Stash Enhancement and a Single Perfect Rose
I'm so behind in posting things I've bought this year, I'm not even going to try to post these in order.
I picked up a set of eight 18-inch interlocking kids' play mats complete with black edge pieces at a garage sale for 25 cents. The knit-blocking mats from KnitPicks are a set of nine 12-inch mats for 20 dollars. Score!
On top of them are four pairs of knitting needles, two of those cro-hook needles, and two odd needles, price one dollar.
The octopus is guarding my haul from Kathy Kirchner's trunk show back in May. Five more balls of Valdani crochet thread, one each of DMC, Opera, and Omega threads, and two of the Sew-Mate tatting shuttles, one purple and one green.
We went to an estate sale a while back and I looked all over the house and didn't find a thing. Then I went out in the garage and didn't really find anything out there, either. But then I noticed some tins sitting on an ironing board - yes, out in the garage.
Score! A tin with a little box of tatting thread nestled in the middle of about twenty balls of perle cotton.
This I didn't pay for. I discovered it growing a ways off our walking path.
If you want perfect rosebuds that smell of damp cement, you can buy those at any florist. But if you want old-fashioned rose scent, these beat the florist roses by a mile.
(Why, yes, I have been reading Luca Turin's The Secret of Scent. Gotta love a book about scent with a cover that's a take-off on the Chanel No. 5 box, that starts out on the first page with a footnote about descriptions of Nice, contains lyrical descriptions of perfume scents, that sends me all over the library with references to organic chemistry, crystallography, and how to assemble a simple polarograph in a weekend, and that contains great lines like "Part of the problem here is that soap powder is, this side of a blowtorch, one of the harshest environments to put fragrance in." from the section "Why 'chemical' does not always mean bad".)
Labels: antique/estate/thrift store finds, books, knitting, wildflowers
posted by Alwen | 6:58 AM
10 Comments:
Wow, you've had some major scores there with the garage sales and estate sales! That ton of threads is so evocative ... you can just imagine the history of each one, the projects that were planned, the joy of adding new colours to the collection. Very special.
I need to get some of those foam play mats for blocking too - there isn't anything available that's knit-specific in Australia at all (as KnitPicks won't ship overseas).
I love the sound of that perfume book, brilliant! And what a beautiful flower :)
I just requested that book from the library. Sounds like the sort of book I'll like! Thanks for mentioning it.
Is it what they call a dog rose? I buy my rose bushes for fragrance. Perfume delight is a rave fave, but the old roses are the best!
i really, really want/need those interlocking mat squares. So useful.
And such treasures, of the purchased and floral kind!
Ooh, excellent finds, every one! And at some point I'm definitely going to have to read that book -- I've heard such good things about it. I, too, vastly prefer the smell of real roses to the hothouse variety; it's a completely different experience.
Always goodies to be found at yard sales and junk shops.
Really nice pictures.
It looks like the tin of thread was waiting just for you. Great score on the blocking mats too. I'm sure those will really come in handy.
At my previous house, I grew a bunch of roses. Not one was a tea rose. I had old fashioned shrub roses, climbers that I dug up from the field across the way, etc. All of them smelled absolutely heavenly.
Looks like you have been buzzy shopping this year lol. So many great items, and that play mat looks great for blocking!
Well done - what fabulous ferreting skills you have - I love the feeling of having found something wonderful - and at a bargain price! (and my secuirity word is retried - hur hur!
What a fabulous tatting thread stash! Such beautiful colors, too! :)
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