My wife and I enjoy going to yardsales together on Saturday mornings in our small town and the small towns around us. We are seldom looking for anything particular (except sewing machines and parts, of course), and tend to enjoy driving through the neighborhoods that we don’t get to see while going to and from work just about as much as we enjoy the sales.
It’s been a long dry spell as far as sewing machines are concerned, and I had been getting skunked on a regular basis. This weekend, we struck-out in our town again, but there was one yardsale in a small neighboring town listed, so we went. Upon arrival, an Antique Dealer friend from another small neighboring town was just leaving (he likes antique furniture), and invited us to come to his shop to see what new things he’d got in since our last visit. After buying the only sewing item at the sale (a toy “Dressmaker II” for $2 so I wouldn’t get skunked yet again), we almost went home, but headed on over to his shop instead. He hadn’t mentioned anything about what his new items were, but it had been a while since we’d been over that way.
To make a long story short, he had come up with a bunch of sewing machines that I hadn’t seen, and wanted to get rid of some others that I had seen earlier. He made me an excellent offer to take 12 of them, including a machine that I’ve had on my Want List for a while, a Singer Centennial Model 66-18, if I’d take all twelve of them for one low price. We hauled 10 machines and 2 of the four cabinets home with us, and I’ll go back this week for the rest.
Of course, the clean black 221-1 in its original case with all of the trimmings, the nice tan 301A in its original model 269 case with most of the trimmings, the 15-91 in a case, and the three model 15 clones in cabinets and case all helped “sweeten the pot” on the deal. All but two of the other seven machines are also fairly clean, but some are missing parts, and just not very popular models. One of the infamous Necchi Lydia machines (plastic cam stack that is prone to cracking) is in the mix.
If we hadn’t got skunked in our town, we probably wouldn’t have gone to that single out-of-town yardsale, or bumped into our Antique Shop friend. And then to top it off, we just about didn’t go to see what he had, thinking that it was probably furniture. That’s the thrill of the hunt. You never know what you’re going to find, or where you’re going to find it.
CD in Oklahoma