Purging Dishes in the Kitchen

With the schematic of the kitchen cabinets in my future home at hand, I’ve been a busy bee this week trying to downsize the dishes in my current kitchen cabinets. I’m on a break right now that I just used to pack the trunk of my car with some stuff to take to Goodwill tomorrow. I’ve almost taken more breaks than the amount of time I’ve logged working on my cabinets. On one break I shoveled a path through the snow to the mailbox because I hadn’t been down there in four days---the path being between the sidewalk and the back of the box because the plowed road is too icy to walk around to the front of the box. I don’t know how many days it takes for a mail carrier to ask the police for a wellness check on a senior citizen but I don’t want to find out by getting one. Actually, I say that tongue-in-cheek because I’ve been scheduling e-Bay packages for porch pickups just about every Monday and Tuesday so I’m pretty sure the mail lady knows I’m still breathing.

Also on one of my breaks I’ve been photographing things to list on e-Bay. Aside from selling art down the road, I have another month for one last big push to give one-of-kind, valuable sleepers and sentimental things with little value new homes. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned before, but I have a large collection of Cracker Jack toys, boxes, tins and other memorabilia including a rare, unopened Cracker Jill necklace. With a few exceptions the collection has very little monetary value. The tiny plastic toys sell for $2 to $7 each but a dozen or so of my metal pieces would sell for $50 to $100 each which I'm not going to do. I struggle with the idea of putting them all in a large mason jar to display on a shelf. I have them are all in a divided fishing tackle box sorted by the dates issued and I can’t bring myself to undo all that work of identifying the various series’. Where was I going with this? Oh, ya, I made the tough decision to take all but one of my Cracker Jack tin cans to Goodwill and to sell off the boxes, t-shirts and Cracker Jill stuff leaving me with just the tackle box of toys. These were part of the things I was photographing as a diversion from thinning down my dishes. My love of Cracker Jack collecting goes back 75 years and what I'm keeping doesn’t take up much space. I even had three complete sets of Cracker Jack baseball cards and albums that I sold last summer. I’m proud of myself for letting those go. It took me several decades of hunting to pull those together.

Dishes: Oh! My! God! I’m also proud of the fact that I got my iridescent carnival glass dinnerware out of my kitchen and into the garage where I’ll try to sell it on Facebook Market Place come spring. Growing up, my mom bought a lot of stuff at the Salvation Army resale store and part of the set I have now was dishes she purchased there and we used to eat off from at our cottage in the 1940s. I added many pieces to the set so that I have a service for ten. Over my lifetime the prices for carnival glass has taken a nose dive after decades of shooting up and now I’ll probably have trouble giving them away. No one wants dishes you can’t put in the microwave or dishwasher which has killed the vintage fine china market but the death blow came from the Food Network when they popularized using plain white dishes. (And I have to admit, eating off orange carnival glass takes a strong gag reflex if you don't take the color of your food in mind when you plan your meal.) The only people buying fancy vintage dishes these days are people who repurpose them into garden art. I did separate the creamer and sugar set from the rest of the carnival glass because those I’ll probably be able to sell on e-Bay for $50. Cream and sugar bowls in any china set are still worth listing.

More Dishes: When I was a kid my mom replaced the carnival glass at the lake with Lily-of-valley dishes that were grocery store premiums in the fifties. I love those dishes but my brother and I broke a lot of them and by the time I was old enough to care about pretty things there were only a few pieces of that pattern left. So I set out to build a set with a similar pattern from the same super market premium era. 

My mom had lily-of-the-valley in her yard and wore the fragrance and I can’t see a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley without thinking of the gentlest side of Mom’s personality. She could be a hardcore disciplinarian, too, and to this day my brother and I still argue over which one of us she loved best. I think it was my brother because he gave her three grandchildren and all I gave her was poodle grand-babies. Back to the dishes, though, I’m keeping my lily-of-the-valley dishes plus some vintage diner dishes and some olive vintage Fenton glassware that all blend together. The diner dishes I use when I’m alone because I can throw them in the microwave and dishwasher. Heck, I could throw them against a wall and they wouldn’t break. Not that I'd ever do that, but I have dropped a few on the floor. I used to have a whole set of for ten of the diner dishes but I downsized them after my husband died to just four place settings, plus extra cups, pitchers and serving pieces of all sizes. The pitchers and platters will go on e-Bay soon. Mid-century style furniture making a comeback is helping to make diner dishes popular again. My brain hurts from downsizing decisions. At one point I even went online thinking I’d get rid of ALL my dishes and start over with a brand new set. It was fun looking but in end the end I recognized the shopping was just another diversion for avoiding what I didn’t want to do and that was letting go of more of my memories attached to my dishes and green stemware, most of which were bought one piece at a time while combing antique malls, flea markets and estate sales. ©

This is the carnival glass I moved to the garage and it came out of the glass front cupboard below. Of those three pieces still left, the center one is all I'll be keeping because it belonged to my mom. The other two are just staging for when the house goes up for sale.

 

 

The two boxes of vases at the top of the cabinet up above will end up in my new laundry room. (x-florist that I am, these vases are what's left after last summer's purge from an entire cabinet of vases that I had in the garage.) Before this week's purging that top shelf was filled with vintage diner pitchers and serving dishes. The photo below shows the only pitchers and serving dishes that made it through the purge. 

 

 

 

 

The photo above is of another cabinet in my kitchen and, yes, I have far more cups than I'll ever need but, what can I say, I can't bare to get rid of the lily-of-the-valley ones that I rarely use, and the others I do use. One of the boxes at the top one holds some cut glass dishes my mom used whenever my folks had a party. The other box holds some pressed glass party dishes that made it through the purging of the Hoosier cabinet that I sold last summer. That Hoosier was entirely filled with pressed glass. And last but not least the hardest purge of all was letting go of my green Fenton stemware and plates (below). I'm only keeping two sizes out of five. But that box of Fenton in the garage won't be going anywhere until I actually see my new home. They've tweaked the laundry room footprint so much since giving me the schematic that I'm not sure how much stuff will fit in the cabinets above and below the folding area. My head hurts from thinking about all this! 

Good bye beautiful Fenton! I will miss you.