Find of the week

This week we went on our first little jaunt to the local op shops since before Christmas and I found this old school desk. It had a $60 price tag on it, but it was loose and didn’t seem to belong to the desk so I asked just to check. The lady said I could have it for $10. Sold! I traded a playdate for Tricia’s courier services which was really a double win for me as it kept Lil happy too.

I’ve had my eye out for a double school desk for a while now. It just needs a bit of a clean-up and to have those stickers scraped off the top. The surface is a laminate that looks a bit like linen material.  Now I need to find a couple of old school chairs.

I have visions of a craft station type set-up drawing inspiration from pictures like this:

Image from Tree Fall.

Image from Childhood 101.

Image from The Happy Home.

I’m linking up with Flea Market Finds at Her Library Adventures.

Two Cheshire Cat Books

I’m finding it a bit difficult to get back into the swing of things after the holiday. It’s a busy time of year and it feels like we have a lot going on. I still have this lingering cough/cold and Edward is not 100% either. We had his first morning at daycare today. I stayed with him and he went downhill while we were there. By 11am he was putting his head in my lap and he fell asleep in the car on the 10 minute drive home. Hopefully he’ll be feeling better again tomorrow.

Anyway, last week I had a lucky op-shop find that I wanted to share for Flea Market Finds.

I spied these two Cheshire Cat books and was drawn to the covers. I had a quick flip through and decided to get them without reading any of the text.

Lillian chose So Many Henrys to read first. We were both very excited to read this on the first page:

It’s a book about a boy from Dundee, just like Lillian. The rest of the story was pretty good too. He travels around and learns how they say Henry in different countries. And the illustrations by John Kuzich are fantastic:

The second book also has a Scottish connection. It’s about Finn MacCool the good Irish giant who outsmarts Culcullen, the mean Scottish giant, and explains how the Giant’s Causeway was made.

So, sometimes it does pay to judge a book by its cover and I was happy to have parted with $1 for these.

Drama at the op shop

Well this doesn’t happen every day. This morning I had a top I was looking at stolen right out of my hands from an op shop footpath display by a woman on a bike! She also grabbed some soap gift sets before she took off. Further down the street she rode right in front of a car at a pedestrian crossing and was hit. She was fine but the bike was most definitely not and I felt sorry for the poor woman who hit her as the shoplifter hurled abuse at her for bending her bike. The op shop manager called the police but before they arrived the driver had told her to put the bike in the car and they’d driven off together. Yikes. I wonder what happened next? Perhaps the driver bought her a new bike? It was a nice top too and only $1. I was going to turn it into a dress for Lil.

Plates of my past

These plates with the little green flowers were our every day set when I was growing up. I’ve ended up with two of the bowls from that original set and this week I was excited to find two little plates to match at the op shop! They were on the top of a pile of plain white plates that had an $8 sticker for the lot. I really only wanted the two with flowers so I asked nicely and the Vinnies lady let me have them for 50c each. Lillian loves the bowls, and loves that I used to use them when I was a kid, so she was also excited to see the plates.

I have two other plates from my childhood that Lillian likes to use, and really, who wouldn’t feel happy eating off a rainbow plate? I doubt I’ll ever come across any more of these in an op shop but I would be very excited if I did.

Another plate I remember and would love to find again is this Peanuts one. I tracked down this image on a Peanuts collectors site but it’s not for sale. (Dad, Tim, do you know what happened to this one?)

Our cupboards are full of mismatched crockery gathered from here and there and I kind of like it that way.

I’m linking up again with Sophie’s Flea Market Finds.

(Three more days to enter the Printspace giveaway!)

More oppy finds

Edward and I had a visit to two local op-shops last week and came home with this little pile of goodies. So what did we find? The anodised cup matches the three I found out on the footpath last year. The little chopsticks are for Lil and she’s been eating (or trying to eat) breakfast, lunch and dinner with them. The cute mug is a Christmas mug which has been put away and may come back as a present. I also got a box of wooden chopsticks. (We used to eat with chopsticks all the time but got rid of them before the move to the UK.) The pile of material is three smock aprons that I plan to turn into dresses for Lillian. I’ve just finished sewing one of them but need Lil to come home from her friend’s house to try it on. On the bottom of the pile is a big piece of dark denim material that I’d like to use to make a skirt for Lil and maybe some pants for Ed. Not pictured is the bright blue puppy with orange hair that the old ladies gave to Ed.

Here’s a better look at one of the aprons.

Visit Her Library Adventures to see what others have found!