Weekend Thrift Finds

I had a wonderful time thrifting and hanging out with a friend last weekend. Although I originally set out to do more browsing than buying, I left with some pretty wonderful treasures. To start with, I found these vintage-look cast iron French poodle bookends. I secretly want a French poodle. I guess now it is not so secret, but since my husband doesn't read my blog regularly, I think I'm safe. Anyway, my friend was not as enamored with them as I am, but I wonder if she will change her mind once she knows that they were recently sold by Anthropologie for $65 a pair? And sees how cute they are on my bookshelf!

I ran into quite a bit of vintage wrapping paper at a couple of stops this weekend, much to my utter delight! (It's the little things, folks.) I'm sharing a few of my favorites with you, I think in total I got about 8 different prints. I especially love this Valentine's theme paper, still in the package:

But I also like this Easter print:

And this alphabet sampler print:

And I'm not sure how old this next paper is, but as I adore vintage paper dolls, and have a very large collection, this paper just had to come home with me:

Why don't I ever find any vintage paper dolls at thrift stores? I have only found one not-so-interesting book of paper dolls at a thrift store. I just know they must be out there, so if anyone has any tips on how to find them, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, I am forced to add to my paper doll collection through online auction sites.

Remember my collection of vintage Christmas cookie cutters? I found a few more for my collection. I am aiming to complete three sets, one to give to each of my children when they grow up and leave home. I inherited mine from my mother, and this will be a way for me to continue for at least one more generation my family's tradition of making hundreds of Christmas cookies every year.

The bell, star, tree and Santa must have been the most popular cutters because I find them pretty frequently. I also usually have to purchase a whole bag of cutters that I don't want to get the few that I do, but this time I didn't mind because they were priced so inexpensively that it was well worth it. I just pulled out the ones I wanted and placed the bag with the rest of the cutters onto the donation pile on my way out.

Another vintage Christmas find, and a great one at that, are these beautiful ornaments still in the box. Of course, the box held only five ornaments, but they are in wonderful condition and I don't have any of them. My favorite is the blue one with the cabin on it, followed closely by the one in front with the bell.

I also found this vintage Paris Metro puzzle that reminds me of one of my favorite cities in the world. However, it did trigger a memory of the time in college that my friend Karen and I accidentally boarded the first class train and were accosted by the RATP Police! The mean lady officer confiscated my friend's passport and it became a stressful nightmare as we hastily tried to secure the funds to get it back. Not the most pleasant memory but it hasn't dimmed my affection for all things French. (Like my longed-for French poodle, as mentioned above.)

These are just some of the treasures I found last weekend--I'll post more in the next couple of days. I also am finishing up one of my thrifty before & after projects, and will post that soon as well. Unfortunately, I got so motivated to start my project that I failed to take a "before" shot so you'll have to use a little imagination! Oh well, it's all in good fun. And despite being a bit late posting this, I'm going to link up to Sir Thrift a Lot again, enjoy checking out other great thrift finds.