Yesterday's Finds - Vintage Cowboy Guitar and More

As mentioned in yesterday's post, my sister kindly schlepped me out to Mississauga to go to Michaels. I live in the east end of Toronto and Mississauga is its own city to the west of T.O., so big sis was doing me a massive favour. Her teenage son came along. He's on the prowl for cool clothes and baseball hats, so it was a given that we'd hit three thrift stores that are in the same vicinity: Value Village, Salvation Army, and Goodwill. I'm not sure if these stores are not greator if I just had bad timing, but there was little, to no Pyrex and not a heck of a lot of vintage stuff for the home. Here's what I bought:

Vintage cowboy guitar. Somebody left this on the counter at Goodwill, so I grabbed it for $5.00 "as is." Can't you imagine some boy ordering this from a catalog in the sixties? This is one of my best finds ever.

The Hank Williams Sr. lookalike plucking away by the campfire sold me.

Here's the bad news: "as is" meant a whole lot of damage. Like the neck.

The entire back piece needs replacing, as do the strings. There's a poncy guitar shop near where I live. I have the feeling that if I take it in for repair they will: a) Laugh at me and tell me to throw this piece of junk in the garbage. b) Tell me that the structural integrity of the frame is compromised and that they'll have to rebuild it for $2,000. c) List off the names of all the big wig local guitar wankers whose guitars are being buffed by them right now and to "Bog off."

d) Not let me through the front door.

I love this guitar. Of course, I hope if I give them some sob story about rescuing this vintage beauty with lot's of potential from a thrift store, they'll cut me some slack and fix it for a good price. Maybe I'll throw in the fact that I'm a teacher who wants to lead a guitar program for the musical kids in my class. Hmmm...
Last summer, I bought a Spear's Flower Press. The Spear's Games appears to be an English company and quite possibly out of business these days. They made high quality wooden craft supplies from what I can gather. This loom was $2.99.
It was missing two pegs, and the two pieces that you slide through the loom. I'm not sure what they're called, but I can rig up something myself.
It did come with an instruction booklet filled with funky projects, like this belt...

and a tea cozy.

I bought Duncan this very eighties I Love NY t-shirt for $2.99. He had a white one when he was a pre-schooler. This takes me back to the I Love New York campaign when I was a kid.
Lastly, I'm filming kids in my class for a video to be played on Literacy Night. Without going into detail about the plot, several kids need to be dressed up as hippy musicians. I found, what I thought was a hippy scarf. When I got it home, I realized it was a poncho. On a ten-year-old, it will look more like a Homer Simpson muumuu. The funny thing was that my sister thought I was buying it as a throw for our sofa. "Ahhh. No."

I'm hoping to thrift at one of my locals today. I need to buy prezzies for my Toilet Humour winners. Today was Stuff Diet Day 5. I just bought groceries and a pair of water-proof mittens for Duncan.