Thrift Sale-ing...

It's late spring here and the lawn and garage sales are in full swing. I've furnished and unfurnished my own apartments across Canada and in Italy at lawn and apartment sales, the Goodwill, Sally Ann, Value Village, junque stores and their ilk for too many years to count. Thanks to friends, I'm currently amassing quite a collection of old wooden mug trees which are really, really handy for displaying bracelets at the market.

Like a lot of you, I scan the jewellery tables for overlooked treasures. I'm not very good at seeing the potential of some things -- I've always been strangely resistant to the idea of taking perfectly good (albeit totally useless) things apart, but I'm getting there.

These are my two latest finds: a sterling silver amber ring and a dragon, phoenix and butterfly pendant. What is more interesting to me than The Great Score is what I can learn. The first thing I learned was that I MUST start carrying with me at all times a small and powerful flashlight and a loupe because of what treasures I can miss.

I almost passed on buying both the almost black and gungy "amber" ring and the "glass" pendant.

I examined the inside of the ring and saw no .925 stamp, which made me suspicious about the "amber". Was it just plastic? It wasn't heavy enough to be glass. I held it under the lamp at the sale. Because I noticed the sheen and also that the high dome wasn't slick and polished like glass or even plastic would be, that there were tiny old, smoothed-over nicks and gouges in the surface, I figured, mmmm, mebbe, mebbe not. But at the very least, it's pretty, and I bought it.

Good thing, because when I got it home and started polishing the band, lookee what showed up invisible under the black gunge:

The .925 stamp was on the outside of the band. I called a friend of mine who buys a lot of estate jewellery and she immediately told me that a .925 stamp on the outside of the band indicates it's made in Poland, and therefore it would be genuine Baltic amber.

My second score was this pendant that I thought was glass and who knows what metal but I kinda thought silver...

But yet again, under the poor light at the sale, I was convinced it must be green glass, and in the end I only bought it because of the dragon and phoenix: I was born under the sign of the dragon, and I'd read many years ago that the phoenix is the dragon's most auspicious partner sign.

I also bought it because it was double-sided and it looked cobbled together and I prefer wonky, handmade things to slick, commercially produced items, no matter what they are. The dragon and phoenix were cast, and I'm presuming likely Chinese because of the tiny cloud that binds their feet at the top (their hands are touching at the bottom and they're looking at each other) and were very obviously cut from some other larger design. They're of a completely style than the butterflies, which are twisted wire and are possibly Bali or Indian silver?

Once I got home and under good light, I clearly saw the banding deep inside the green, meaning this is a huge lump of uniformly milky agate. Dyed, according to what I found online, but oh well. It's still a very beautiful colour and it's not splotchy like a lot of dyed stones are these days.

I'm intensely curious about where this came from. All the metal bits look to be silver, polishes up nicely, but there are great lumps of solder everywhere, and as I said above, it's definitely been cobbled together from many different cut-up pieces. There are what I think are called sprues still poking out here and there that were never filed down. The entire soldered-together medallion on both sides is domed over crossed flat metal strapping over the agate that's also been soldered into place. 

I'm currently looking up the symbolism of the different parts of the medallion. If anyone has come across something like this, I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for looking!

Display & Storage

Like everyone, I have a problem with storage, both at home and to and from a market or show, as well as the display itself. I try to make my table displays do double duty, so that display box lids are closed and 1-inch foam slabs (from a camping foamie) cut to size are used to cushion boards loaded with earrings, necklaces and doodads and everthing gets packed firmly into shopping bags or bins -- where they reside until the next market.

The plasticated or Tyvek flat-bottomed reusable grocery bags are cheap and so handy. Most sizes and heights of earring carrousels fit perfectly into flat-bottomed Tyvek grocery bags, and your earrings won't go anywhere because the bags don't collapse or fall over: cloth bags don't work at all well for this purpose, anyway, and I stopped using them. It'll take a couple of dollars and a bit of experimentation to find which size(s) work(s) best for your personal needs: beads and jewellery and wooden boards can start to get reeeeeally heavy. Overall, though, I've found it's best to try to keep the size of your bins and bags pretty much to the same size for easy storage/loading up your vehicle.

This is my newest acquisition:


Tiny drop marks of water damage I can live with -- when it's on the table the lid will be open.



Secure lock -- this is the second item I have with this lock style.



I have scraps of foam and black stretch velour to line each compartment.
Sometimes being a packrat pays off -- I always have stuff to fix things with!

I'm thinking that if I cut those ribbons that keep the lid propped half open,
then the lid might fall back flat and I could drape necklaces in there... or I could line it with velour and very thin foam and pin things...

 I admired this box on the table of another market vendor on Saturday and Brenda, of Brenda's Magnetics, offered to sell it to me, saying she was bored with it.

"Oooh... how much?"

"Five bucks."

"Sold."

She said she didn't have space in her tiny apartment to store unused display items so she gets rid of them. Unfortunately, I have tons of room here (space I'm rapidly running out of because I have so much freaking STUFF!). I have years' worth of display items that I'm no longer using and no good home for them. Nothing wrong with these items; I simply don't use 'em anymore.

I periodically cruise the Goodwill, Value Village, Sally Ann and lawn sales keeping an eye out for interesting boxes, clamp-on lamps/spotlights and things that can be repurposed into displays. But, still, you'd be amazed at how easy it is to acquire something you admire from another vendor just by asking.

Thanks for looking!

< = >

Less equals more according to Graham Hill. Yes, I have absolutely experienced what he's talking about while camping, whether it's in my truck in the mountains or on a friend's couch, and curtailing my acquisitive packrattiness during the three years spent living in Italy, knowing when I left I would be limited to two checked bags at whatever weight, so why buy???

But, oh, boy, are there ever some scary implications in his talk on Ted.com. Like, for example, how un-American he is, preaching the gospel of Stop Shopping. How dare he? Heresy!

I have read about what a growth industry the storage business is and anyone anywhere can see evidence of it: you can't drive anywhere in any large city or small village without seeing at least one storage facility, with new ones popping up every day. I remember reading a few years ago how people in their McMansions could easily have 5 or more garage-size storage units to hold the stuff they still couldn't find room for in those ginormous excrescences they called "homes": they just couldn't stop buying. (And that's after they'd filled their own garages to the rafters.)

Have you ever been in a position of needing to rent storage, even for a few months? Holy crap, is it ever expensive! I'd bet dollars to donuts what most people would want to store in the end the Goodwill would probably toss in a dumpster, and yet they're willing to add thousands upon thousands of dollars of storage charges on top of the "value" of the items they're storing instead of having a lawn sale and suck up making 10 cents on the dollar (if they're lucky). And how many people in the end end up walking away from their storage units because truly the truth is "out of sight, out of mind". Look at the classifieds: storage unit auctions abound -- there's another growth industry for ya -- and off these items all go, back into circulation, at 10 cents or less on the dollar.

Gawd... I feel positively monastic with my 20 or 30... okay, 40+ boxes of kitchen crap, books, art, art supplies and now jewellery-making crap. I've written before about my project to get rid of one single box or garbage bag of stuff per week. That's slowed waaaaay down. But now it's pyromania season -- I mean fall -- so a lot of my collection of useless paper things (like bills from 15+ years ago -- nope, I really don't think RevCan gives a rat's patootie about those) are finally being used as fire starter. I'm still left with what to do about my books, though. Those expensive art books...? You know, the ones I haven't even looked at for at least three years, if not since several days after I bought them over the past 10 to 20 years? The ones that I paid full price for new and I could buy now at 10% of the list price used on Amazon.ca?

I did discover a trick which I've heard other people telling me they do now, too -- put a book on an online wish list. They're like me: they come back a month or six months later to put another must-have book on the wish list and see the other ones sitting there patiently waiting to be ordered -- and wonder why they're there in the first place.

I have a lot of boxes just like the one Hill brought on stage in his Ted talk. Ones that were far easier and faster to move for the past 10-15 years w/o spending time and going through untold emotional angst looking through their contents. Gaaaah........ I don't need post-its with 15-year-old telephone numbers on them, dammit!

I have a long way to go and many boxes to dispose of, but yes, I would love to get back down into one room again, or better yet an RV's "one room" so I can get rid of needing two possessions: a vehicle AND a room.

I got to Graham Hill's post via here (and here for the original post) but in the meantime have lost the origin of the post by an artist who is struggling with this very dilemma of trying to downsize yet feeling compelled to create more art -- which really and truly is the worst stuff in the world to create, own, accumulate, display, store and/or move.

But then that ties into breaking the buying stuff habit versus buying experience or consumables, assuming experience and creation are equitable. In every recession, do you know what the primary growth industry is? Jewellery, and to a lesser degree accessories. Jewellery, as I've discovered, is such a visceral item to possess I don't think people are going to stop buying it against all logic or state of bank account any time soon. Art -- anything made by hand for that matter -- is equally a visceral occupation that feeds other needs, if not a creator's very essence (or need to eat).

Meanwhile, back in the real world, if I'm lucky today there will be no rush typing coming in so I can go make more jewellery to feed viscera; it's the market tomorrow, plus there are two shows to get ready for next weekend.