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Queen’s stockings roll up big sale

The art, antiques and collectibles news mention Queen Victoria’s unmentionables, a charred Hendrix guitar and a sad auction of slain football star’s belongings.

Some bloomin’ collectibles

An English woman packed away stockings she inherited from her mother. Now 82, Mary Youings decided to put them up for auction with a listing of £150 to £200. (That’s approximately $265 to $350.)

Imagine the former teacher’s surprise and delight when the gavel came down at $14,000. Oh, did we fail to mention her mother wasn’t the first owner of the stockings? That would have been Queen Victoria. The BBC reports that the “auction house believes the quality of the hand stitching, the black and white two-tone silk finish and the fact they include the Royal Crest is evidence that they were worn by the queen in the 1870s.”

Fifty-inch bloomers once worn by the queen brought in $8,000 at the same auction near Derby, England.

Fired-up collectibles

At least Queen Victoria’s collectibles were in good shape.

Rock ’n’ roll legend Jimi Hendrix had a penchant for, well, getting fired up during performances. Hendrix was filmed burning his guitar at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. In the same year, he torched his Fender Stratocaster guitar while performing in England.

Somehow the damaged instrument ended up the garage of the parents of Hendrix’s publicist, Tony Garland. More than 40 years later, Garland came across the guitar and didn’t some hmmming, wondering if it was worth anything.

Try $497,5000 of worth something, according to the Associated Press. Other items sold at the same London auction were the Beatles’ first contract with manager Brian Epstein ($426,000), Elvis Presley’s application to carry a concealed weapon in California and as an added bonus, a set of his fingerprints ($81,740), a bathrobe worn by John Lennon in the 1960s ($7,000) and a silk scarf Margaret Thatcher sported in 1979 ($700).

Collectibles auction tinged with sadness

Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor was killed in a home invasion last year in Miami. Last weekend, contents of his Washington-area estate were put up for auction with proceeds going into a trust fund for his infant daughter who was reportedly left out of the will.

One attendee told the The Washington Post that he was “tore up” by Taylor’s death and was “getting goose bumps talking about it now.”

There was wide array of items from a couple of bars of Irish Spring soap to a 9-mm German handgun. Interspersed among the fishing poles and Fabreze were only a few true collectibles, a rack of custom Cowboys/Redskins billiard balls for one, a signed Redskins football for another.

Joyce Brooks of Brooks auctions reported that $7,375.50 was raised for the fund. The Brooks commission, she said, is between 30 and 50 percent.

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