Carbooty

I love junk shops, carboot sales, charity shops. When I was 16 myself and my friends used to get up early on a Saturday morning and trawl through church jumble sales, coming away with fabulous 40's and 50's dresses,  austere or garish, nipped in, fabulous. Add a pair of black or white long suede gloves with dozens of tiny buttons running from wrist to elbow, a pair of seamed stockings for 50p from Woolworths and a £1 a pair of impossibly high stilettoes from the back room of the ancient cobblers shop on Lumley Road where my boyfriend worked as an apprentice, we would dress to the nines for less than a fiver. During lunchtime at college, we would walk to Dead Mans Alley (or Ball Pit Lane - our name was more apt) near the church, and rifle through old suits that a shop there held in dusty piles, remnants of house clearances. Poor mum would get the job of taking them in, taking them up and generally feminizing them. Bees knees indeed.
You can still get bargains these days, but jumble sales seem to be a thing of the past. People realised you could make cash from unwanted belongings, and so the humble jumble drifted away into past tense. Shame.
Still, I love to hunt for a bargain anyway, and though the days of 40's dresses are long gone (not to mention the tiny waist that slid so easily inside the post war clobber. That's what I need, a bit of cake rationing) I still wander round car boots and my eldest daughter and I regularly haunt the charity shops for unusual clothes or ornaments.

I found last week, a set of three buddha faces designed, I imagine to go on a garden wall  - painted dark green with gold smeared on the eyes and lips, they were awful.. but... a can of matt cream spray paint, and they look fab on my wall. £3! For them all! Barg.
I also picked up a set of two long wooden frames with three cut out mounts inside - £1.50 for both.. They each held 3 cartoon postcards of winnie the pooh (dont go there) but then I found a book of 1950 film posters for 75p, clipped out six of my favourite kitchen sink and polanski favourite films, sprayed the frames cream too, and voila.


Proper chuffed with the results.

And the patio... oops.