One Overlooked Estate Sale Find Sells for 10X The Price!

Summer is such a great time in the antique and vintage business. There's shows and people out traveling and going to antique malls and stores and everybody says that's where the action is and you can't sell anything on eBay. But that's not true because I sold 19 out of 20 items I listed on eBay last month. Let's look at them and see why. Because there's lots of clues for collectors and resellers, not just how to get deals online in summer, but how to sell good things and what sells in summer and where. This was the very first thing to sell in my listings last time and I am not surprised at all. It's Enid Collins. It's so much fun, so much sparkle, so much bling, and of course she was the one who started all of these. You'll see purses that look sort of like this without her name on it. Those were craft kits that you could buy and glue the rhinestones on yourself. They're cute, they're collectible too, but Enid Collins is where the collector market is really the strongest and so I felt pretty sure that this would sell. I was a little surprised it went right away for the buy-in now of $135, but in clean condition like this, they are that desirable. And you notice this one is called Bird Watcher 2 because there is another design with the cat watching the bird called Bird Watcher. It doesn't have a 1. I don't think she knew she was going to do a second one when she designed the first one. And you see this one is pre-1970 because it has the copyright 1965 mark right inside of it. She did have to start putting copyright dates in her items because there were so many knockoffs being produced. There's the EC logo. Now when you see the Collins of Texas with the crescent moon and the horse, that means it was done after 1970. The EC logo is before 1970. She kept control of the firm until 1970 at which point she sold out to TAMD. I knew the Harlequin Donkey was special. We had this in an estate sale. I priced it at $35. I left it in at half-off day at $17.50 and I pointed it out to dealers and nobody took me up on it. I think a lot of people just don't recognize these. So I bought it from the estate at half price and I put it on eBay and it went for almost 10 times what I paid for it. What is the moral of this story? The moral of this story is you should come to my estate sales if I have one near you because we get good things and every time I do an estate sale I am amazed how we sell so much stuff but there's always one really interesting thing left at the end. When you have a house full things just get overlooked. I could not convince anyone else to buy this in person but online as you see there was a big demand because these are rather scarce. You'll notice the second picture is on a towel because I took it after the fact. When I did the listing I only took one photo and did not realize people would want to see the bottom which I should have because the bottoms are hollow and so there could be chips and they wanted to make sure the condition was good. So we added this photo and once I did that the bidding soared. Harlequin animals were made by the same company that made Fiestaware and Harlequin dinnerware and they were made to be sold at Wilworth's and they were made for a limited amount of time. It wasn't really what they did. They mainly did dinnerware. They did it as a favor to Wilworth's. They are in the original Harlequin glazes and this guy sold for $173 on 15 bids and I had a lot of inquiries about it. I had people wanting me to close the bidding and sell it early which I do not do. When I list something it is listed so everybody has the same chance and I put things at buy it price that I feel is fair. I thought this guy was really cool. I wasn't sure how cool. It's just a cheap piece of plastic from the 80s but it's from the Olympics and from the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984. The Winter Olympics there were a huge triumph when they happened but shortly after that Sarajevo was plunged into the Bosnian-Serbian conflict and a lot of Sarajevo was seriously damaged including some of the Olympic sites. Some of them still remain but this guy remains and someone corrected me because I'm so bad with foreign pronunciations. His name is Vucov. I believe I've said that correctly this time. So Vucov the little wolf sold and is in a happy new home. It costs $44 on nine bids. I wasn't surprised they were active bidding because you just don't see a lot of things from this Olympic Games. The Olympic Games are such a spectacle and involve so many people from all around the world that they are one of the most collectible categories that people don't always think of when they talk about what's trending. I am not such a big believer in following trends. I'm a big believer in finding things that are interesting and unusual that aren't the thing everybody is thinking of and those are the things I often list on eBay. I was really pleased that this piece went to a fellow who I have known for probably 30 years in the northwest antique and vintage collecting circles. He specializes in carnival glass. It's his first love and I rarely have ever had a piece that was interesting enough for him to want to buy it because he has a very advanced collection. So I was really excited that he ended up with this one. This is Imperial's Iron Cross mark from the 1920s and you can see the Iron Cross mark on the bottom in this image and that is part of the real appeal because Imperial did this as part of its jewels lines in the 1920s as their foray into art glass. Imperial had really been more of a mass production house before and so this was really elevated for them and collectors appreciate it because it's carnival but it's also stretch glass. Notice how it stretches at the edges and crackles open and that was a very deliberate technique that extended the life of carnival glass in the market into the 1920s. The ruby is such a great color and it had really good iridescence. Ruby red base is unusual. It's less common than say purple or marigold. So this is a really pretty piece and I'm glad it went to a collector who will really appreciate it. It saw a lot of action. It sold for $77 on 25 bids. This Triple Handled Loving Cup. I just love this style. These were very popular around 1910. This one's dated 1909. It's from the Vancouver Dog Club and Ban was a very good dog who apparently passed all of the field trials and was the head of his class and that's the reason that this trophy was awarded. Now you see the Meriden mark on the bottom and Meriden is from Connecticut and did a lot of silver plating there. I did not know when I made the original video that Meriden did have a Canadian subsidiary at this time and so this piece actually was made in Canada. So yes, another thing that I'm glad somebody got now for $68 because again the prices on all of this are now 50% higher. Now for you Canadian viewers, I know that you do pay some customs duty when we ship stuff north to you but your country has not reciprocated with tariffs on antiques so you are still able to buy antiques in the United States and bring them back and if it's over 100 years old it is not subject to duty. There seems to be a lot of confusion about tariffs. Tariffs are charged to the customers in the country where the tariff is levied. They are not charged to Canada. They are charged to American citizens. Trophies are just so cool for their shape and the way that they look and so a lot of people collect them and you know if you have a big pile of them in a cabinet no one's really looking to see if they were your trophy or someone else's. I wasn't sure how this would do because I've never had a piece of Crown Devon fuchsia before. I think it sold for a reasonable price when you include shipping. It did sell with one other item so I was able to refund some of the shipping to the person who got it and she's a regular collector of ours as well so I'm glad it went to her. I thought it was really lovely and the fuchsias really stand out on that sort of neutral background. You can see in the lower photos here that it was footed and that made it a little more interesting than just a bowl that sits flat. And there we see the Crown Devon mark. Crown Devon is one of these underrated English potteries. It didn't have royal in front of the name because they didn't sell to the royalty so they didn't get the royal warrant. But it was really well made and what I particularly notice about Crown Devon is how vivid the colors are. And you can see in the side view even though it only has a splash of color the color really grabs you because it's in such high contrast and such precise painting right down to the stamens. So it went on $21.50 on four bids. This is not a piece we see in the United States often. This is one of the pieces I got in Canada and I'm glad I got there before the tariffs were imposed. Now this piece would cost 50% more. This was the other piece that the same person got and I'm glad that she got it because it saved her some shipping to combine them even though it took a large box because the shapes were different. We always combine shipping if we can. The Barbados Policeman bottle usually sells for more than this so she actually got a rather nice deal on it I thought for $19.99. She was the only bidder. It's something that I think is very specific but barware collectors do like these and it might have been something that would have sold for more at a show or where somebody saw it in person because the condition was really great. Nevertheless, a nice piece. I came out finding the collector got a good piece at a good price and that's what happens sometimes. I tell people you should really look at my ebay listings because not everything sells for a fortune. I only put these things out in this last case for only a week because I had a tight schedule and couldn't let it run for 10 days and that means people get some deals sometimes and I'm fine with that because I look at things on balance and overall I sold 19 out of 20 items that did very well this month on ebay. In a month when lots of people were complaining about how slow it was I sold almost everything. This also went to a viewer. This went to Joan and John in Colorado and I'm so glad that they got it because they have a personal connection to London and that's the reason that this was of interest to them. I found it fascinating because I did not really know that there had been a major exhibition. It was not technically a world's fair but it was the first time it was a joint exhibition between two countries, France and England. The Franco British exhibition was really in a sense a burying of the hatchet between the two countries and the realization that time had gone on. They were allied and aligned and 30 miles across straight from each other and that they were important to one another and so the fact that they showed their wares together for the first time was very significant. You see the Palace of Music. I just really love the inscriptions. It's so fancy and so elaborate on silver plate. On the bottom left is the Palace of French Applied Arts. This is at a time when France is really regarded as the design leaders in the world. I didn't have a buy it now on this piece because I wasn't sure where it would land. I felt that for the condition that $56 on 4 bits was a good price to get for it and I'm really glad it went where it was supposed to go. I think these were wonderful. I think somebody got a pretty good deal on them. I realize with shipping you're looking around $25 which I imagine is probably their full retail value in the right place. I got $16.50 on a number of bids plus shipping and that seemed fair for what they were but I just thought they were so great and this is the sort of thing that now that we have 50% import tariffs on Canadian antiques is going to be much more difficult to get in the United States so I'm glad I had the opportunity to provide this to a collector at the time. And this picture shows how they're shaped to nestle up against each other which I think is really neat and means you need to have a pair because you can't just match two random ones unless you have one big and one small. Now I knew they were Evangeline Pottery out of LaBelle, Quebec because they look like Blue Mountain but the bottoms are not the same red clay that Blue Mountain used because Blue Mountain was made in Ontario and the local clays were different so that's an easy way to tell them apart if you see unmarked pieces. Blue Mountain has become much more collectible since they went out of business around 2001 and Evangeline, if you get the right pieces, is pretty collectible as well. Their quality was maybe not quite the same as Blue Mountain's but the overall effect with these is just spectacular. This piece went to one of our regular art glass collectors. I'm really glad she got it because it's different than what she has in her collection which I've seen and it's extensive. There are not a lot of modernist glass pieces done in opaque color so much of it is transparent and so this is really something different and was very connected to the styles that were popular around the millennium which has been 25 years now. This is by Caithness in Scotland and this is the ebony on sand effect and I really think it's interesting the way that they use a tool to take the one coloration at the bottom and pull it through the rest of the glass and then when you see it from this side you realize that they've pulled it a few times around the base of the bowl just to give some visual interest to the side. There is our Caithness label. This is the second factory in Perthshire and I really like the way that it's cased so that you have the ebony in the inside and the sand on the outside so you really get this high contrast which was also very popular in art glass around the year 2000. So even though this isn't wildly old it is a style that is no more and that's when we see collector interest starting to grow. We see lots of interest in Fenton from around this time because they were doing a lot of their painted artware lines and that was the style that was very popular then that we're not seeing now because hand painting is expensive. Hand finishing of all kinds is starting to become a lost art in a lot of areas because the cost of labor, the cost of natural gas to make art glass, all of those things are becoming very prohibitive in the west and so we really are fortunate to have this legacy of these pieces and I'm glad that somebody got to add it to their collection. It went for $30 on six bids. Amish butterprint is perhaps the most widely collected pattern in Pyrex these days. It's fun, it's colorful, appropriate for modernist homes as well as country homes and it just seems to be loved by everybody right now. So I knew that the butter dish would do well and it sure did. It went for $81.99 on 14 bids and that's actually a relatively good deal although with shipping it cost about a hundred dollars which is where I see them priced in the stores between $100 and $125. This one had not been in the dishwasher, it does not have any chips or cracks. That's very important with Pyrex. People want it to be perfect. I've had a few people say, oh you know some of that Pyrex there could be lead in those paints. Well yes, it's on the outside unless you're licking the bowl on the outside. I'm not really sure what the concern is there. My friend Rhonda watches the channel in Florida and I was so glad to put this up because she chided me correctly for looking at glass and skipping past Dala horses in a video a couple of years ago and so I've been definitely more aware of Dala horses. To find one from Sweden that was done in glass was kind of the perfect combination of everything. The reverse painting on the back of this piece is unusual for a Mats Jansson piece. Generally they're just clear and so this was really special and people knew it. They come in various colors. A lot of people hadn't seen it in orange before and so the bidding was definitely intense right away and it went for $50 on 10 bids. It's remarkable to me to see how much interest there is in these glass block paperweights. When I first was in the business some years ago, these were sort of overlooked and I thought they were really good quality and started picking them up way back then and now collectors have figured it out. They're also heavy to ship and because of that we're not seeing a lot of imports of things like this these days. You can see the Mats Jansson label on the lower right. A lot of these the labels have been washed off or did not have a label and they're not all signed so it does pay to do a little bit of study. You can go on eBay and look at completed sales with ones that do have the sticker and you'll get a feel for what is Mats Jansson because there were other companies that made things that are similar. When you look at the quality they're not always as good. They're maybe rougher or not really as well detailed as the Jansson pieces which seem to be the ones that collectors are gravitating towards today. This ended up being a gift. One of our viewers has a son who is a pilot and she thought this would be right up his alley because the Concorde is such a major piece of aviation history. Even though it did not end up being commercially successful it was the fastest commercial jetliner ever produced. One of the problems they had was that it created sonic booms all over the place and so a lot of airports right away said we will not allow that jet to fly into our city because of the noise pollution and so the Concorde was doomed shortly after it was created but they did make a number of them. They did fly for many years and tragically the last one to take off from Paris crashed not really because of the age or the technology of the jet but because of some sort of an obstruction on the runway that caused the rubber tires to blow and damaged equipment and because of that the entire fleet was grounded and retired. The blue glass this is what bristol glass really was like in the 1820s. It was this color of cobalt. Obviously they weren't making paperweights with jets on it back then but bristol glass is this color and only this color and nothing else. So as I've been preaching for the last few years do not call bohemian glass vases from the late 1800s bristol glass. That has been done for years because unscrupulous dealers back in the 1930s and 40s thought bristol glass had more cachet with collectors and they actually ruined the market for the victorian bohemian glass by misnaming it and so now we're seeing people starting to collect that glass as well because they are not being deceived and it's beautiful in its own right. This piece went for $39 buy it now. I had always hoped it'd fly on the concord but I didn't have $9,000 for a one-way ticket. This also went right away on a buy it now. I put $69 on it because I saw another one had sold for that price. I was quite surprised by that because I didn't pay a ton for this. I was under the impression that it was an interesting cafe plate. I know the old man of the mountain doesn't exist anymore because it fell off the side of the mountain some years ago and so I knew there'd be interest but I didn't realize that it would go immediately on a buy it now for this price. I understand why it did though. This is one of those things that's not there anymore and items representing things that are not there anymore always end up being collectible. You see this was made for the flume reservation at Franconia Notch in New Hampshire so this was a special order on the Syracuse Econo Rim. Econo Rim was this style rim where it was decorated but rolled in a way that it was hard to chip because most of this was made as cafe ware. These were in use at the time but they were being sold as souvenirs as well which is unusual because souvenir china usually is pretty thin porcelain stuff that you hang on a wall. So this was durable. It was good quality. There are collectors of Syracuse china but this went to New Hampshire so I know it went to somebody who had a personal interest and happy memories of the old man of the mountains. Sadly the old man of the mountain was one of those things on my bucket list I did not get to see before it fell apart and that is a lesson. We should all do all those things on our bucket list whether it's finding a particular collectible item we've always wanted or traveling to some place we've always wanted to see. I like silhouettes anyway but especially if their mottos and Buzzamato was a really big important company in the making of these in the 1920s 30s and 40s. They actually went through the 50s as advertising pieces and then they pretty much phase out after that. This one has a very sweet poem for a friend and would make a great presentation piece today. I don't know if the collector who bought this is collecting them to put on the wall or is actually intending to give this as a gift again but they got it for $29. I ought to buy it now. The Shelley plate sold for the opening bid of $29. I wasn't really sure what it might sell for because it is Shelley and Shelley china is very good and of course the children's plates. I think they're just darling. They are not as collectible as they used to be because a lot of the children of that generation are no longer collecting because they're in their 80s and 90s now and I think it's a real sleeper area. They're darling. They're well made and this particular one illustrated by a famous illustrator and with the famous Shelley backstamp. Shelley went out of business in 1966 but we can tell from the style of the car the way the policeman is dressed and the color scheme and the typeface everything about this says 1930s. Now one reason I think it might not have gone for more is because again for some reason eBay likes to put the highest number that you might possibly pay for shipping it. I think that that does deter bids on larger items. I have to remember to keep putting all of the different ways to ship because I ship UPS, FedEx, Post Office, whatever makes the most sense because when I started this auction I was out in Seattle and I was going to be shipping these from long distance to other parts of the country and so I think the shipping expense ended up deterring bids on this piece. Of all my friends who had children I only know one who got them a nice proper children's dinnerware set with a plate like this and a cup and a bowl which is so curious to me because in my generation they were Melnack but every kid I knew including me I had Peter Rabbit. We all had them. I'm not sure why that is not a trend with parents these days but it seems like something really cute that small children especially would appreciate. This piece went to one of our viewers who'd never purchased before and she said she was really thrilled because this made her heart go pity pat and I can see why because Raku is very popular again and Raku miniatures are a little harder to find actually than the bigger pieces. This one is by Ben Diller, a Hawaiian Raku artist from Maui and when I visited Maui in the 1990s he was still actively producing and he really enjoyed putting petroglyphs or images of Pele, the volcano goddess or other things that gave a little bit of a Hawaiian flair to this and so that's why you have the little medallion with the turtle hanging down. It's interesting the way that it's decorated because it's decorated in a way we might associate more with contemporary southwestern pottery as opposed to Raku. Raku originally came from Japan and the Japanese did it in a very formal studied manner and it was part of the tea ceremony. Bernard Leach, the seminal stoneware maker in England, learned a lot of his techniques in Japan based on Raku pottery and spread it to the west that way and eventually it came to the United States. Warren Gilbertson was the first to display Raku in a gallery display in Chicago in the 1940s but it really wasn't until Paul Soldner made it very popular in the 1960s that the technique really took off and part of the appeal to Americans was not the studied formal traditions of Japan but the fact that they could introduce chaos and excitement to the pieces by putting the hot pottery in sawdust or other natural materials to burn and create the interesting designs on the exterior. So American Raku really became very different than the traditional Japanese Raku and this is a great little example of that. It went for $37 on 15 bits which is a pretty good price for a small piece but a very collectible piece and it's so fun watching people appreciate these traditions that have come down through the ages and yet somehow are considered very contemporary. Speaking of Bernard Leach, in our next eBay listings we'll be featuring a bowl by Lucy Lee and she was a noteworthy ceramicist of her own and worked with Bernard Leach for a period of time in the 1950s. This went to one of our viewers who bought the other piece of Alta glass I put online a few years ago. I have had exactly two pieces of Alta glass in all of the years that I have been selling and she now owns both of them so it's great that they are reunited. These were made in medicine had Alberta in Canada. Alberta being ALTA that was their old abbreviation before the two-letter abbreviations came into vogue and so Alta glass and you can see that they were really influenced by the way Murano was doing their stuff in that time because you see bubbles you see crimped and pinched and pulled parts for beaks and wings and all that good stuff. It's so cute and so stout and from the back it looks like a baby bird just begging mom to give it a worm. A lot of Alta glass used a waffle bottom and so it does not have a inscribed signature. This one has both the paper label and the inscribed signature because Alta glass was trying to make a name for itself. Alberta of course has lots of natural gas and Medicine Hat had the right clays and sands to make both pottery and glass and supply western Canada and the prairies at a time when shipping from Ontario and points east was very expensive and bringing things over the border was also expensive so they filled a niche in that part of Canada and that's why they're fairly obscure to a lot of people but very collectible when you find it. This is another thing I got in Canada before the tariffs went up and I'm glad I did because now this piece with tariffs would cost somewhere in the $50 range. The same collector also bought this piece because she was on a bird kick that day. Owls are so popular now. They were so popular in the 1970s when this one was made. This one actually is just Costa. As you see on the bottom with the etched signature it also has the V. Lindstrom signature because she was their designer at this time and I just love what she did with this. It's so simple. It's just a peg. It doesn't have any wings. It doesn't have any of the things that you would think would be necessary to make it look like an owl and yet with those huge recessed eye sockets with the satin glass, with the way they molded all of those feathers in the side of the bird, you get it right away and it is expressive and so modernist and such a great clean design. Costa had not yet merged with Boda at the time that this piece was made so it just has the Costa signature. This one went for $29 on a buy it now. I want to thank the lovely viewers in Vancouver, Canada who had me up and allowed me to buy a lot of things they had picked and bring them to you before the tariffs went up because now a lot of these items will not be accessible to people in the United States at reasonable prices. I want to thank everybody who shops with me on eBay. I want to thank all of you who are watching and I hope this inspires you to keep on plugging away because there are collectors all over the world 365 days a year interested in antiques and vintage. If you enjoyed this video check out this one. Also click thumbs up to like this video and check the description for information about our Patreon, our memberships. We've got a lot of different levels with different perks and bonus videos and early content. Also please do check out our website theantiquenomad.com for appraisal help and we'll see you again for more adventures in the antique and vintage community soon. Bye for now!