I don't frequent the weekend flea market for many reasons. When I was new to this city I probably went to Smiley's every third weekend. My then-boyfriend/now-husband and I would walk around they market and stare at the oddities that people would try to sell. On occasion we
would find the "one man's junk, another man's treasure" sort of item and purchase it for probably less than 2 dollars or so. So with that in mind, when he asked if I wanted to go out to Smiley's I somewhat hesitated. I could think of a myriad of reason I didn't want to go but it was something different and a couple of hours without TheBoy.
Of course there was no money to be taken, what would I need that for. I wasn't going to find a loom or a spinning wheel just laying at
someone's yard sale booth or shop set up. I'm not that kind of lucky gal and apparently this isn't the kind of city. But we started off our journey around the place after finding a parking space. (Parking is not easy at a flea market... at least not this one.) Shortly up the first aisle we walk past this fellow selling things from the back of an old bread truck. I glanced at it saw an interesting item but kept moving as I wasn't quite in the swing of looking over things. It had been a while you know. Just as I was moving forward my husband points over the concrete booth table and says "hey, its a torso!" Still not thinking clearly (as this is on the "something to get list") he asked if I wanted to know the price. They looked nice after all and the seller had 2 - 3 in view.
I suppose its not difficult to figure out that we purchased a torso. It was ten bucks! They were in good condition just from looking and I guess we thought ourselves very lucky. After all when we
priced these things online it was fairly priced but once you add shipping became out of my price range. Today though, I just couldn't turn down the deal. Only, we didn't have any cash on us. So some years after making fun of all the people who would use a flea market ATM (cause seriously, how safe can they be) I found myself withdrawing money from... a flea market ATM.
My consolations are
1) it "looked" secure
2) it was a meager $1.50 Transaction fee as opposed to the $3.00 everywhere else
3) I got a torso form and a butt form for $15! ($16.50 if you include the
ATM fee.)
We hadn't planned to get the butt form but the guy made sure we knew it was $5.00 and his last one. Yeah, I'm a bit of an impulse buyer at times.
I will probably look into some way to clean the forms up a bit but overall I'm pretty happy with them. Its like TheMister said, "If we had of gone looking for it (money in hand) we wouldn't have found it. " Must be why I've never scored that spinning wheel/loom find.
