The Find & The Savings Make for A Good Weekend !

The Find...



Do you do garage sales, flea markets or do thrift/resale shops ?

I use to do all garage sales, never flea markets but always, always resale shops. In this town we have one Salvation Army which is good for books and the occasional new piece of Tupperware. We have a GoodWill which is way over priced. The GoodWill has a really excellent selection of books. I will say though that I can always find a really nice dress or top with the price tag still on it. We have a couple of other little shops but they are not worth mentioning. Most of their items are broken or ripped or have pieces missing. Why bother.

One resale shop in town is raved about by everyone. Going in there, I could never figure out why everyone loves the place. It is messy, the furniture is broken, dirty and torn. Dishes are chipped or bent. The clothes are in no type of order and are strewn all over the place. I wondered where the attraction was ?

Until I got to the book section. Okay I will admit, no matter how a book section looks, I am not turned off or discouraged. Even if the books are on the floor. This place has so many books and they are in order. I mean the math books are not in the cooks book section and so on. I fell in love when I discovered they had a foreign book section. To top it off, they have a foreign cookbook section. Be still my heart ! I have already bought two Puetro Rican cookbooks and three Cuban cookbooks.

My mouth dropped open when I ran across their craft section, particularly the knitting books. Unlike the other books that are on shelves, the craft books are in front of a bookshelf in a box on a rickety old end table. To the average shopper this cardboard box would not look like much but look at what I purchased this past Saturday.

YES !!! Interweave Knits Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter of 2006. Interweave Knits Winter 2004 and Vogue Fall of 1997. The knitting magazines are 25 to 50 cents a piece. She charged me 25 cents this time around. Only $1.50 for all six.






The Savings



For years I didn't purchase Interweave Knits. I would buy one here or there according to what I saw inside. So, I'm missing a lot of issues. It's funny that I ran into these because the issues for Interweave 2006 is crucial to my collection of patterns that I want but may never be knit. I was just about to purchase four patterns from Ravelry this week three of them being from the Spring 2006 Interweave Knits. I went through the five Interweave's recently purchased and see that I've saved over $70.00 in pattern purchasing from Ravelry or Knitting Daily for the total patterns I planned to purchase. You may chuckle at this but I can assure that over a short span of time, I would have purchased all of these patterns and more !




Whew ! That was close !!!

More Finds and Savings

Have you ever heard of Publix Supermarkets ? We don't have them in Michigan so I'd not heard of them until I came to Georgia. Well, they are wonderful sort of upscale markets. When I say upscale, I mean there is top customer service, top brands, top bakery, top seafood market, top deli, gourmet brands in every section. The Publix brand of items are just as or sometimes better than the brand name products. Everything is top, top, top. With all that said, you know of course that Publix is a bit pricey and pricey is relative to the consumer. I say they are pricey. I find that some of the items such as meats and fruits are exhorbitant whereas prices for dairy items are reasonable.

Where is this all leading ? Okay, Publix has great sales. I don't mean to throw my food shopping into the knitting mix but I caught the best ever sale this weekend.

I normally pay $8.99 to $9.99 a bag for my Starbucks coffee. Well, Publix had all Starbucks on sale for $5.99 a bag ! I had $1.00 off coupons so I actually got my coffees for $4.99 ! Unheard of in the world of purchasing Starbucks !!!

Taboule and Couscous are low carb

I'm not sure whether I purchased enough though

Publix had a buy-one-get-one-free sale on Near East products. My children and I are great lovers of couscous. I love taboule/tabobouleh and who doesn't like pilaf.

I usually pay about $2.37 for Near East side dishes at Walmart and about $2.73 at Kroger. I had no idea that Publix has them priced at $2.19 so at buy-one-get-one-free, I only paid about $1.10 for each one !!! Had I purchased these eleven boxes of Near East at Walmart at 2.37 a box, I would have paid $26.07, Kroger for $2.73 I would have paid $30.03 and regular price at Publix for $2.19 would have cost me $24.09. Instead, I paid approximately $12.10 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Oh happy day !!!

One More Thing...

I picked these on my walk this morning. Dandelions and dasies.

What a good weekend.