I had seen the hoards of boxes of craft items on the auction-house website but had brushed past them because I don’t craft. When I arrived on the day of the auction, I was again confronted…
Going overboard on scrapbooking hobby
Posted in Crafts
Category: Crafts
Bobblehead cigar-smoking black male ashtray
Posted in collectibles, Crafts, and Figurines
I don’t know why I bought the metal figure of a black male with a cigar in his mouth, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip. I’m not usually drawn to Black…
The first thing I noticed about the smooth ceramic dolls on the glass shelf at the auction house were their brown gingerbread color and their blank faces. And that they were beautifully spotless. The eight…
Extolling the work of early black craftspeople
Posted in Black history, Books, Civil War, and Crafts
The thin booklet was laying on the auction table haphazardly, as if someone had absentmindedly tossed it there. Because it was so small and flat, I’m sure it was considered to be of little worth. That’s…
The man was an island of calmness standing there behind a display of three chalk-like Santas positioned on top of a vintage sled. You could almost miss him amid the bustle of Christmas shoppers at Christkindlmarkt Bethlehem,…
What do you do with glass grapes?
Posted in Crafts
As soon as I saw the eight to 10 trays of glass grapes under the auction table, I was stumped. What would you do with them? Dust them off too often or let them just…
That first buy – a Carl Sorensen bowl
Posted in Art, collectibles, and Crafts
Recently, I was talking to the sister of a regular auction-goer who had tagged along with him to the biweekly auction. She had joined him at other auctions, but she had never bought anything. This time,…
Oh no, I thought as the auctioneer started moving disparate items into a lot. He was desperately trying to sell some unsellable junk on the auction table and no one was biting. First, he slid…
Skookum dolls: Not truly Native American
Posted in collectibles, and Crafts
I always wondered if different parts of the country yielded different items on the auction tables. I recall spending a day one December in Georgia, my niece in tow, driving from one antique shop to…
Black Americana shelf sitter
Posted in Crafts
I was on my way to look over some vintage items in the cases at one of my favorite auction houses recently when one of the auctioneers stopped me. We have a nice old African…