The same could be said of the flea market. There’s been a strangely tense vibe there; the quality of the merchandise remains good, but some of the newer dealers seem antagonistic to the concept of haggling. Hey, if I wanted to pay antique mall prices, I’d go to the antique mall, not to an open-air flea market wedged between a cemetery and a softball field.
Nevertheless, I did manage to find a few good things this week:
A Lomonosov Cheetah Cub, an H-R Mama Hippo, and a rather tragic Beswick Dachshund with eight breaks - including her neck! She was only a dollar, and it was obvious that her previous owner must have loved her something powerful: she had enough Quake Hold stuck to her bum to stand a Nataf on its head.
At the very least, she’ll make a nice test subject whenever I get around to teaching myself china restoration. Oh, and I did find one other piece, at the local Salvation Army on Monday - a piece of Kaiser! More specifically, a painted bisque 377 Goose Girl:
I had to stop in to check out the shoe department - the Vita Monster ate ANOTHER pair of work shoes - and I did a fly by of the collectibles department, just because. At first I thought it might have been a fake or a knockoff, but nope, it’s the real thing.
Yeah, this is a tonier than average area for a Salvation Army, and the quality of the merchandise is a shade better than average, but a piece of Kaiser sitting on the shelf next to dollar store knick-knacks? Definitely not a normal occurrence, even around here.
She’s not mint - one little curl of her hair is broken off, but who am I to complain? She was only a dollar more than the pair of shoes I found. (Yes, they wrapped them up in separate bags. They're not heathens, y'know.)
I did do a quick run through the rest of the store to make sure there weren’t any other Kaiser pieces floating around. Fortunately not: if I had found, say, a Kaiser horse next to some tacky Hobby Lobby resin Jesus figurine, the cognitive dissonance would have probably killed me.
(Nothing against religious tchotchkes per se, it’s just that I’m a bit of a snob about them: if it’s not a Hartland, or doesn’t glow in the dark, I ain’t interested.)
I suppose I should throw a little Breyer stuff in here.
The BreyerFest Porcelain SR Aurora was nicer than I expected - not enough to motivate me to buy one this year, though I wouldn’t rule it out in the future. If I hadn’t found all that I had found in the Pit this year, I might have bought a few of the other leftover Porcelains there, including the Party Time, and especially last year’s Dances with Wolves.
The only problem with buying more Breyer Porcelains is that it would necessitate me doing a major reorganization the china cabinet, and I’m really not up for that. I’m having a hard enough time getting done all of the other things I need to get done.
4 comments:
Nice finds! Clinky finds are such fun, I used to have great luck finding H-Rs, Beswicks, and MIJ chinas.
And thank you for spelling "tchotchke" correctly. If I see it spelled "chachki" one more time I'm ramming a dictionary up that person's nose.
I'm amazed at your Kaiser--I have such a fondness for their pieces and so little of it in my own collection! Add in that it is a painted fairy tale piece and I'm swooning! (When I was in high school I saw a painted Meteor stallion on vacation and have been aching for him ever since!)
Our Salvation Army and Goodwill never have any good tableware or figurines, although I've done pretty well in their clothes departments. I've done unexpectedly well at the local antique malls lately, though. There have been lots of figurines and the prices have come down. I scored a Lomonosov red squirrel, a Lefton-type collie pup, and three H-R minis this weekend.
If I had found a Meteor, the entire post would have consisted of exclamation points, punctuated by random bits of gibberish.
I'm no chinahead, but I'm seriously in LOVE with him.
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