From beer signs to tie-dye shirts, students can find all sorts of items at the Convocation Center’s Clean Sweep garage sale and flea market event over the weekend.

The Clean Sweep features vendors from 41 cities, said vendor coordinator Jennifer Brown. Brown said items for sale can range from homemade shirts to collectables.

The event will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

“There’s quite a few from the DeKalb-Sycamore area,” Brown said. “There are some from Rochelle and Courtland, too. We’ve got a guy this year coming from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They come from everywhere.”

Brown said there’s anything you can imagine at the sale.

“There’s action figures and baseball cards,” Brown said. “There’s a comic book guy, too. I [have] a guy who shows up with sports collectables….so it’s not just one market of people.”

Brown said there’s something at the sale for everyone.

The event is open for students to attend as customers or vendors. Heather Priest, assistant director of marketing, said the Convocation Center makes it easy for anyone to become a vendor at the Clean Sweep.

“People can rent tables from us,” Priest said. “They can put the tables in their booth space. We actually help them unload their cars. So we have volunteers running our pagodas [booths] and also doing push carts out to their cars…. So they don’t have to worry about anything of that sort.”

Priest said marketing for the event has been primarily through word of mouth through vendors and returning customers.

“We started it as kind of an economy stimulator…five years ago,” Priest said. “We just wanted to bring the community together and have kind of an inexpensive day. It’s $2 to come in. They get a free bag and you can come shop. There’s tons of garage sales, so it’s a win-win for everybody.”

The number of vendors and goods increased over the years as news spread of the event, Priest said.

“According to our records we’re going to have a fairly good turnout,” said Sharon Love, Convocation Center administrative assistant. “Of course the weather, you never know with the weather. But as far as vendors go, we have increased vendors over the last year. So we have a lot of new vendors and we anticipate a very large crowd. We’ve advertised it a lot more, word of mouth has gotten out, it’s all over the social media. We have a Facebook page.”

Some of the vendors will go to the newspapers and run ads in the garage sale section, Love said. Some put ads on Craigslist or put it on a bargain hunter-type website, which Love said has helped out.