New Dots!

Haven't been out much lately. Buggered up my foot last week - presumably the aftermath of my wild and wacky Saturday night spent gardening. Cause when I garden, I garden hard. Lol. :-)

Picked up two items yesterday. First, a thrift score:

Corelle Strawberry Sunday platter

Eating dinner over at my parents house has convinced me that not only that A) it's perfectly ok to eat dinner on a Corelle serving platter -and-  B) why would you ever want to go back to using a dinner plate after that? These platters are literally the perfect meal receptacles.

So in a day and age where every diet/health/fitness site says eat on smaller plates, I am embracing using serving pieces as my plate. The Pioneer Woman makes much the same observation in this post here. (Fair warning, so much Jadeite ahead, drool and jealousy are imminent.)

Green dots bowl! Yay sauce!

Wish I could say I got a bargain on this piece, but in truth I paid retail for it. (Pretty sure the dealer who sold it to me priced it off ebay). He did however knock 15 dollars off just because we are regular customers, so that took a good bit of the sting off of it. So yay for in-the-wild Pyrex finds I actually really wanted and didn't have already. And yay for beating ebay prices, even if it's just by a little bit.


And it completes my bowl set! My orange bowl is dishwasher faded, so I hope to replace it someday with a nice shiny one, but this works for now.

The blue dot bowl was probably one of the first mixing bowls I ever bought! I remember that it was a whole 8 dollars in an antique store and that was just sooo much money for a bowl to me at that time. Gah!

And it's taken me a full 5 years to complete this set in the wild. But it couldn't be more timely, since the 100 year anniversary pieces are Dots themed. Since I broke down and bought these at Target, I had to get at least one group shot. Almost 50 years difference between them in age!

Hope you're finding thrifty treats and treasures!

Happy Thrifting!

Cabinet Update

 I finally got my cabinet painted! But I'm not a good blogger, so it didn't even occur to me to take a "before" shot. This is the closest I have to one:

Once upon a time I think this hutch was a blonde or light brown. But ages ago someone painted it white and it seemed to eventually end up in storage where the color didn't exactly age well.

I painted it semi-gloss white on the outside and about as close as I could get to turquoise Pyrex or Tiffany Blue as I could find. I'll update this post (hopefully) when I remember to get the paint details off the can. *UPDATE* My color choice was Behr Island Oasis from Home Depot *

I did actually take a turquoise refrigerator dish to Home Depot with me to have color matched - something I've wanted to do forever. But alas, the scanner just wasn't helping me out. Light passes through the glass, so the color it kept matching was quite a bit darker and greener. The paint people behind the counter didn't have much better luck either.

Funny thing was, I think the universe was pretty bent on me having a decent match after all. Right beside me (literally, to my right as I stood at the counter feeling disappointed I couldn't get my fridgie matched) was one lone paint sample of a color that looked remarkably exactly like my refrigerator dish. I requested a small can mixed up in semi-gloss, used a Christmas gift card to pay for it, so I literally got it for free. How cool is that?

Here she is all filled up!

Hard to get a picture of it all at once. It's in a small room with an awkward furniture arrangement, so my pictures are all angled and cut off.

I filled it up with some of my very favorite things - and this time I decided on whim to highlight my Fire King collection.

Once I finished painting and hubs & I got it where I wanted it I started filling it up. First thing I put in was my brand newly-acquired pink Sunbeam stand mixer. I knew I wanted my collectors books in beside that, and as luck would have it, they fit perfectly.

Next, I knew I wanted my collection of Hazel Atlas Ripple. And the one thing I knew for sure was going on the top was my Fisher Price light up globe. I have to stop myself from collecting globes, I have nowhere to put them! And now my pink and turquoise canisters have a home! I love it so much!

In the same room, I've been playing around with even more shelves and displays. I didn't think I owned enough Jadeite to make a decent looking display, but I mixed in green depression glass, Delphite and 3 shades of blue Fire King. I really like the way it turned out!

The jadeite shelf is directly above this one, which is housing (most of) my original 6 colors of vintage Fiesta. I haven't actually arranged these yet, they are just stacked by color, but I still like the way it looks all together.

One of these days I'll take a pic of my Pyrex shelves. But right now they are a total jumble.

I used to have my Pyrex mostly on display on the shelves and kept duplicates in the kitchen as daily users. Sounds completely practical, in theory. But in practice, if I wanted to use something I didn't have in the cabinet, I needed to go get it from another room and wash it first. Meaning I tended to use the same pieces over and over again and some of my very favorites just sat on the shelf in another room collecting dust.

So what I did was basically switch out about a hundred pieces. It was a job and a half. Now my kitchen cabinets are full of my favorite Pyrex, washed and ready to go - whether I have a duplicate or not, and my shelves are full of duplicates (both good and bad) and not-as-loved. This may be the incentive I need to divest myself of some overflow.

I've been doing so much Spring cleaning and organizing lately! I feel like these displays are my reward for a hard work and a job well done, and I am enjoying them tremendously.

Hope you are enjoying some nice weather and finding awesome junk!

Happy Thrifting!

Surprise finds

I really haven't been out since my last post. Drs appointments and obligations have kept me (mostly) out of the thrift and antique stores for a few weeks now. I've hit the Goodwill when running errands put me in sight of one, but I've left empty handed (except the hubs who scored a few vinyl records).

Even today, I had an obligation that kept me from attempting to yard sale, so I almost just stayed home altogether, but my husband actually told me he thought I might crack up if I didn't get out today. So of all things I chose to do, I decided to go to my hometown antique store (that almost never has anything). Figured we'd walk through it in about 5 minutes flat, then we'd splurge on some junk food lunch - another indulgence I've been denying myself quite a bit lately - then head back home.

But that didn't happen. In fact, I found one of my vintage holy grail items - a McKee dots dish!
(Red dots on custard, and I believe is it the smallest of a 3 piece round canister set)

It was the first thing I found, and I was positively over the moon about it! I've coveted McKee dots online and in collector's books for several years now, but only just this summer even saw a single piece in person. (Alas, it was a lidless red dot refrigerator dish for 65 dollars. And I just couldn't do it. Had it had a lid I might just have.)

I would have left happy with just this one find, but in another booth I found 3 pink refrigerator dishes for 15 dollars - with lids!  AND the smallest Snowflake Blue casserole dish that completes my 470 set!

A family reunited!

Had to take this picture of them all together :-)

The medium size pink fridgie has seen better days. I don't think its been dishwashed, but it looks like someone got after it with a brillo pad. It sad to see a damaged finish on a color like this that is in such a high demand these days, but it's also easy to forget how many good cleaning products we have now that just didn't exist in the prime days of pink Pyrex. The little guys probably were too small to be used as baking dishes, so they've made it though the decades with very little damage.

I've got to admit, I hoard pink Pyrex. This is makes 2 and a half fridgie sets for me, and I'll probably still keep buying them if I find more I can afford. I hope I'm not bad!


And speaking of vintage holy grails, what are yours? I think I've got so many Pyrex grails that they are a category unto themselves, but my absolute top two are more McKee dots (every color I can get!) and more pieces to go with my grandmother's Hull wheat canister. I'm ever and always looking for these - in the wild. Maybe someday I'll ebay them, but I'm a half-the-fun is the hunt kind of girl!

My grandmother's Hull wheat canister. I believe this originally belonged to her mother.

What are your vintage holy grails you keep an eye out for?

Hope you're enjoying this weekend and finding fabulous treasures!

Happy Thrifting!