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.

From Postage Stamps to Fountain Pens

Downsizing comes in four forms for me. 1) Selling collectibles that are well worth the time it takes like the western memorabilia stuff I sold last summer, 2) donating the household goods to Goodwill that I no longer use like small kitchen appliances, 3) giving stuff away because I want to see it stay in the family like the wicker suitcase that held all my grandfather’s worldly possessions when he immigrated here in the late 1800s, and 4) the category of downsizing that I call Jean’s Antique Adoption Center. This latter category of downsizing covers old things with an obscure market but they have a history that deserves to be preserved by someone who appreciates it like the Fisher Body Neapolitan Coach I blogged about last fall. The Adoption Center also covers collectibles that my husband and/or I once invested a lot of time or money in. However, the resale market is all but gone yet I’m still sentimentally attached and can’t bring myself to just trash the stuff. My lasted project falls in the latter category. I’ve been working on ‘stamp adoptions’ for the past three days but unlike the Coach I sold for a huge profit, the sales that will be generated out of a 9” x 16” x 22” plastic box of postage stamps will be at a loss. If I can even find buyers. Stamp collecting in America is all but dead and there is a glut of sheets, blocks and single stamps listed on e-Bay.

Before we met in 1970, both my husband and collected stamps as teens and our early twenties that we carefully soaked off envelopes or bought by mail order and using stamp hinges, we placed them in our Harris albums. It was a time intense hobby. After we met we switched from buying single stamps and started buying sheets and blocks, thinking they’d be good investments. And in our defense, it might have turned out that way if the internet hadn’t come alone to slowly choke the life out of the U.S. mail service. By the ‘80s we quit buying stamps altogether but we still tore stamps off envelopes that came in mail but otherwise we ignored the hobby. Nineteen years ago, when Don had his stroke and we moved into this house the box of stamps got put in the basement and hadn’t been touched since this week when I bit the bullet to do The Great Stamp Sort. 

Three days of sorting, writing up auction descriptions, photographing postage stamps and prepping them to ship, I now have 30 lots of stamps ready to list on e-Bay. It was probably a waste three days of my life to put that much effort into this project. I probably should have just said to myself, "These have served their purpose back in their day" and put them in the recycling bid or sent the box to the auction house where someone might not know they’d be bidding on albatross. But I like the idea that I’ll be coming full circle and giving the stamps a fighting chance to find new homes. The unused stamps I’ll list at half their face value just to stand out from all the others online. The big three mail order stamp companies are still in business and they might be attracted by the price when they can see a bigger profit in selling them overseas. And my two huge foreign lots from the first half of the 20^th century might do well enough to make the effort worth the trouble but I’m not counting my chickens before they’re hatched. However, I've got to admit that my "Great Stamp Sort brought back the thrill of the hunt that attracted me to the hobby in the first place, especially when I mistakenly thought I'd found an error stamp worth over $2,000. It was so cool until I found an article online on how to tell the recalled error stamp from the corrected issue.

I’m getting close to the end of my sorting collectibles projects. I have a Cracker Jack metal and plastic toys collection but that’s been sorted into dates for thirty years. It doesn’t take up much room and it still "brings me joy." I'll keep that if I can. Same with half my seashell collection and the ones that don't make the cut will go to Goodwill. Other than that, I only have a couple more, small collections to deal with and before the winter is over I hope that stuff will be photographed, written up and ready to list in the spring. At least that's the plan. I'm working on political pinbacks now.

But the sort/sell job I’ll be leaving for last or maybe even after I move is fountain pens. Before my husband’s stroke he accumulated a small collection (under two dozen) of the fancy ones---marble, exotic woods, floaters and others that are still holding their values. After Don's stroke when we could no long go on collecting safaris his instinct to collect was still there. He’d pick up free ballpoint pens from offices or where ever. More than a few times he even pulled pens out of doctor’s pockets and admired them to the point the doctors would give them to him. You’d be surprised how many give-away pens a person in a wheelchair can collect in twelve and a half years. Of course the post-stroke ballpoint pens have no value and ever since Don died nearly eight years ago I’ve been reverse, un-collecting them; every time I leave the house I stick a few pens in my purse and leave one behind whenever I write a check. I’ve enjoyed my secret life as The Pen Fairy and I'm outing myself now because I've only got about two dozen yet to go. ©

Halloween, Ghosts and Cracker Jack

I may be the only person on the planet who doesn’t like Halloween. Not one single thing about it. Not the black and orange color scheme that take up several isles in the stores for weeks ahead of November 31th and is draped around neighborhood yards. Not the greedy little kids who when you say “take one” they take one handful. Not the costumes that way too many adults seem to think are fun to dress up in and scare the heck out of me when they show up at my door. Not the Zombie Walks held downtown that grows larger every year. Not the candy itself that puts me on a sugar binge that lasts until New Year’s Resolutions are made. Is there such a thing as a Halloween Grinch like there is for Christmas? Google has an answer: Yes, there is and my picture appeared when I did the search.

So why did I go to a lecture billed as Ghost Stories? They weren’t ordinary ghost stories. These were legends and spooky mysteries that center around iconic buildings in our downtown buildings. I’ve seen this speaker before and she's good, no matter the topic. She gave an entertaining account of all the tragic deaths of people in those buildings who supposedly wanted to hang around earth to haunt the places. Although I’m not fully vested in the premise of souls sticking around, I do think my husband’s did just that for a couple of weeks. Everything has a scientifically based explanation; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it to explain why my wedding kept falling off the bulletin board where I'd hung it on a pin.

When I was a kid I liked Halloween and there was one house around the corner from me that we always hit before the rest. The elderly couple who lived there gave out boxes of Cracker Jack and I still have the plastic prizes that came in those early boxes. I’ve added hundreds to my collection since then including a tin horse drawn wagon circa 1916 that I paid a small fortune to acquire. That’s a different story for a different day but in case you’re curious I still love the collection. When you collect anything you learn interesting facts. For example I learned about how the Cracker Jack’s waxed box was a pioneer in food packaging that revolutionized the food industry and I learned how baseball became connected to their product. The story behind the latter is that a vaudeville entertainer who’d never been to a ball game wrote a song on a train and that song---Take me out to the Ball Game---with its iconic line “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack" was a godsend to the company’s sales. And before you ask, it didn’t come from any deal or compensation the entertainer got. 

Throughout 1914 and 1915 the company offered baseball cards in Cracker Jack boxes and a complete set today is worth over a $100,000. Needless to say, I don’t have a set or even a single card. If I did it would go up for sale so fast my nose would bleed. I do have several sets of the replica cards the company put in boxes (1991 through 1993) for their 100^th anniversary which aren’t worth enough to tempt me to sell---a set might buy me a nice steak dinner. I also don’t have any of the forerunners to the toys put in boxes in between 1910 and 1912 which were coupons that when you collected enough could be redeemed for things like silverware, watches and sewing machines. I wish I did. They are rarer than bunions on fresh water fish.

Oh, yes, I do have Halloween to thank with my obsession with Cracker Jack. That and the fact that in the early years of being with my husband we went to a lot of antique malls and flea markets where he often found pricey things to add to his collections and, as a joke, I decided to add to my childhood C.J. toys and wooden nickel collections which at the time I could pick up for under a buck a piece. It was a game we played that took the thrill of the hunt to a whole new level. As my knowledge grew and the years went by, of course, so did my willingness to pay more. In the meantime I had a lot fun teasing Don that I could spend two hours at a flea market, spend $1.00-$2.00 and have as much fun as his $100-$200 hunt.

So ya, I’m probably more attached to my Cracker Jack premiums than I should be and it does bother me that I’m at an age where I should let go. But most of those little toys represents good times spent with my soulmate and I still can’t let go of those memories attached. And what would I do if I downsized my entire life yet again to live a minimalist life-style for another five, ten or twenty years? Stare at the sterile walls wishing I could buy back my memory triggers? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust but in between I collected too much. ©