Weekend Market report 7/10/2010

Welcome to the Weekend Market Report.

This regular feature is a joint venture between myself and Diann from The Thrifty Groove.

I share my adventures at the Farmers Market, and Diann shares her adventures at the Flea Market.



This weeks Farmers market adventure started Friday, when I found a nursery/greenhouse having a clearance sale. I picked up a whole bunch of Geraniums for a price too good to pass up, and took them with me to the market today.

It's a good thing I did, because I didn't sell any potted herbs. But I sold about half of the geraniums.

I had 3 different mints, oregano, dill, marjoram, savory, chives, and epazote in pots, and I had apple mint, peppermint, oregano, tarragon, savory, marjoram, sage, and lemon verbena, cut. I sold out of lemon verbena, some savory, tarragon, and apple mint.

I sold a lot of bottles of water, it was a hot muggy day. I didn't sell any rock herb markers, but one woman asked me if I would make her a full set, to match the herbs she grows. She said she would e-mail me her list of herbs. We'll see what happens.

I cut out of the market a bit early so I could head back to the campground. When I left yesterday, I had Bingo's carseat in my truck, and Diann and Bingo were effectively trapped at the campground with no car seat. Not a pretty situation.

If I had stayed the last two hours, I may have sold more water. I have never really sold anything else the last 2 hours anyway.

I made lots of contacts, and spent some time educating people about how to use herbs. It seems like I do more of that than anything else.

Hi Everyone!

It's "Market Report" time!

As most of you know, we went camping this weekend. We are still camping for one more day.

Friday evening Troy drove back home to get things ready for the Farmer's Market Saturday morning. The Princess and I stayed here at the campground. Troy came back up to the campground after the Market yesterday.

So, while he was doing his thing, I was doing mine! Yup, I was thrifting. I went to a thrift store, a yard sale, an Antique Mall, an Amish Store, 3 craft/vintage stores, a consignment shop and a used furniture store.

What's really amazing, is I didn't buy very much at all. Everyone's prices were out of my budget. I saw a ton of stuff I would have loved at the antique mall of course, but I was bargain hunting and not antique shopping. Big difference.

I forgot to take any new pictures at the thrift store. I have talked about this store before. But, I took pictures of the other places. Originally I had planned on showing you everything I bought at each of the stores in this post. But, that would be a pretty big honkin' post.

But, I will give you some sneak previews and show you some of my adventuring now and some later in the week.

Here is what I got at the thrift store.

 

A Pair of silver candle sticks. I’m not exactly sure what they are made of. Someone tried to clean them and soaked them in some kind of cleaner and really damaged them. I think they were plated and the silver plating came off. I got them for $1.00. They are probably going to be ear marked for a makeover.

I know this did not start life out as a cloche, but it will be one now.

I just thought this metal plate was so pretty. I haven’t come across a lot of pretty metal plates.

As you can see, this pretty plate has some wear and tear on it. The flower design is wearing off on the center part. But, a pretty Homer Laughlin plate for .25 cents is still a pretty little treasure.

Our next stop was at a yard sale. Also no picture of the sale. It wasn’t a very good yard sale. Most of the things were way over priced and even then, not much I was interested in. I did find this old Home Interior shelf that was abuse to death! Had it not only been .50 cents, I would have walked past it. Someone put a ton of screws all through it. This shelf will definitely be a fixer upper!

Next came an antique mall. Of course, I was drooling all over the place at all the gorgeous things! Way, WAY out of my range of spending. But, still lots of things to dream about!

Yup, that would be my purse wide open, just dropped right there at a stack of linens! I snapped a quick picture then immediately plopped my butt on the floor and started going through the boxes. This vendor had a bunch of these linens marked 50% off so, I just had to look!

I bought 3 items.

An embroidered dresser scarf for $1.25.

Another pink dresser scarf. $1.50

And an embroidered pillow case. $1.00

 

I stopped at this cute little shop. Lots of fun things to look at but, I didn’t end up buying anything.

We got there about 15 minutes before they were closing. I would like to have had a cup of tea in the tea room.

After we left his store, we walked to the next one and this was in between the two shops. I thought it was so cute.

Okay, that’s it for today. I will show more of our adventure later this week. As a matter of fact, I think tomorrow will be another post about my day thrifting. I hope you have enjoyed spending a little of my day with me!

Be sure and join me each Tuesday for Tuesday Trivia Tie-in, where readers are invited to share trivia and show off their treasures. Read all about it here

A Good Deal Popped Up

I have never been one to call myself cheap. Thrifty, frugal, economical, maybe but not cheap.

But that doesn't mean I don't like cheap things.

One of the things we have really been trying to do is find cheap snacks. It seems like there are two kinds of snacks.
Type A) Expensive, fattening and delicious.

Or

Type B) Cheap, nutritious, and unsatisfying.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but not a very big one.

But one thing that Diann and I both like is popcorn. Now, you can go buy those bags of microwave popcorn, if you want, and I admit, they are quick and easy if you are desperate, but nothing beats the taste of real fresh popped corn.

We have a popcorn popper. It's a really nice one. It looks kind of like this:



It has a 12 oz kettle and is capable of popping about 250 oz. of corn an hour. For those of us who aren't math whizzes, I got out a pencil and paper and figured it out. That's about 15 lbs of unpopped corn. For reference, when you go to the movies and order a large popcorn, you are getting about 3 oz. so our popper can make somewhere around 80 large theatre sized popcorns an hour. (I bought this back in the mid 90's, and it was a thrifty deal when I got it, but that's a different story for a different day.)

So, we don't use it much at home. It's great for family reunions, neighborhood parties, or church and PTA carnivals, but for home we needed something a little smaller.

We have been looking, and to buy a new popcorn popper we couldn't find anything less than about $30, so we have been putting off buying one. We have been checking thrift stores, trying to find a used one, but all we could find were those air-pop poppers, and we weren't quite willing to sacrifice the flavor of "real" popcorn yet.

So Diann has been making popcorn the old fashioned way, in a 6 qt pot, on top of the stove. I've never made popcorn this way, and have no idea how to do it, so every time I wanted popcorn, I had to give Diann some subtle hints, like leaving the pot on the stove along with the canister of popcorn, a bottle of oil, and maybe a couple of empty bowls. (yeah I know, subtle isn't one of my strong points.)

The worst part of this deal is that since Diann made the popcorn, it was only logical that I should clean up. Burnt on oil is really hard to scrub out of the bottom of a stainless steel pot.

Well, the other night, at the thrift store, I found this treasure:



And what made it more of a treasure was the price. I paid $3.99.

Just for reference the same model popper, numbered 099 (mine is number 040) was listed on E-bay at the time I wrote this for $89.36.



It was made by the Robeson Cutlery Company at the Perry NY facility. There isn't a manufacture date on it, but it says "PAT PEND". Since some research on the company shows that they applied for the patent on this particular popper on January 17, 1966, and the patent was granted on October 12 1971, so I surmised that it was made between those dates.

A little bit of history on Robeson Cutlery:

Beginning:

Millard F. Robeson founded the company which bore his name in 1879 as a cutlery jobbing firm, operating from his home in Elmira, NY. Selling knives was, at first, a side-line but business grew. Robeson’s first storage area was his dresser drawers but, as additional space was needed, it overflowed into the closet and underneath the bed. Upon returning from a business trip and finding his cutlery inventory moved to the porch, he agreed with Mrs. Robeson that larger facilities were needed. They first came in the form of a new room added to the house, next a new building adjacent to the home, and finally a move to the New York town of Camillus.Read more.

And ending:

...in the 1960’s Robeson soon found itself and its products out of place in a world of big companies, foreign competition, and demand for more basic, non-premium cutlery... ...In 1971, Ontario Knife Co., Franklinville, NY, bought what was left of Robeson cutlery business. The Perry cutlery facilities closed in 1972 with the Robeson line being discontinued in 1977. Read more.

We tried it out tonight.





Now all we need are a couple of good movies to watch.

I will be linking this post to a couple of different blog parties:

Vintage Thingie Thursday at The Coloradolady

And

Thrifty Thursday at Tales From Bloggaritaville