I discovered our local auction house a few weeks ago, and have very much enjoyed a new source of great deals. Plus, the process is so fun because of the suspense. I have not actually bid on anything live at an auction—that would require hours of sitting there waiting for an item with a small child or two—but I’ve placed absentee bids, and get lovely emails on Friday afternoons after the auctions letting me know of my success.
My coup de gras this week was buying a set of sewing items for $25, clearly from an estate. Maybe this doesn’t seem like a great deal to you—admittedly, it was the very top of my bid range—but at $4 for a spool of thread these days, sewing stuff can really add up. I thought about the woman who assembled everything as I organized my new treasure this weekend—clearly a bit of a packrat, because there were definitely over 100 spools of thread. But she devised some ingenious storage solutions for the thread so not only will I never have to buy thread for the rest of my life, I will always have amazingly organized thread (yes, this is something I worry about).
She also was a button hoarder which makes me the proud owner of a large collection of buttons. This is very ironic because my grandmother was a button collector and it was a hobby that never really piqued my interest. These buttons, thankfully, are not valuable buttons, but they look very much like fun crafty buttons to make all sorts of weird projects with and to let kids string and sift and sort (once they reach the age that they won’t eat them).
Her collection also included 7 thimbles, oodles and oodles of needles (again, one of the things I will never have to buy), scissors, extra pin cushions, all sorts of fasteners, razor blades, threaders, gauges and some eclectic small instruments whose function I still don’t know, and others that I’m sure I’m forgetting.
So while I technically didn’t need any of this, I’m pretty sure it’s a good investment… right?
