What is your best ever charity shop buy?

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Today I bought DH a gorgeous Austin Reed tweedy jacket in new condition for £2!

I gave them a lot more, but the truth is there is no way we could have afforded this in a 'real' shop.

Charity shops are fab.

DD's lovely wooden farm set and a load of animals for £10.
Lovely violets tea set including three cake plates, milk jug, sugar bowl etc...for a fiver. Saw a single cup and saucer with the same pattern in an antiques arcade recently for £10 !
Three decoy ducks that used to live in my fireplace .

I love charity shops!
I found an older boys Boden sweatshirt this morning for £2 - perfect for DS1.
Also got a Fatface sweatshirt for 50p!

I also buy VHS videos for DS3 (things like Bob the Builder and Postman Pat) for 50p. We keep them for a few weeks then when he's sick of them I donate them back to the charity shop and buy some more - loads cheaper than buying / renting dvds..

A pair of very stylish black strappy heals bought from Oxfam for £4 five years ago -they're so comfy, even after hours of standing/ dancing, they've been my staple wedding/ party/ evening shoe ever since!

I think I may have worn them 400 times... so a penny per wear!!!

I got a lovely little cream enamel 1950's double saucepan,one of those that fit one into the other.It makes fantastic lemon curd.
When I think back, many of my happy memories contain an ancient charity shop outfit - the vintage cotton shirt with a cowboy print I wore to my uni interview,a falling to pieces 30's flowery crepe tea dress I wore all the time,and every winter coat I've ever owned.I only really buy knickers and socks from "new" shops.
You can get most stuff 2nd hand if you're patient enough to wait till it turns up.

Not from a charity shop exactly, but our local tip used to sort out decent stuff from what people were throwing away and sell it for charity. I got a gorgeous hand-carved wooden serving dish in the shape of a banana leaf which I use all the time, and it cost 20p.

Also got a haul of european kids clothes for £5 (about 7 items, must have been from the same donor) that fit skinny, teeny ds2 perfectly - he's a totally different shape to ds1 and dressing him is a 'mare. I was !

Oh I'm so envious of the Hermes scarf-finder. It's my holy grail, I make a beeline for the scarves every time!

Used to live in an area where the charity shops weren't that great, but since we've moved I have gone crazy...

Beautiful wooden Noah's Ark with animals that DS adores, £1.50

Jaeger skirt and three Jaeger belts, £10

Big old coachbuilt pram (not SilverCross but same sort of thing) £10

Endless beautiful linen tablecloths, tea towels, tea tray cloths, all hand embroidered, so pretty and so cheap!

I have to avoid the shops now...

Apart from finding a nice celery glass vase for £2 identical to the one I was considering getting from a magazine that was £30 I haven't ever managed to find anything good in a charity shop when it comes to clothes.

I'm very of everybody here that has managed to find good stuff - how do you do it? Do you go to ones in nice areas or do something special? I live in a reasonably nice area but whenever I try popping in to my local charity shops they are all full of really dodgy stuff

sylvanian families barge in box complete £1
boden coat for dd for £3 has been worn by 3 dds and still looks lovely.

zipzap you have to pop in all the time 90% of the time you don't see anything nie. My oxfam is right next to the bus stop so i pop in a lot.

My Mum is a big fan of charity shops & jumble sales - I grew up on them. Recently she phoned me to tell me she'd bought a handbag for £1.99, and she thought it was Gucci. When I went over there, sure enough it had a big G on the front, but somehow... When my DD saw it, she recognised it: George at Asda.

Our local tip is brilliant too. I have furnished the house from there. An office chair for £5, beautiful wooden table for £8, and a set of 4 chairs that match the table perfectly. They let me have then for £10 because they'd got wet & had started to go mouldy, but after a good scrub they're fine!

I have a fab collection of assorted china - all our breakfast things are blue & white Scandinavian, but different designs. The dump is really good for things that some people are now throwing out but other people covet, like gravy boats, cake stands, jelly moulds & anything that's not dishwasher safe. All for around 20p each. I love this kind of recycling!

Think I'll trawl round FUlham and Notting Hill charity shops on my next day off, as I need new clothes and last time I got a new ankle-length winter coat from Monsoon for £25 (about £200 new), Gap jeans (£5 plus £3 for taking up), and a fab black dress which I think I only wore once but then recouped the cost on Ebay. Plus some jewellery.

More recently I got a brand new boxed playmat for a sitting-up baby - which was a godsend for the two months he used it before crawling off, and many, many baby toys and books. MIL is addicted to bargain-hunting and snobby SIL won't accept any charity shop items so MIL loves giving me lots of stuff for ds. An ELC wooden shape-sorter for £1 was a good one.

have never bought anything valuable or notable at a charity shop, although have had loads of good things.

yesterday, we went into cancer research and found a France 1998 World Cup Trivial Pursuit.
obviously, the lack of money didn't come into and and we bought it at a princely £4.

had a look at the questions in the pub and found a Chelsea one OH couldn't answer !! hahahahahahahahahha

Not quite Hermes, but I recently bought a Bruno Magli scarf with retro farm animals on it for a pound. I am going to make it into a cushion for DD's nursery.

Other notable finds have been an Escada jacket and a paperweight that I noticed when I got it home was signed underneath - I looked it up and it turns out to be by some moderately famous glass artist and worth considerably more than the three or so pounds I paid for it.

Hampstead & Muswell Hill have charity shops with lovely clothes!

My dd found a fabulous inky blue cashmere jumper at the weekend for £5 - she looks so fabulous in it I want to lock her in her room until she's 30.

Next question. If you find a bargain that the people running the shop have obviously missed (like my Karen Millen suede jacket for £3) do you tell them and give them more? Or do you think "Whoopee - lucky me!"

a tripp trapp for £15

A Monsoon evening dress for £6.

Black, strappy and beaded all over. Makes me feel a million dollars.

Whistles luscious velvet trousers for £6.

Cashmere dress for £8.

A couple of lambswool v-neck jumpers for 50p each, in the "bargain bin". As-new.

Knitting needles, wool and patterns for pennies - I was so embarrassed it was so cheap, I gave them extra.

The boys got a board game for £1.50 which they love.

Nothing spectacular, but my bookworm daughter is kept fed almost entirely from one local charity shops that always has lots of books at the right level, for about 25p.

There must be another child out there who is growing out of books just as fast as DD is growing into them. I'd love to know who she is. Because I love her! Her cast-offs are way better than the local library.

Just before Christmas I got one of those road map rugs from a charity shop for £3. It is immaculate and was a super suprise present on Christmas morning.

Pair of immaculate Oasis skinny-jeans, 12L for £4 and a pair of black leather riding boots for £8 . Twas a good day!

crystal glass photo frame in box which we gave to MIL for xmas, she loved it £3

Boxed thomas tank trainset, with TWENTY die cast thomas and his friends train in it £1 i coudlnt believe it when i got it home - it was complete, went and gave them a tenner the following weekend, felt guilty.

One of these retro mixers, brand spanking new, all the attachments (dough hooks, both bowls - everything). RRP $549, Salvation Army price $100.

I am still quite euphoric about it three weeks on.

Bumping this fab thread to ask if anyone knows a charity shop in London that does maternity clothes?

yesterday i bought my ds a big 10000 piece tub of them Hama beads for £2. went in Hobbycraft today and it is worth £14. just had to buy the peg boards