Going shopping for interesting finds at estate sales is quite hard work! I put in about 6 hours of work on Saturday driving all across North Dallas. That's not including how much time I searched online and the papers for my stops, printed descriptions and maps, and mapsco'd the spots to find a route to travel all before leaving my house in the morning.
So made a number of stops, found some stuff at some places, but not all. Even got the dreaded "garage sale claiming to be an estate sale." Rough! So here's one of the items I found at my first stop, a big triangular jar full of really old buttons! Yeah, I know "woo... buttons... exciting..." But you see, there's really a huge variety here, with no limit on the uses I can come up with! Some look to be extremely old, I have never even seen wooden buttons before. Some with the metal square shaped openings on the back, which I've learned can be from the 1920s and earlier, possibly the 1800s. Got a bag full of vintage lace and ribbon scraps also here. I also picked up some old dice, most likely made of bone.
My last stop on my trip on Saturday turned out to be the best. It was the home of an 89 year old woman who is a painter. She painted in pastels and oils, and her home is just covered in all of her beautiful original artwork. She moved in with family recently to be closer to her loved ones, so the family was selling off a portion of her belongings. Her name is Ina Wood, and she's of the Walter family that was some of the original inhabitants of Lewisville. Her family and friends were very nice and I'm happy I got the chance to meet and chat with them.
From her house, I took home a wonderful assortment of items! I found 2 very pretty white aprons with lace. Some clock parts for my Steampunk fans. 12 Sets of jewelry! I loved her jewelry selection, very colorful and shiny and perfect for my fascinators! Here's the jewelry I found at her place as well as the bone dice from an earlier estate.
In a back bedroom of Ina's house I found a closet with a wonderful selection of hats. I brought home all six and their boxes! Two fuchsia ones, 3 black, and one jewel encrusted blue one. Most came with veils, which I was thrilled about. The veils are in a variety of conditions, I'll have to work to either fix or replace them in time. Here's one teaser shot of my selection. Hopefully I'll get some photos soon of some local ladies wearing my hats out and around in town.
Looking forward to getting new stuff made from my finds!
I love these appliques! I have at least 30 of them now. Seems that I keep adding things to my mental checklist of items to look for, and appliques are new on the list. And so damn pretty! All kinds of sparkly and colorful, all the good things that a design girl like myself drools over. Too much fun. Oh, and the polka dot background? That's an old blouse that I picked up so I can use it to form the disk pad basses of my new fascinators. I love getting to reuse cloth!
Jewelry!!! Oh I am so in love with these items. They mostly came from the very artsy craftsy household that I got most of my appliques from. The gold matching pieces on the left are actually very old belt buckles, and so intricate. So much fun to be had with these items. I'm considering adding the black and gray necklace in with a fascinator I make out of one of the earrings. Matching jewelry is always a must for a lovely Dame.
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