Amazing ephemera

Continuing on with my finds from over the border in Ontario, here are my final finds from a few other towns participating in that big clean up week.

I'll start with some stuff I grabbed at a house with a sold sign out front...

In bag number 1, I found a box full of unused batteries. One package still completely unopened. All the loose batteries at the bottom of the box tested good on my battery tester.

 46 cents in pennies

and  $6.55 in Canadian Tire money

Bag number 2 contained this whistling and dancing jolly Santa

3 packages of unopened elastics for those silly band looms that kids are really into these days,  .30¢ in more Canadian Tire money, a small unicorn trinket, a piece of purple rock quartz, tiny sewing scissors, a plug-in pest control device, a computer mouse from the Caterpillar company, a packaged fossil which I assume came from a gift shop somewhere, and .83¢ in change.

 A Game Boy Advance with 4 games- Pokeman Fire Red, Pokeman Leaf Green, Pokeman Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team, and Yoshi's Island, 2 working flashlights, And 8gb & 32gb USB sticks. 

The garbage man was coming, so I quickly checked one more bag. I almost left it to get my car out of the way, but the garbage man was awesome and asked me if I wanted him to wait while I grabbed more stuff. I grabbed the bag, said I was all done, thanked him, and I was off again. 

Inside the bag I found assorted jewellery and .42¢ in loose change

and a few perfumes

 

At my next stop I grabbed 2 small sized hockey nets for my kids, and after I loaded them into my car, I decided to check the garbage bag that was out there with them.

I tore open a small hole and saw a small green circle that I knew was an XBox. Inside the machine was a Shrek game.

Not too far away I grabbed some art at the curb. I can't make out the signature on the painting to the left, and the framed piece on the right is a cross stitch piece.

There were 2 more empty frames as well that I also picked up...

 

 About a month ago I picked up a very old framed print. The frame was pretty plain with some raised flower details in the corners, but it was really wrecked. The flower details were all broken and the wood of the frame was chipped. I didn't post it on the blog, and I was considering just getting rid of it, but I really liked the print inside. I put it to the side until I could figure out whet to do with it. When I brought the above frame on the left home, I knew it would be perfect for the print. Amazingly, the glass from the print frame fit perfectly, as did the print itself.

Here is the print which has a signature of one W. H. Thompson. There isn't really any info online about the artist, but I found out the piece is called Autumn Golden Fleece. I think this new frame really compliments it well.

I also managed to get back to the pile where I found all the vintage educational stuff  in my last post. I wanted to look through it a bit more thoroughly as their garbage pick up hadn't come yet. I found one more piece of the Instructo felt board Farm set (yay!), and a bunch of vintage dinosaur prints sitting inside a folded up dinosaur poster.

Here is the poster, it's unfortunately got a pretty deep fold crease down the middle...

And here are the awesome prints that were inside...

At my last stop as I was going through some of the bags, I was greeted by a lady who was bringing out more stuff. She told me her father had recently died and that she was cleaning out the house to get it ready to sell. I assured her that I wasn't going to leave a mess, and she was quite happy to let me go through everything, even telling me what was in each bag and offering me more stuff as she brought it out from the house. 

Funnily, most of the stuff she was offering me I considered junk, and most of the stuff she showed me in the bags, she considered junk. Here is the stuff I managed to save from her pile...

An old gold plated Gillette razor set

3 old packages of hairnets

Wrapped in a bag was this souvenier set from Leask, Saskatchewan

 

An old Lowney's chocolates box

 Some old booklets. The ones on the bottom row are like greeting cards, except they are a few pages long filled with poems and nice pictures. I have never seen cards like this before, they are like little books. At the top we have the 1974 Ford car buyer's digest, and a Rip Van Winkle book. There is no date printed on the book. It is rather old, but I haven't been able to find anything online about it.

Here is the centre of the Ford booklet. Check out all those funky station wagons, they're as big as boats!

I also found this old Royal Readers school book

 

From 1902

 

As well as a few more old school books

 

These small mushroom themed Tally cards. I'm not sure what these were used for...maybe card games?

A tuning fork and small whistle in the tune of C

 

and this old globe savings bank

 

I also found a small "Uniform code of operating rules" book for CN Rail. With it was this awesome collection of CN Rail ephemera. There are all kinds of papers and cards pertaining to someone's job, or I should say jobs, because as I read through them, you could see how through the years he moved up from working in the yards to becoming an engineer, at CN Rail. There are eye exam cards, rail yard passes, insurance papers, pay stubs, ID cards, and more. Really amazing pieces of history dating back to as early as 1947.

Lastly, I pulled out this photo album and an old box. The box felt heavy, so I took a peek inside. The lady said that this was just "old junk, you don't want that" but I saw what real treasure was inside.

Inside was a collection of souvenirs from a well travelled man...

There were many old fold out post card books from various cities in amazing condition. Some of it dated as early as the 1940's

old maps, pamphlets and ticket stubs...

Tourist guides and so much more. Just an all around amazing collection. I can't believe it was considered junk. My husband and I spent hours looking through these beautiful blasts from the past.

All of the stuff I didn't post about added up to another nice amount of stuff to drop off at the second hand store.

I also found out about a town wide sale not too far from here, so I scoped it out and found a nice spot (so I thought) at the edge of town to set up all my stuff. I sat there for 4 hours, but people just drove by and didn't stop even though there was plenty of space to do so. I just didn't understand it. The town was packed with people, there were hundreds of cars going by, but barely anyone stopped at my spot. At the end of it, all I ended up with was a lousy $26.85, and 2 severely sun burned knees. 

The effort of packing it all up into my van, unpacking it all there, and then re-packing it all up to go back home really sucked, but in the end I still enjoyed a beautiful day, got some exercise with all that packing and unpacking, and made 26 dollars without really any loss to myself, so I still consider it a win :)

Until my next post!