Weekend junk finds

The neighbor girls that are Maren's best friends have a mom who loves yard sales and thrift stores just as much as I do. She brought them home some Build-a-Bear clothes last weekend, and oh, was Maren envious! She asked me if we could go yard-saleing to look for clothes for her bears too--Uh, no need to ask me twice! Unfortunately we had to take Little Brother with us so our saleing time was limited, and even more unfortunately for Maren, we never did find any Build-a-Bear clothes (apparently those are a hot commodity at yard sales!), though we did pick up a darling handmade red hooded cape for her Felicity doll. Even though Maren didn't find what she was looking for, I scored big at two sales!

The first sale was a normal garage sale not far from my house, held by an older lady who is a committed crafter. From the looks of her sale, there's not a craft out there that she hasn't tried at one time or another over the past 50 years.

From her I bought all of these fun vintage cake decorations, including the uniformed bride and groom in the middle.

She had everything--boxes and boxes of fabric, ribbon, trim, vintage Christmas doo-dads, millinery flowers. I bought a ton at her sale and now I wish I had bought more!

The other sale was an estate sale I'd been trying to get to for two days but was thwarted by a sleeping child and a set of bad directions. I finally rolled in at noon on Saturday, half-price day, and knew immediately that this was the type of sale I wish I'd been to on opening day.

The prices were yard-sale-cheap, even before the 50% discount. My shopping abilities were seriously hampered because I had to keep track of a very cranky toddler, but I grabbed and stuffed where I could.

$1 Jadeite? It has a flaw but since it's for my own collection and not to be sold, I don't mind one bit. I found a pint Hazel Atlas canning jar that may end up turned into one of these.

There was also a big box of vintage wrapping paper with some really great Christmas, wedding and baby shower prints that will be fun to go through in more depth. (My vintage Christmas wrapping paper collection is getting totally out of hand; that might be a good project for this summer.)

A nice little haul for only two sales! Now that the big kids are finally out of school, I'm planning to hire a babysitter each Friday morning so that I can go estate and yard-saleing without the kids. Maren and I may still head out on Saturday mornings in search of Build-a-Bear clothes, which sounds like fun to me!