Just lately I've had some very nice finds at the local charity shops and / or car boot sales. There have been useful items like some shortie pyjamas for DN - Action Man ones, very appropriate for him as he NEVER sits still, and YET more nice bits of toiletries for me - shower gel and soap, that sort of thing.
Monday morning (always a good time to check out the local charity shops as they seem to have re-stocked over the weekend) I found a large sandwich box full of Lego bricks for DN for £2.00. It's nigh on impossible to get hold of the simple Lego bricks any more - everything Lego seems to be as part of a kit to build a specific item - so I was very pleased to find these.
I've had a good run on finding books that are worth re-selling on Amazon too, although I do tend to be uber cautious these days and usually jot down the ISBN numbers of any I see in charity shops so that I can check them out before I actually go back and buy them. This is not just because I'm a total tightwad but also because if I end up with loads of books that are no good I've also got to try and get rid of them again and it can be months before a charity sack comes through the letterbox that will accept books. I won't bore you with a photo of them as they are fairly non-descript looking things with interesting titles like 'Libya under the Second Ottoman Occupation'. Not my idea of bed-time reading but a good find nonetheless. I've even managed to sell a few lately on Amazon too which is nice, and a useful boost to my finances.
What was a wonderful find last week was this bea-u-tiful piece of Liberty Tana Lawn material. There was a whole 4 1/4 yards of it and I only paid £1.00. I had spotted it in a box of material pieces a few days before but wasn't 100 per cent sure that it was Liberty. I spent ages on the internet trying to work out if it was or wasn't Liberty and in the end thought to hell with it, I'll buy it anyway. Once I'd got it back home I miraculously found the exact same pattern but a different colourway being sold on ebay as vintage Liberty. Lovely though it was, and much as I would have liked to keep hold of it, I put it up on ebay with a buy-it-now price and it sold that afternoon to somebody in Japan who collects vintage Liberty to make quilts from. Yup, that was a very nice find indeed, and one I'm unlikely to replicate any time soon.
I haven't been reading your blog for very long but one thing confuses me - if you find yourself with a whole bunch of books that you want to get rid of, and can't (via Amazon) why don't you just give them to the charity shop ? The one I volunteer in has a pretty fast turnover (and incidentally, sells on Amazon too) so it'll be grateful for new stock. But if you have other reasons, I apologie - I'm a newbie to the site, as I said !
Posted by: Ponytail | 05/23/2009 at 04:55 PM