounds buildings and since I was in the right-hand line I went in the building on the right first.
Here are some things I saw that I found interesting (obviously there were many more interesting things, these are just a few of the things I saw):
A large fungus – we see them on trees quite often on our hikes. I didn’t see what the price was.$35 is a bit steep.Adorable Racoon Family metal sculpture. I’m going to see if The Hubs can make something like this.Super neat “ferris wheel” plant holder. It was $110 or I would have snapped it up. I saw that later someone had bought it.This is from the Rusty Birds metal artists. They make many cute birds and lots of other garden art, including the little kitty peeking over our fence you can see in some of our yard photos.This lady added weird things to paintings. I guess that is Boba Fett(?) added to Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. I prefer the original Blue Boy myself.I have some lamps like these. They came with plastic ruffled shades with a fabric overlay. I didn’t know they were worth this much, ha!Plastic dinosaurs with candle holders. What a fun idea! There were also some dinosaurs made into bookends. This was in the booth where I got my treasure 🙂Lots of children’s books at this market, but no Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys. I did see a couple Bobbsey Twins.Someone’s old floppy disks made into notepad covers.One booth had a lot of this pottery. I can’t remember the name of the maker but it is vintage and very expensive. This vase had no price tag but the one below it was $245. It has a wonderful, soft feel and beautiful pastel colors.I got a couple of frames like this at the Mama Roost yard sale for $5 each. This one was $32.I should have grabbed a couple more of these old keys, but I couldn’t get past the $4 price tag. Although, that is the going price for these.Old paintbrush with case.Back of paintbrush jacket. Isn’t that interesting? The man who had this booth was telling me he was running on only 4 hours of sleep in the last few days, after we literally bumped into each other. It was their first time selling at a show. I told him I had an Etsy store and he asked for my info, so I gave him a business card I cleverly had with me. 😀 Why did it never occur to me to make magnets out of my Scrabble tiles?I could make a garland like this with all the scrap fabric I got a few weeks ago at the Mama Roost yard sale. I thought it was a fine idea to make a little storage space under a chair cushion.I have three little chairs like this. I have this exact same light fixture globe for sale in my Etsy shop but mine has the fixture and chains that go with it. I am selling mine for quite a bit more though. Perhaps I should lower my price.This was already sold or I might have grabbed it up too. Isn’t it fun? It’s made out of an old door like the one I have in the storage room.
And FINALLY, here are the treasures I bought, including the most bestest one, a rolling pin with green handles! That’s what I was searching for and I found it for the right price. Hooray! The little Christmas tree was only $5 and it has lights! The books are just for color to decorate with, since we are doing a black/white/blue/silver theme for Christmas this year. I think I will use the drawer and basket to put on my kitchen decor shelf to make “levels” so I can display things better.
Treasures!
These tiny ornaments came with the tree, the booth man came running up to me after I took the tree and said that the ornaments and garland went with it. I think they were anxious to get rid of them, ha! The garland is in bad shape with the paint coming off, so it had to go “the way of all things”. There is an interesting assortment of tiny ornaments, including 4 Bratz doll ornaments with a hanger that says “Bratz” on it. I’m sending those with The Girl to take to The Youngest Girl, who enjoyed playing with her Bratz dolls when she was little.
Odd assortment of ornaments.Tiny Bratz ornaments. I might use the little snowflakes since they are blue and white.
After the show I went over to see The Boy and take him a couple of things. I visited with my grandcat, Basteta, and The Boy’s roommate’s cat, Piglet. Basteta is a fluffy gray kitty, and Piglet is a big cat with a curly tail.
I’ll say that if you want to go to The Great Junk Hunt, it is worth the extra few dollars to get in early. By 10:15 there were so many people that I could barely get through the booths. Much nicer to be there when it wasn’t so crowded!
I looked in some storage bins this last week in order to consolidate things, and found this vintage eggbeater I had bought awhile back. I completely forgot about it! I think I put it away because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it.
I like green-handled vintage kitchen implements because my kitchen color theme is green. The green theme came from this green secretary desk I bought at a second-hand store a few years ago.
Vintage Secretary Desk – chippy and shabby
I asked The Hubs to figure out how to hang the eggbeater on the wall with my other kitchen things, and he decided to make a hook:
Eggbeater hook.Eggbeater on hook.
Here it is on the wall with some of the other vintage kitchen things. The ads for canned fruit and cookies came out of a 1922 Ladies Home Journal. All I need now is a vintage rolling pin with green handles and my wall will be complete! Well, maybe… 😃
As I mentioned in the bench results post, I recently brought this desk/dressing table to my house from Mom and Dad’s, and I needed to move it into the storage room.
Grandma’s dressing table.
In order to fit the desk into the storage room, I had to take almost everything out of one side of the room. There are two sides of the storage room, one for miscellaneous furniture, etc., and one for my hiking/backpacking/camping things and vintage treasures. I don’t have a photo of what the room looked like before I took everything out, but here’s what the bedroom looked like after I emptied the storage room into it:
A lot of stuff, and that isn’t even all of it.
Some things just got moved over to the other side of the storage room.
That’s Consuela the Mannequin. She helps me with my Etsy shop. The Sis-In-Law gave me the giant bag of packing peanuts.
I keep a lot of empty boxes to ship my Etsy items. They take up about 1/3 of the room. I have many ceramic Christmas village houses selling on Etsy that will need the large boxes to ship them.
Here is what the storage room looked like when I got most of the stuff out of that one side and after we moved the desk in. We bought one of those 4-wheeled furniture dollies at Harbor Freight and rolled it in on that, and then just left the desk on top of it.
I like empty frames, as you can see by this frame wall in my office.
I bought many of the frames below at an antique mall in Aurora, Oregon, that was having a parking lot sale. They were all $1.00 and $2.00 apiece, which is ridiculously cheap. I bought most of the pile at the sale. Some of the others I got at the Mama Roost yard sale and they were ridiculously inexpensive as well. In order to fit everything back into the storage room, the frames had to go upstairs to a newly cleared spot in the hall. (The upstairs “hall” is also a storage area.) I didn’t realize how much space they actually take up.
I like frames.
The Hubs suggested putting the old door on top of the desk (with a carpet remnant under it). That allowed more space to put things on top of the desk. The door came off a “shed” that was in our yard when we moved into this house. In order to build the shop, the shed had to come down, as the city only allows 600 square feet of outbuildings total on a property. Now, if you attach your shop to the house you can go as big as you want, but The Hubs didn’t want to take the chance that his welding would burn the house down. The door still has both doorknobs and the robe hook. I think it might have been one of the original doors to the house, as there is one just like it that they used for the upstairs bathroom. The doors in the rest of the main house seem to be from the 1970s when the house was remodeled.
I gradually moved the rest of the things in:
Finished product.
You’ve probably noticed that I also like tall vintage lamps. Well, lamps in general. Someday I will have a place to use them. This is my OTHER bag of packing peanuts. I have enough for quite a lot of shipping. And I have enough boxes as well. I have over 100 things for sale on Etsy right now, plus bins of things that aren’t even listed yet, so I need to have a variety of boxes for shipping. I wish I had some sort of box closet so they wouldn’t have to be in the storage room, but that won’t happen until The Girl moves out and I can move half the stuff up to her room, ha.
I was happy that I did the whole job in just a couple of hours and was feeling all proud of myself and everything, until later I remembered that the mirror to the dressing table was left behind the cedar chest in our bedroom. Arrgh! Now I have to move things out again to find a place for the mirror so it won’t get broken. Can’t have a dressing table without a mirror!
After church today I put on my painting clothes and went out to dry brush the bench. I chose a small and not very fluffy paintbrush and used a door and trim paint by Sherwin Williams called Whitetail. (I forgot to take a photo of the can.) It’s the same color of the walls in our kitchen and laundry room.
I dipped the paintbrush just barely into the paint, scraped the paint off on the sides of the paint can, and then dabbed it on a paper towel to get most of the paint off for the dry brush look.
Dry brushing technique.
Then I brushed the paintbrush back and forth lightly over the bench. There were a couple of spots where I got a bit too much paint on, but I started on the back of the bench to make sure I knew what I was doing before I got around to the front, so most of those don’t show.
It really brings out the wood grain.
Finally, here is the finished bench in the sun:
And in its place on the back porch:
I think it needs a pumpkin and a pot of fall mums…and it looks a lot neater in person.
The Girl, Marnie, and The Hubs (in that order) have all approved of the bench, yay!!! It will look better after the house is painted, whenever that happens.
No more painting projects for awhile, it’s on to work-work and writing for me, along with rearranging the storage room so we can put my grandma’s desk/dressing table/mirror in there with its matching head/footboard and dresser. It is in the waterfall style, probably from the 1940s. When Grandma passed away in 1992 the bed and dresser came to live with me, but I didn’t have room for the dressing table and little bench. It has finally come (with some dead spiders) to my house after 30 years in Mom and Dad’s garage. Dad needed the space for a worktable.
Grandma’s Dressing Table (Excuse everything else in the photo. It is our laundry room/furnace space.)
The dressing table and its siblings will probably need to be painted someday unless I can get someone to refinish them. Right now I don’t have the skills to do it properly, but I suppose I could learn. The wood is so pretty it would be a shame to cover it up!
I’m sure I’ll post something about the storage room clearout as I’m going through. Cleaning out and rearranging = good fun!!
Today we took Marnie’s daughter, Aryn, to a bunch of estate and garage sales so she could see how it’s done. We went to quite a few sales, but we started at one that was supposed to have been the estate of a lady who had once been an antique dealer. She had a lot of Asian art and things and Aryn found a beautiful kimono for a very reasonable price. Marnie got a few things too, and I ended up with quite a selection of goodies from that sale. And we all got quite a selection of goodies throughout the day!
One of the things I brought home from the first sale was a “grab box” full of random things for $5.00. After unboxing this box I wished I had bought all the other grab boxes they had as well! Here are the unboxing photos:
This is how it looked when I got it.Here we go!Red Mystery TinI poked it with my finger and I still don’t know what it is. The red came off on my finger, so ink pad, maybe? It seems to be Chinese.Very cool stand-up magnifying glass for beadwork, etc.Brand new rubber stamp shaped like a calendar. Silver cord. I don’t know what it’s made of, but it would be great if it was conductive!Brand new set of tiny 8mm letter stamps.Brand new stamp pads, green and black.Very handy file set.Bondic. I think it’s a glue thingy? I will have to Google it.Rub-On metallic colors. I can think of some projects I might use these on.Scratch Removal Cloth – removes scratches from paint. Maybe I will try one on my van.Yoku Moku tin. Probably originally contained cookies.Kind of a tangle.Besides the tangle of jewelry pins, a bag of jewelry pins, a nickel, a pushpin, safety pins, a tangle of gold wire, jewelry clasps, a necklace with knots in it (says “sterling” on the clasp) and some black cord.Paint palette, I think.Watercolor paints.
Pretty neat stuff, huh? The magnifying glass and files alone are worth much more than $5.00. If you know what is in the mystery tin, do tell!
The pièce de résistance of our day for me was this:
Finally, I got an old typewriter!! I’ve been looking for one for a long time that was in good shape and the right price. Yay!! (It’s still in the car because it weighs a ton and I need to clear a space for it before I have The Hubs bring it in.)
So a great day for estate and garage sale-ing! Success!!
every day's just like starting over 