Who doesn’t love a good auction? The bling, the crap, the undefined. I follow family footsteps when it comes to auctions, so what I buy is not my fault.
Auctioneers recognize certain people coming through the door. We have a glint in our eye that causes them to run to the back room and scoop up all the stuff nobody bid on in a previous sale. Okay, it’s that caught up in the moment thing. One auctioneer used to send me notices of upcoming events, but it just occurred to me I haven’t heard from him in quite some time–like ten years. Did I fall from favor? Or perhaps he felt I might still be busy with the four grocery carts of wallpaper he sold me, which I gleefully loaded one roll after another into my truck, visualizing the potential of redecorating my entire house for $25.00. That’s back when the world was stuck on wallpaper.
The main bathroom being my first target, I ran everybody out of the house so I could concentrate on my project. In the first panel, I noticed mis-prints and uneven stamping of the pattern. I unfurled another roll–the same. (Why don’t we throw it in the auction and get rid of the stuff?) I ripped it down and started again, persevering. But each roll I found slightly off. Wall paper crisscrossed the floor like linoleum so that I could cut out sections of weeping dye, or realign vertical stripes. I’m happy to report that you have to really study the wall to find the blurry spots. One-of-a-kind. 🙂
I thought that would be the end of my wallpaper career with only 248 rolls left, until my mother-in-law asked me to paper a section in her house. I found enough of one pattern to do that, and it turned out nice. I found several rolls of another almost-white paper with little, teeny birds flying around in the background to give a friend who papered her kitchen just before it went on the market. Okay, good, again. The pheasants over brazen-red became my laundry room design, a small room that I could close off in an emergency.
Wallpaper gets overdone in a house real fast. My family began to use it for BB target practice–plucking roosters off their perch, or blasting flower pedals with holes. We made wallpaper cut-outs and pasted or glued them to poster boards to enhance school projects, decorated shoeboxes, and lined shelves–anything to use it up. I parked the remaining 219 rolls on the top rack in the shop where it remained for many years, until somebody noticed spiders had taken up residence. One day it left–just disappeared, and nobody missed it. I didn’t even ask.
How’s that different then when my mother bought half a truckload of gift wrap for $12. It was all pretty crummy and nobody wanted to wrap their gifts in any of it except the red paper with miniature white hearts–hearts being dearly loved. It worked, not just on Valentine’s, but Mother’s Day, Secretary’s Day (though that could send a wrong message), best-friends-forever day, birthdays, and here’s-a-box-of-cookies day. Heart gift wrap make great tooth fairy boxes–you get the picture–any reason or occasion.
One time she used a roll of awful green gift wrap for a picnic tablecloth. Clever! we thought, until she peeled it up and the water and heat had caused the dye to bleed through onto the wood table, leaving it a remarkable blue-green, which actually turned out okay because it looked better than before.
Mom ridded our home of armfuls of gift wrap in many ways, mostly passing them out to anybody who knocked on the door. One time she put together sets of all the different wrapping paper, lashed them together with colorful twine and gave the sets for a community auction so people could buy them! The heart-paper gone, and none of the other awful paper used, somebody began sneaking a few rolls at a time out to the trash can, until the gift wrap, poof! just disappeared. She never asked.
But it’s the auction when I bought twenty-two pair of stainless steel curved scissors that has followed me through the years. Curved scissors (you guessed it) cut circles. My bi
d picked up all of them with one swift sweep on the cheap, cheap, cheap. That’s before anybody heard of thinking outside the circle, or is it painting outside… Hm.
Why would anybody need curved scissors, you ask? If you figure it out, I’ve got just the thing for you. Do curved scissors even work? All too well. I cut some canvas for a lawn chair, and, yikes! Have you ever seen a straight line gone bad?
Okay, okay, give me some credit. I bid on the lot of scissors just to get the single pair of regular, straight scissors in the bunch. Good scissors can be expensive, and, for them, I became the proud owner of all, for $2.00. I’ve taken a lot of heat over those curved scissors, trying to explain them over the years to anybody who opened that drawer. But when I have to cut a circle, I’m ready and you’re not.
What Other People Do 