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I took a trip to my favorite thrift store this morning and had a fairly good hunt for stuff for my etsy.com shop.

The theme was definitely 70's today with this hand-embroidered picture for a child's room...
This Otagiri ceramic spoon rest with the cute little owls...

Joan Walsh Anglund stationary from 1973...

And a classic 70's coffee maker...

When I came home to put these little goodies in my etsy shop, I had an email from another blogger who has a great site on interior decorating and featured one of my upcycled mirrors.

Fun.

http://decoratinginsanity.com/2011/06/21/bright-colored-mirrors/

All in all, a good day in the world of etsy.com





twoblondsandavan.com/

A Little of This and a Little of That

When the other blond and I go out to yard sales or thrift stores, we are always looking for that really great find that we can list for forty-plus dollars and will sell the same day because its so beautiful and rare.

Those things do come along every week or so, but they are usually accompanied by a lot of other little this-es and thats that may only be worth 10-plus dollars and appeal to a smaller range of buyers. But these things do add up and are part of making the bottom-line come out black instead of red.

This past Friday was a perfect example of a day that turned up lots of these smaller and less-expansive items, rather than one or more really choice pieces.

Linda and I - along with our combined three boys -- headed to a nearby town having a town-wide yard sale, which is always nice because you can basically park the car and explore the town on foot rather than driving from place to place.

It was a sunny, summer morning and the boys were happy to run off with a few dollars in their pockets to see what treasure they could find. My youngest son found some things for himself, like a remote for his Play Station.

My older son decided he wanted to find some things for me to put on etsy for him, and he didn't do too badly. He found this hand-carved tray originally made for deviled eggs, but would be great for sorting beads or jewelry findings.

And I found a couple smaller items like this 1950's View Master... And a pretty bar set with and ice-bucket and matching snack bowls...
So no silver-spoons from Tiffany or Quezal glass lurked among the housewares at the yard sales we went to, but a few pretty things were found none-the-less. Not to mention a nice couple of hours walking around a quaint Pennsylvania town on a sunny, summer morning.

Vacation, Cake Stands and Letting Go

My husband, two sons and both my in-laws all loaded up in the old Suburban on the last day of school and got the heck out of Dodge...or rather, south-eastern Pennsylvania...and headed for sights southward.

We went to Monticello and marveled at one of the founding father's homesteads, and we drove along Skyline Drive and oohed and ahhed at the Blue Ridge Mountains. We went far underground and walked through Luray Caverns, listening to an organ that actually uses stalagmites to make music.



We ate wonderful food on patios built on the cobblestone streets that saw soldiers from both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars march down them.

And we even slept one night in a Yurt...yes, a Yurt - a round, semi-permanent structure made with wood and canvas -- in the Shenandoah Valley

So, with all this activity you'd think I would put aside any thoughts of finding things for my etsy.com shop...you must know me better than that by now.

We were traveling down a back road on Saturday morning - leaving the Yurt and heading towards Skyline Drive -- when, at forty-miles-per-hour, I spotted a glass cake stand with dome sitting on a folding table at a yard sale on the side of the road. I yelled for my husband to stop and we all were flung forward in our seats as my husband slammed on the brakes and then made a u-turn.

I love him.So among our baggage rattling around in the back of the Suburban was this cake stand and dome that somehow made it back home without being damaged...there was also the additional baggage of my back-and-forth internal dialog of what to do about opening a shop.

Any quiet time on the trip, and since we got back (and already took a another trip back to New Jersey - but that's another story), my mind was preoccupied with deciding whether or not to take the plunge into store ownership. The other blond has been wrestling with the same thoughts.

I would love to write here the answer that would make for a good story, that even though we have a million bureaucratic hoops to jump through, fees to pay, a store to renovate and supply with merchandise, that we were going to forge ahead anyway...but this is not a story, this is our lives.

Both blonds came to the same conclusion...although we can both picture this cute little shop filled with wonderful things, the complications, overhead, hours and expense of opening and running it is not something we have to deal with in our virtual shops. And we decided to keep it that way.

So with heavy hearts we closed the door on the dream of a brick and mortar store, but feel a renewed thankfulness for the opportunities our etsy.com shops have given us.

I have traveled a lot of miles this last week, and not all of them were in the Suburban.

New Record

The fastest thing I ever sold on etsy.com was a set of silver salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like owls. My son, actually, was the one who found them and I put them on the site for him. He was thrilled when they sold in three-minutes flat.

The second place winner was a Cosco child's booster seat from the fifties, very mid-century modern. It sold to a man in Italy in ten-minutes.

But yesterday, there was a new winner that supplanted the salt-and-pepper shaker, shaving more than a full minute off the best time and pushing the Cosco chair into third-place. And the winner is...Ta da...this approximately 40-plus year-old metal storage shelf from a garage sale. Sold one-minute after I put it on the etsy shop. I had a feeling it would go quickly, such a great rustic piece and still very useful. The industrial look is very hot right now, and one I like myself.

Ah, rust and dents, big sellers...quick ones too.

Two Blonds and Several Brunettes

It doesn't get much better than this morning...70 degrees, sunny, a church sale on the horizon and the Suburban filled with some of my favorite people...ahhh.

The free community newspaper gave us the heads-up on a church fundraiser in the lovely area of Seven Valleys on this Thursday morning. So, I picked up Linda and her mom Lee, and then headed to my aunt Joan's to pick her and her daughter Gail (my most awesome of cousins) up too for the twenty-minute trip northward.

We arrived just as the doors were opening and the long, long line of our fellow pickers shuffled in to see what the church ladies were offering. The space was large, open and spread out in three areas. When I first walked in I got the same overwhelmed, and slightly confused, feeling I often get at these things. There are so many people and so many directions to go in, I become a little like a deer in headlights.

Eventually, I shook off the feeling and headed towards the jewelry section. I didn't find any jewelry and was beginning to despair that I'd find anything I wanted, when I looked under one of the tables - my heart got a little lighter. I saw this old GE Show-n-Tell player. I had one of these as a kid and loved it. Had to have it!
As I stood up with this find, I glanced up on a shelf in front of me and saw one of the coolest old metal, tub radios I've ever come across. I snagged the radio too and then worried I was spending $10 on only two items, and then I shook that feeling off too and headed for the check out.Once I'd paid for these bulky items, I deposited them in the Suburban and then headed back inside to see if there was anything else I had to have. I ran into Linda with a joyful look on her face, she'd found one of her favorite things, a vintage clown costume (everyone's got their thing).
Blonds and brunettes alike had a successful day at Grace United, as you can see from the back of the Suburban.











I reversed my trip and deposited everyone back at their homes with their treasures.

By 10:00 the Suburban was empty and I was home and putting my finds on etsy.com, hoping for another morning just exactly like this one in my near future.


twoblondsandavan.blogspot.com/

Just Me and My Boys

Yesterday morning my two sons woke up on a Saturday that they could have slept in to go find a church sale with me...aww, their little picker instincts are already embedded in their DNA.

The good part of the day was the gorgeous drive through the countryside, it led us to a little town just on the west side of the Susquehanna river. When we arrived we found there was not only a church charity sale, but it was a town wide yard sale, as well.

Plus, a Bricker's Fries truck had come for the occasion and was parked on Main Street, so the boys couldn't have cared less about anything else - they would have made the trip just for a breakfast of greasy fries.

In the end, we had to be content with enjoying a beautiful May morning, and for me, the company of my teenage sons, but not much in the way of finding things for my etsy.com shop. I have never walked to so many yard sales within such a small area and found so little.I literally found one thing in the entire town to put on etsy. Although it is a pretty cute thing, this mushroom soup tureen from the 70's.

The boys, however, were excited to find an inflatable boat still in the box for $1. So as a reward for being troopers and walking around this town full of cra...stuff we really didn't want...I took them and a friend to a park nearby with a creek. They spent the rest of the afternoon playing in the water with their new boat while I sat on a blanket (incidentally, found at a yard sale the week before) and read a book I had also bought that day. So our yard sale finds may not have been good money makers, but for about $1.75, they helped create a priceless day nonetheless.


twoblondsandavan.blogspot.com

On the Road Again

Oh how I love spring with the fresh scent of yard sale signs in the air...ahh, the long, cold winter of only auctions and thrift store shopping is over.

This morning Linda, her mom Lee and I were out and about in the big, blue van and didn't know which way to go first. There were multi-family yard sales, and estate sales and garage sales in every direction. We settled on heading fifteen-minutes north to an area that listed several multi-family yard sales, hoping we could have as many sales as possible in close proximity.

Of course, we didn't even make it out of town without spotting one that looked too good to pass up...so we didn't. And I'm glad. I found a couple really neat things, like this 60's mod picnic basket. Only 9" x 6" and it holds complete place settings, bowls, cups and utensils for four - and just so funky looking.








When we got to Jacobus, we found a development having a community sale, but there wasn't much but newer, plastic items, or over-priced antiques.

Then we found a few more in the area and our luck changed. I bought a whole box of blue-glass mason jars that someone might like to buy from my etsy.com site as vases for their outside wedding (this is becoming popular).
After several more stops, it started to get late and our purses were getting depleted, but we decided to stop at one last sale. And we were all glad we did, especially Lee, who we decided was the "winner" for the day with this great 50's drink mixer she found for $2.
Tomorrow morning, two church sales...oh I do love the spring.