Jaci Dawn

Every year the City of Oregon City hosts an open air antique fair on the last Sunday of August. We always go even though the same vendors are always there. The same stuff is not. Sometimes we buy something and sometimes we don’t. It’s all for fun.

Because of the way Oregon City is set up and the lack of parking spaces in the down-town area, we park somewhere on the bluff. We walk along the promenade to the Oregon City Elevator (Elevator Street: the only vertical street in the USA). There’s someone manning the controls of the elevator and it is only open certain hours of the day. The elevator is just one cool thing about Oregon City.

The open air antique fair is another one. Vendors line Main Street for three blocks and up two side streets. Sometimes there are 110 vendors and sometimes there are only 80-some. This year was a little on the down-side. Live music and food.

I usually do not have a specific item in mind. I just want to see what is there and what the vendors want for it. Blue glass ball jars are $3/each or 2/$5. I have lots of those. Same price for most of the antique bottles we own and the line up of old glass insulators my grandsons love to play with. There is always a lot of glassware, costume jewelry and vintage clothes. This year there were plenty of old Tonka trucks and old Playskool barns.

I love to look at the furniture. Some day I want to furnish my home in antique furniture: old sideboards and pantries that I can display my junk on. Book cases, flower pots, planters, windows to buy and paint. Cast iron fencing. Old bird cages. It is so hard to see something you just love and can’t afford to buy right now: $225 for this great cast iron fence.

Don was looking for a round cast iron pancake skillet. We found two but both were made of low-quality cast iron.

We were three booths from the end of the walk when I decided I just had to buy the one item I’d seen at the very first booth we stopped at three hours earlier. I could see it was still there and I just felt I needed to go make an offer on it now. So I left Don and found the vendor just as another couple started eyeballing my “prize”.

It’s not an antique but it is slightly used. And I paid a lot less for it at the antique fair than it sells for on the Internet.

It’s a backpacker’s easel. That I knew. And that was why I bought it. But what I didn’t know was that it is one of the top-line backpacker easels.

It is a Mabef easel, made in Italy.

I did a little onl9ine search after I got home to see how much I saved because the vendor accidentally put two prices on the easel and I got the lower one. She originally had it marked $75.00 and I offered her $70. But the second tag was for $49.

I found it on eBay for anywhere from $79 (starting bid) to $160. Discount art sites listed similar ones from about the same price to $225.00. Mabef sells it for about $114.00 – $188.00(US).

So cool.