A Bazaar Weekend

There is a church up the street from our condo that has a thrift shop in their basement.  It's only open on Wednesdays and with work and my arthritis class I never seem to be able to check it out. Rats. Lucky for me they had a church bazaar this past weekend and the thrifty goods took over the entire (enormous) church building! I was thrilled at the chance to finally check it out and brought Jim and Hetty along with me to share in the fun!

We started out in the basement (since Jim really wanted to get a cheap coffee maker) and had a great time looking at all the housewares. Jim ended up landing a nice Braun coffee machine for $5 (that ironically is the exact same model as the one my grandparents had on the farm) and Hetty and I swooned over the glassware and crystal! Although I would have loved to fill up a wheelbarrow and pushed home a huge pile of vintage dishes I restrained myself and just got a few bargain pieces:

I couldn't pass up the darling little glasses and saucer (at whopping 25 cents a piece) and am always a sucker for a good doily.  After wandering around the maze like hallways and peeking in all the organized little rooms we finally made it upstairs to the jewelry chapel. There was a bit of a line to get in (so the poor volunteers inside don't get overwhelmed with shoppers) and one determined old lady tried really hard to talk Heather and I out of going in.  "All the dealers were already here earlier," she said, "and they left with boxes of jewels - all the gold and silver is gone! There isn't anything worth buying left now!"  Sorry lady. You aren't convincing me - and why would you bother waiting in line if everything is already gone? Odd. Luckily I don't actually care if my jewelry is real gold or not and happen to be a huge fan of gold tone costume gems! Ahha! 

Now onto the finds! They had the chapel divided into nicely organized sections (boy did those volunteers do a lot of hard work!) and I loved being able to check out all the brooches, clips, necklaces, clip ons, earrings, and braceletes all neatly spread out and labeled with bargain price tags! Best of all - the majority of the goods were priced from a quarter to a dollar so everything felt like a deal! I picked up some long beaded necklaces, two spiral scarf clips, and one pinwheel flower pin for 50 cents a piece:

As Hetty and I continued down the tables (Jim bailed pretty much as soon as he got the coffee maker and took our house ware finds back with him) the excitement grew and I reached the two tables filled to the brim with giant costume earrings! Hetty knew I was squealing in joy and helped keep me calm and sort through the trays to find earrings that suited my old lady (a.k.a "I wish I was Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote") ways.  I tried (yet again) to refrain from going overboard and dwindled my purchases down to ten pairs (which, by the way, was way harder than you'd think - you should have seen how many pairs they had). Take a peek at the pairs that made the cut:

Eeee! My jewelry finds ended up costing me $6 (including the necklaces and pins in the above picture) and I think I made out pretty well! Much like all my vintage finds I washed and sanitized them when I got home and can't wait to work these into my accessory wardrobe! I was thinking about doing a close up on my favourite pairs, but after laying them all out I couldn't decide which ones I liked the most! They are all so lovely! What a great day! Looks like I'll have to try harder to find the little church thrift shops in Victoria because they are much more exciting than the well searched over shops that are open all week long. Hooray! What do you think? Six dollars well spent? Which pair(s) do you like best?