As those of you who follow me on Instagram already know, my brass animal menagerie went through a pretty significant expansion this past weekend.

When we heard about the “Thrifting with Tyler” fundraiser for Dwell with Dignity a few weeks ago, my friend Kristi and I signed right up because we love thrifting, days off from children, and long bus rides. Well. At least the first two things.

Dwell with Dignity is a really cool sounding organization. From their website:

Dwell with Dignity is a non-profit group of Interior Designers and volunteers dedicated to creating soothing, inspiring homes for families struggling with homelessness and poverty. We provide and install home interiors for families that include furnishings and art, bedding and kitchen supplies, and food in the pantry.

I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to work with them sometime in the future. For now I just paid them for my bus tour and scooped up brass animals.

I didn’t want to haul my camera around, so I don’t have many pictures from the tour itself.  There’s this one, of me and Kristi enjoying our GIANT margaritas at the end of a long day of thrifting:

 

As promised, we discovered some great new places to shop. We spent most of our time in Villa Rica, a town west of Atlanta that I’d never been to before. There are several thrift and antique stores along the little downtown strip. The most surreal is Jane’s:

 

It was just….so.much.stuff. Floor to ceiling. Spilling everywhere. It was pretty claustrophobic in there, but we stayed long enough for Kristi to buy a Breyer horse and me to get these cowboy bookends:

I’m thinking I might have to spend the next couple of years cultivating a love of cowboys in Abe so he can have a cowboy room when he’s older. I’ve always wanted a cowboy room.

But my favorite place was an antique mall called Another’s Treasures. The caption with my instagram brass animal picture said, “I couldn’t leave any of them behind,” but, really, I left A LOT of brass animals behind. There were so many! And so well priced! I think the most I paid was $8 (for the elephant); a lot of the smaller ones were $3 and $4. It was so hard to decide which ones to get. I’m still in mourning over the giraffe that didn’t come home with me.

But. I mean. It was getting a little embarrassing. I had to stop. I have no idea where I’m going to put all the ones I DID get.

 

There’s a squirrel, too, that I forgot to take a picture of, because Gus had already whisked it off to live with my other brass squirrel.

You know what else they had SO MANY of? Vintage planters! I bought the two best ones:

 

And then I got this….chipmunk…..thing. Just because:

 

On the way to Villa Rica, we stopped at a place called Studio 22 Antiques, and I bought ceramic elves:

 

A normal person might put these elves away until Christmas, but I’m not sure that that’s going to happen around here. My squirrels might need some friends.

So, all in all, it was a lovely day. The longest by far I’ve ever left Abe–which means also the longest Dave has ever had all four kids by himself–and everyone managed quite well. I’ll have to start leaving every Saturday. Not really. Between Easter, the state math tournament, and my day of thrifting, it’s been far too long since we’ve had a full weekend around here to work on things. I’m looking forward to sticking closer to home for awhile now!