Autumn Picking

Since the North Carolina State Fair has shut down the Saturday flea market, I have had to get my junk fix from yard sales and estate sales. It's funny how I often have the best luck with nearby yard sales while sales across town with enticing ads in the News & Observer often don't have anything. Other rules. "Only good stuff. No junk!" means, invariably, that there is no good stuff and lots of junk. Yard sales out in B.F.E. advertising "cleaning out my barn. Fifty years accumulation!" means a dealer is selling some of his average pieces at full retail and it will cost you $20 in gas to find that out.

I picked up these neat contraptions around the corner in my North Hills neighborhood a while ago. An elderly couple was downscaling out of the neighborhood and held a really interesting yard sale. Because of the universities scattered around, one will periodically come across retired professors who have accumulated a lot of cool stuff over the years. My neighbor apparently served in WWII and had a sextant and astrocompass in their original boxes. 
The sextant is really cool and looks complete in its handsome original box. -Of course I couldn't make heads or tails of it on a bet. It's really impressive how skillful a man had to be with his hands and head back then!

I don't know much about this stuff so I thought that because the astro compass was Canadian and had a less attractive box, it wasn't worth that much. Apparently, I was wrong.

Yard sales held by young couples are usually not good sources for good old junk or vintage clothing. However, I stopped by a sale put on by some cool twenty something folks and I was surprised to find this old Oak splint storage basket being used as a coffee table. It was given to one of the guys by his grandmother and is probably around 100 years old.

Sometimes, one can find the best antique finds when the junk is not where it's supposed to be. For example, the local Junior League thrift gets tons of clothing and relatively recent furnishings. Therefore, they know alot about that stuff. However, this 40's/50's USMC blanket probably showed up out of left field and was priced very fairly. Army and Medical Corp. blankets seem more common than one from the Marine Corps. Plus, this one is in great condition so I grabbed it.