The text across the top of @yesivhdez‘s 11 second reel reads “me leaving every estate sale with a little trinket.” The trinket in her arms is a stained glass koi fish lamp with a red and orange scaled body, pink fins and a black power cord trailing down in loops.

Her caption, posted October 3, 2026, is just as short: “Just a girl who loves estate sales & stained glass,” followed by a row of emoji and the hashtags #stainedglasslamp, #estatesalefinds, #bayareaestatesales, #stainedglass and #vintagelamp. The post is tagged Los Altos Hills, California.

The whole reel is a single continuous shot outdoors on a tree lined road in bright sun. She wears a light blue striped button up shirt with a backpack strap over one shoulder, and she carries the lamp in both arms, tilting it toward the camera so the fish’s head, eye and overlapping scale pattern catch the light. Each scale is its own small piece of glass in a different shade of red and amber, and the fins fade toward pink. Her black power cord hangs down from the lamp in loose loops across her shirt.

The framing changes as the clip runs. In the first seconds the camera is close, with the fish filling the left side of the frame and her smiling over it. Around the three second mark the lamp swings in toward the lens, near enough that individual scales and the leaded lines between them are visible. By the middle of the reel she has stepped back and a house is visible down the road behind her, and by the end the shot is wide enough to show blue sky, shrubs along the roadside and the whole fish held out in front of her. Her mouth is moving throughout, so she is talking to the camera, but the only words printed on the screen are the line across the top. Her caption calls her a girl who loves estate sales and stained glass, and the reel does not say where the lamp was made or what she paid.

For a sense of how leaded glass lamps are built, the museum record helps. According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studios turned to lighting and lamps in 1898. The Met’s collection includes a Tiffany lamp in leaded Favrile glass and bronze dated 1904 to 1915, and the museum notes that although craftsmen worked from patterns, each shade was unique because of the individual glass pieces selected for their colors and densities.

For anyone who brings home a lamp like this from an estate sale, the first job is the cord. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s home electrical checklist asks whether any cord is frayed, cracked or otherwise damaged and says to replace all damaged cords or replace the equipment, because damaged cords can expose live wires and create shock and fire hazards. The same checklist says to use the right wattage bulb for the fixture and, if you are unsure, a bulb rated at 60 watts or less, since an oversized bulb can overheat the fixture and nearby combustibles.

Before plugging it in, turn the shade in good light and look for cracked or loose pieces of glass, gaps where the lead lines have pulled away and any wobble where the shade meets its base. Check the underside for a stamp, label or maker’s mark and photograph it, so you have something concrete to research with. Then carry it the way she does, supported from underneath with both arms, not by the cord or one fin.