Mac Grove is always one of my favorite neighborhood sales. For those of you not from around here, the long name for this area is Macalester Groveland and it is near Macalester College in St. Paul. Their neighborhood sales were last Saturday and about 40 homes were participating. I picked my sister up at about 7:30 and we headed off. Debbie was in charge of navigation and I was the driver.
I found some great vintage books and one of my fave finds was a ziploc bag full of vintage aqua Christmas bulbs. Debbie spotted these, by the way. I went right past them without noticing, but she held them up and said “um, hey, isn’t this your color?” Dang! Why yes it is!
These don’t qualify as the ‘find of the day’ though. That honor goes to the pile of vintage luggage. All from one sale.
Isn’t this little train case incredibly charming? And it matches my MMS Flow Blue chair perfectly.
As if this matched set wasn’t enough, there were two more pieces that didn’t match including this charming monogrammed piece.
Who remembers Northwest Orient Airlines? They dropped the “Orient” in 1986, and of course merged with Delta in 2008.
I also found a lovely brown transferware pitcher and some primitive wooden utensils.
My pile of goodies was full of my favorite shades of blue and green.
After taking that photo, I decided to get out my macro lens and play around with some close ups of the little milk truck so you could see the detail.
Seriously, how could I resist this thing? The color, the patina, the little cow on the door panel. And it was only 50 cents, so who could pass it by?
I still struggle a bit with the macro lens. When I bought it I thought I would use it a lot for flower close ups. Why I thought I needed close up photos of flowers is beyond me now. The depth of field with a macro lens is very small. You can see the results of that in this next photo. Only the exact portion of the plate that I focused on is crisp (sort of?), while everything that is slightly closer or further away is out of focus. This can be fun to play around with, but it is also rather frustrating.
When I took the closeups of the aqua bottle I could actually read what it said.
So I googled it to see if it was legit. Turns out Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription was a typical quack medicine from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s that originally contained opium.
A sales pitch for it said, “No one can know the distress of my mind as well as body. Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription was the only medicine that seemed to do me any good. After I had taken the first bottle and part of the second. I could sleep well and all my troubles began to get better. I believe I took eight bottles and then I felt like a different person. I gave birth to another baby and my old complaint came back. I began using the “Favorite Prescription” and was soon relieved and was able to do my work, including the washing.”
Well, thank goodness she could do the washing, right? She probably really enjoyed doing the washing after slurping down eight bottles of that stuff.
Too bad it was empty when I bought it!
q is for quandie 
First off I wondered where the heck the title of this post was going. I love those glass bottles but opium holy cow. Perhaps a form of laudanum? Seems like this is the year of the vintage suitcase lucky you. This was one great sale the loot is fab. Interesting info on the Mac lens that plate is so pretty and I see how without the lens the detail would be lost.
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Ha! Yep. laudanum was made from opium as well. Were women just walking around higher than kites? Maybe that’s really why they needed those fainting couches!
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Lol! Makes me wonder what we are ingesting today that 100 years from now
will get a similar response.
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Good point! You gotta wonder, right?
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Well, it’s a wonder she even WANTED to do the washing…maybe it just wasn’t a chore to her anymore lol. LOVE all of your finds…especially that great luggage!
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LOL. It is funny to picture that poor woman doing the wash, isn’t it?
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Great finds… Love the little milk truck and all the other blue / aqua / green things.
Just curious…how do you clean these suitcases (on the inside I mean) because I don’t think they will all smell like roses and might need a bit of freshening up?
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I usually just throw some dryer sheets inside mine. I really mainly use them for decoration, although I do store CD’s, DVD’s and scrapbook supplies in some of mine. I’ve read about other options for refreshing the insides online, such as filling with cat litter for a few weeks, and then vacuuming it out. I haven’t tried any of those though.
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…I think it was having that other baby that led to drinking another 8 bottles (she didn’t mention). Hmmmm life has not changed too much I’d say. Made me smile thinking about this woman with piles of laundry sitting around her, bottle in hand, babies hanging until she could pull herself together to get it all done! ….just my thought,
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First of all, we need to start a “Linda” club! Second, that is a hilarious mental picture.
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Nice finds, guess I’ll have to find my own Debbie and hit those sales next year.
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Everyone should have their own Debbie!
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Dear q,
Do not try to lick inside that bottle! 🙂 Great finds!
Blessings
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LOL … I was thinking about trying it!
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Great finds! You have the best sales where you live. I never score as well as you.
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We do have some pretty fabulous garage sales around here. Of course, we also have a lot of bad ones too. I mentioned that there were 40 sales that day, so as you can imagine I walked away empty handed at quite a few of them. And some of them we didn’t even bother to stop for.
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I wonder if that’s what they were talking about in that song, “mother’s little helper”?! haha In all seriousness … those suitcases are awesome and I’ve never seen Christmas lights that color … great finds indeed! 😀
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