Weekend Finds: Only a Little Belated! (Goodwill a palooza)

Good morning!

As promised, I did manage to get all my weekend finds photographed and ready for you today. OH. MY GOODNESS. I bought way too much stuff on Saturday. 

I picked up my dad and we decided to do the gauntlet of Goodwills down Gallatin Road (trip G, for those in the know...I'm kidding, I just like alliterative phrases). This means the Gallatin Goodwill, the Indian Lake Goodwill, the New Shackle Island Goodwill, and the Rivergate Goodwill. We could have kept going and hit the East Nashville Goodwill, but we were overspent both financially and physically at that point, and threw in the towel.

Wanna see what we got? You know you do!

Weirdly enough, this is a) one of my favorite things I bought and b) one of the things I struggled with whether or not to buy! It's a painting, about the size of a piece of copier paper, in a heavy wood frame, of what looks like someone's long-ago lakeside house. Check out the boat dock and the screened in porch on the 1910's? 1920's? looking homestead. The picture is signed "P.E. Hunt" and has this masking tape provenance on the back of the frame:

Walter! What are you doing getting rid of your "memento from Grandmother Eddy-Stout's"?! This picture reminds me of the two or three tiny, similar canvases my grandma's father, a Cape Cod fisherman in the thirties' and forties', did of local lighthouses in his old age. When you think about whoever painted this piece being an amateur, it's really heads and shoulders above a lot of the bizarre things I see in the Goodwill pictures bin! What kept me on the fence about buying it? Its $6.99 price tag. "That's a lot for a little picture like this!" I said to my dad. "Do you think it's reasonable?" He did, and home it went with me, where it goes JUST PERFECTLY in my green room den/computer room. I'll have to show you what I've done with that space sometime this week or next, I've finally just given in to my TGIFriday's aesthetic of "HANG EVERYTHING ON THE WALL", but I think it works!

This 1920's or 30's clipping of birds in its chipped-to-pieces frame was appealing to me for the very reason that it was probably dug out of someone's attic after years of disuse...doesn't the weirdness of the bird subject and the faded quality of the print make it something else?

I'm am really in a fashion rut for late forties' things right now, and this embroidered-collar dress might have looked very nineties' with its original, straight-shift under-piece, but as that was missing when I found it at the Gallatin Goodwill, I had no compunction about pairing it with a low cut, flared skirt dress yesterday to have this kind of almost Turkish robes, 1920's marketplace thing going on. Plus, this kind of embellishment reminds me of things I've been drooling over in the bound volume of 1947 Harper's Bazaar parked at my desk, so it was buy, buy, buy.

This distressed Catholic statuette of Jesus, sacred heart and all, was sitting in the housewares section of the Indian Lake (Hendersonville) Goodwill, and I about died. $2.99 folks. AND. ANNND: One, the gorgeous, fifties' paint on Him, in beautiful peach, red, turquoise, and gold; two, the way said paint is rubbed off around His poor nose and forehead; three, the fact that it's an almost antique Catholic statue here in the middle of the predominantly Protestant Bible belt, in a GOODWILL, where I can buy it. Three cheers!  Isn't it dreamy? I don't usually buy religious items (see: recent purchase of Dali's interpretation of the Last Supper as another exception), but this was just too good to pass up.

Here's another example of "I shouldn't buy it, it's too expensive" from me. I picked up this pan in the same Indian Lake Goodwill, and went "GahLEE this thing is heavy!" (because at times, I sound like I am blood related to Gomer Pyle). I actually brought it over to my dad to show him how heavy it was, as he perused the t-shirts for school colors. "That thing IS heavy!" he agreed, hefting its weight. "We're talking a PROFESSIONAL. SKILLET. HERE! Man!" Yes, both of us come from the school of "if it is heavy, it is probably of great value." And the Goodwill pricing people agreed, as this pan was $8.99 to the other pans four to five dollar range. Still, I stuck to my intuition (and my need of a heavier duty pan to cook the millions of vegetables this diet has me cooking on a daily basis) and pulled the trigger on it.

What sold me, other than the weight? The crazy cute midcentury illustrations of all the sorts of things I could cook in this pan, naturally. When I got home, I looked up the  words "Markley" and "Descoware" (the only markings other than adorable abstract sheep and lobsters), to find that this was a pretty top of the line pan in its 1950's-era day. The Markley design in particular seems to be collectible (duh, which is why I wanted to collect it), and right now there's a smaller skillet from the line on ebay for $34.99, another for $49.98. Things get more expensive on Etsy, as they are wont to do-- here's a saucepan for $69.99 and a dutch oven (a VERY CUTE dutch oven, omg) for $80.00. So my nine dollar purchase is vindicated! Also, the clerk who checked us out remarked encore une fois upon the heft of the skillet. "Don't go hurting anybody with this thing! This is like a self defense weapon." Way to take it to a dark place. But seriously! This pan is serious!

This shirt was at the New Shackle Island Road Goodwill, and is a rare sight to see nowadays. I was complaining on the drive over about how, when I was in high school, I could buy my own weight in polyester print dresses and shirts and skirts at any given second hand store. The hardest thing was finding one that wasn't somebody's-zepplinesque-grandmother's size or the tiny bird size of other people's grandmothers. Was there no in between for an average sized girl of above average interest in polyester day wear? Now, however, it's IM.FREAKIN.POSSIBLE to find crazy seventies' prints, I guess because they're the first thing snapped up by resellers? Or just because everyone-who-would-have-cleaned-out-their-seventies'-wardrobe-from-the-attic has already done it? My dad had similar woes to share about the old Friedman's locations (I think there used to be three altogether, including Nolensville Road and a Gallatin Road location-- now there's just the original one on 21st ). While he still took us religiously around to those Nashville army surplus stores in the summer, picking for goodies in huge bins that smelled of oil and moth balls, he said when he was a teenager, the place was chock FULL of WWII stuff in addition to all the Vietnam era surplus. "I used to see buckets, I mean buckets, of mess containers and shovels and all kinds of stuff...I saw a shovel in its case at the flea market last week, you know what they wanted for it? SIXTY. DOLLARS. It still had a clod of dirt on it from when somebody used it on a boy scout trip or something in the sixties' or the seventies', and they wanted SIXTY. DOLLARS. for it. Can you believe that!" I can, Pappy! The changing tides of old stuff is hard for us old stuff collectors.

Look how crazy the print is though. A tree, in Greece, surrounded by Victorian sightseers. And the same replicated on the back! Mr. Fine of Dallas, you have outdone yourself, truly.

I lunged for a "Country Sophisticate" jacket in an eye popping teal- and-purple-flowers print in the blazers section, which turned out to be zoot-suit-sized too big, but I was rewarded in my efforts with this small sized sequin jacket. Oh! The sequins!  It's lovely on, too-- in my heart of hearts, when I'm not dressed like Joan Crawford circa 1946, I would appreciate being dressed like her circa 1968...that regal, older-lady-with-panache kind of over the topness that keeps Bob Mackie's ready wear in business.

This is a robe of some unknown ethnicity...I think Middle Eastern?...that was in the dress section, and I fell crazy in love with the detailing on the buttons and the embroidery at the bottom. With a cinched belt and a skirt underneath, like the other embroidered piece, it turns into an a-line type dress. I love all the little stitching and how dramatic the pattern is for an otherwise plain black garment. I WILL be wearing this, toute de suite.

Before I even got started on Goodwillapalooza 2014, I dropped by a yard sale that was just the other side of the tracks from me in Inglewood. Literally, if it wasn't for the placement of a railroad track whose bridge was further down, I could have easily walked to this sale. Eartha Kitsch sent Rae and me a message earlier in the week going, "You do NOT want to miss this sale, girl has got some GREAT STUFF". When Eartha says go, by Godfrey, I go! Rae and I both heeded the call, as we bumped into each other with our respective husbands bright and early that Saturday morning! She and Travis got some great photos, a kooky lamp, and a forties' or fifties' cake tin I am still too jealous of to quite describe to you (haha, I kid, couldn't be in a better home....anditwaspinkandturquoisewiththewordcakeonit *stifles sob*), and I got these little goodies. Eartha told no lie-- one, people were swarming the place like they were giving away treasures even in the pouring rain (the sale was thankfully in a car port and screened in porch), and two, everything there was like a distillation of the best stuff you would see at several estate sales. Which it probably was! Good eye, that picker.

Here's what I brought home:

I put my foot down on cameras a while back, and $10 wasn't a very good price on this Brownie six-16 Target, but I'm legitimately afraid I will stop seeing these things as much as I have in the past, and my fear drove me to pull out my pocketbook. In my sixty-some-odd camera strong collection, I actually don't have this deco-y little model (circa 1946-1951), and since it came with the box...I caved. I CAVED. I might never be able to fully stop buying cameras...I don't know what it is that appeals to me so much! The box's iconography, the way, if you had film for it and could process it yourself, that this camera would still work, no strings attached, no batteries required, today...they're pretty much my favorite collectible after clothes, framed pictures, and lamps (see: my horribly overcluttered house for more details).

Hats were $2 apiece...act like I wasn't going to get one. Or two. The black hat on the right is actually much cuter in real life, I'm always reminded of Audrey Hepburn in that one scene in Sabrina when I see cap-ish little fifties' hats like these.

Ok, seriously! End of the line! This is the last thing I bought, for $3:

What you should know about this photo-- it's HUGE! Well, in comparison to other photos of its time, definitely larger than life....maybe two feet wide by a foot across. The subject matter ("Man on Horse, Old") and the large format made me want to buy it for my collection of photos you wouldn't want to bump into unawares in the middle of the night...check the expression on the horse, and the expression on the man riding it:

What always bums me out about seeing photos like this is the person sitting for the photo's sense of how important this photo would be. You know what I mean? Nine times out of ten, I find pre 1900's photos in dismal states of disrepair...which of course, make them more interesting to me, but if I were the photograph or portrait's subject circa 1877, getting all gussied up for "a portrait for the grandkids to remember me by", I would be rolling over in my decades-old grave as the picture sat in someone's attic or barn or storage unit until it was eventually sold to a stranger with the half-hearted caveat, "We don't even know WHO that is, somebody's great-uncle." Being a collector of pictures, I'm glad they did forget who so-and-so was and have his poor picture for sale at discount prices, but dang! I also feel sorry for the guy who thought this photograph was going to carry his existence on in his family into the next century, for generations to come.

AN-Y-W-AY, how about you? Did you find anything good out at the sales this weekend? Are you a junk store addict who really COULD while the whole day away at store after store (I think I've answered that question for you on my behalf)? Which of these finds do you think was the best buy? Let's talk!

That's all for today, I gotta get to the business of shifting books (luckily, I'm reading this insanely compelling-to-read Patricia Highsmith collection on audiobook, so I'll have some nasty-pieces-of-work possible murderers to keep me company)...you have yourself a great Tuesday! And I will see you back here tomorrow. Til then!