The West Seattle Community Garage Sale Day always has so many sales that we usually have to split up our recaps up into multiple posts. So here’s part two in what appears to be turning into a bit of a series.

First, a couple of notes about signs. Meghan already talked about our favorites, with the unicorns and glitter and all. This one wasn’t as artfully crafted, but you can’t deny it gets the job done.

Someone else took the opposite approach: crappy signs, but plastered everywhere so you can’t possibly miss ’em.

On to the stuff we spotted … I was browsing through the books at one sale, and encountered this item.

I realize this falls into the “gag gift” category and probably never actually got used, but you know what? I think “items that somebody might’ve stuck their wang through” is right up there on the list of things you never want to encounter at a yard sale. Nasty!

Later, we pulled up to a sale which seemed familiar. Meghan asked the guy, “Didn’t you have a bunch of Playboys here last year?” He said yes, and then claimed they all sold within the first twenty minutes … but we’re pretty sure it was much later than that when we photographed them last year. This year we didn’t see any dirty magazines, but he did have a bunch of strange paintings.

Actually, there were a lot of sales we remembered from last year. Mostly ones we remembered because they were bad. At least we were able to avoid a few known duds this time around.

Then there was this sale, with a huge amount of stuff spread all over the lawn.

Meghan found a kick-ass ’60s dress here, and I grabbed a couple of books. We passed on this piece of dragon art.

After I paid, the sellers said “Here’s another book!” They had a stack of books they were giving away free with purchase — a bunch of copies of the same book, which was some kind of Dungeons & Dragons themed novel. I said no thanks, and then they offered me a free wooden smiley face back massager. I declined that offer as well and got the heck out of there.

Soon after that we drove up an alley to get to a sale. This is something we usually try to avoid, since people will pull in from both directions and trap you there, but we decided to chance it. The first thing I saw was this mannequin.

Karl bought her shirt.

There were tons of vintage clothes priced cheap — it seemed like the seller had been a vintage dealer and was either getting out of the business, or just unloading some odds and ends. Meghan got an insane prom dress and I picked up two items for my kid (a vintage cotton dress and a crazy dress-up jacket).

We hit a ton of sales, but didn’t even come close to covering the entire area. But we encountered plenty of cool, strange, awful, or just plain baffling items …

masks

And finally, an item that I normally wouldn’t have bothered to take a picture of …

… except that Karl held it up and said, “Hey, you know what this is for?” When I didn’t respond, he whispered: “Remember that penis book?” I screamed, then laughed, and then the sellers really wondered what the hell our problem was.

It didn’t feel like we hit as many sales as last time, but we still managed to fill up the trunk …

… and half the back seat.

And there’s still one more sale we haven’t even mentioned yet! Stay tuned for part three — this one deserves a post of its own.