Why I Love Estate Sales

For a total of USD 2.75: a complete baby sweater, lacking only buttons; one finished baby bootie, needing only to be sewn up; a second bootie still on the US size 3 Aero/Bernat needle; a row counter still on the needle (row 19); the pattern book the baby sweater was knitted out of; the remainder of the yarn; plus a nice old pair of shears (25 cents) and a six-foot steel tape measure (50 cents).

Edited to add: I went back on the second day with my husband, and he found these two wooden tubes of old steel knitting needles. I rolled them marked-side-up: they say "12" and "15" and gauge out at about US 000 and US 0, six in one tube and five in the other. Then I found this nice little pair of German five-inch scissors, and an old Susan Bates metal needle gauge that goes down to the US 000 size. Total spent on this lot: 85 cents. (10 cents for the needle gauge, 25 cents each for the tubes of steel knitting pins and the scissors.)



Just for you, psammeadred: They are shiny! I have rehabilitated steel needles that were rusty, but all eleven of these are nice and shiny, not a speck of rust. (Not as common here in Michigan as I would like, since we often have very humid summers.)

(I recently re-read E. Nesbit's Five Children and It -- are you named after the Psammead in that story?)