A Little Looking…

Yesterday I had a DMV appointment a few towns away. The appointment went well, but I dread thinking about what my photo will look like. Thankfully not many folks ever see my license!! But as a treat on the way home I stopped into my favorite boutique thrift store that always has great items and sweet volunteers.

Some of the fabulous things this time included shelves of lovely old silverplate and a Native American rug. And I really wanted to buy something.

But in the end I couldn’t find anything that was BOTH good and priced for me as a reseller. And that’s how it is a lot of the time. I can’t even calculate how many hours I spend in a year wandering and looking in all different kinds of venues and come up empty handed or with very little. Crazy when I think about it. Hours and hours. I love looking, still it’s a lot of lost time when you think about it.

One of the vloggers I follow has a huge reselling biz that includes a warehouse and millions of dollars in inventory. He no longer sources at thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales, etc. He looks for opportunities where he can buy in bulk–like buying a whole estate or someone’s collection. He says you’ll never grow otherwise because you’re wasting too much time sourcing. And he’s right, but frankly I don’t want to grow bigger! If anything I’d like to be smaller and more selective.

Well back to DMV day, I headed to another boutique thrift store down the street that sells mostly clothes and jewelry. I rarely buy anything here, but I thought I’d take a look at the jewelry which is spread out all over the small store above the clothes racks. In the end, after looking at hundreds of new necklaces and bracelets I spotted this vintage rhinestone bracelet by La-Rel and was a smitten kitten. I haven’t captured its beauty here, but the rhinestones have a lot of flash. (La-Rel was a New York manufacturer who produced “rhinestone magic” in the 1950s.)

This month has also included a few trips to my neighborhood thrift store where there’s more competition these days from other resellers with their phones at the ready looking things up. But I did manage to score two Villeroy & Boch rice bowls.

This quality German brand is one I always look for and one that sells for me. Just recently I sold two of their pressed glass “Miss Desiree” wine goblets.

And finally today I went back to our local monthly flea market. For one reason or another I haven’t been here in nine months!!

I didn’t buy much. It was more of just-having-fun outing. But I did buy the carved wood female nutcracker with long legs and pert breasts, likely Hawaiian, and the Italian mid-century carved alabaster trinket box with hand-painted flowers. Neither are valuable or rare, but they are nice bread-and-butter items.

And lastly an apology. I discovered that WordPress has been sending some of your comments to my spam folder! I have no idea why but I will try to monitor that better moving forward.

Wishing you all happy hunting,

Karen