My Wexford Obsession

I thrift with my sister but we haven't always been thrift store addicted.  It happened innocently enough.  My younger daughter decided that she would start collecting vintage decor and dishes with the intention of starting a side business renting her treasures for parties and photo sessions.  One of the first patterns that she acquired was a group of Wexford stems.  Wexford is a sturdy pressed glass pattern made by Anchor Hocking in the 1940's thru 1960's.  The vintage glassware has a pretty distinctive pattern, small diamonds towards the top and larger diamonds towards the bottom.  Some places this is referred to as criss cross and occasionally it is called a waffle pattern.  When we noticed some glasses in Goodwill that matched my daughter's glasses we snatched them up.  My daughter lives across the state in a metropolitan area. My sister and I felt that while my daughter shopped the big city we could check the stores in the towns that we shopped and pick up things that she might like.

It turns out that Wexford apparently was pretty popular in our area because it has been readily available.  When we stop at Goodwill there is often one or more pieces and it is always reasonably priced. I now love it as much as she does and I now have many more pieces than she does.  She has not yet started her business.  Life has a way of intruding and she has had a lot of stuff going on right now and limited storage.  Perhaps soon.  When she gets ready to open her rental business I will happily share my pieces with her.  I don't have the place settings. No dinner plates, salad plates or saucers.  I have not seen them for purchase locally and have not searched them out online.  I do have many, many serving pieces.  I have six sizes of glasses, as well as punch bowls and punch cups.  I have footed sherbets, hexagonal salad plates, berry bowls.  More of some pieces than others but quite a bit of it.  Here is a sampling.  These pieces are currently displayed in my dining area.  The majority of the collection is in more functional storage on wire shelves in my basement.  None of the pieces are currently in the new dish pantry but I imagine that they will rotate in and out of there.

six sizes of glasses

canisters currently holding dog treats

ice bucket

two stacks of coasters

My newest piece was a gift.  Quite a long while ago I had written a post about my search for decanters.  I had read Helen, who blogs at Entertablement's, post about her husband's bar cart and her decanters and I was taken with the idea of a bar cart and I started my own collection of decanters knowing that at some point I would find the right cart to put them on.  Alas, I am still looking.  My good friend Kim, who blogs at Exquisitely Unremarkable, sent me a gift in the mail of a decanter that she found at an Etsy shop.  Unfortunately the decanter arrived in pieces having been broken in transit between the Etsy shop and the farm.  The only thing in one piece was the stopper.  It was a sad day.  Kim was not to be deterred and soon another package arrived.  This one arrived intact.  Turns out the decanter that she selected was the Wexford pattern and just happened to coordinate with my many other Wexford pieces. Thanks Kim!  It is a lovely piece.  It means so much to me that you would search out and send such a perfect gift.   

my new decanter

part of my collection on top of the bookcase

Learn and Do

The new year is a time traditionally when blog people look back to recap the passing year and look ahead to the upcoming year.  They post lists of their most popular posts or projects or recipes.  They set goals and make resolutions.  I am not one of those people who is successful at those tasks.  I tried posting my garden goals once on the side of my blog.  Eventually it disappeared from there, dying from inattention.  Some bloggers are writing about their one word for the new year, a fairly new type of resolution popular the past few years.  I have not been a 'one worder' either.  But I do have some things that I would like to accomplish and so perhaps some goals would be in order. A very vague goal, kind of on the order of that one word business.  I would like to learn and do new things.

I got started before the New Year.  I decided that my  (only) bathroom could use some upgrading.  My toilet had started to leak and I was having issues with my sink faucet.  I did some research, read some articles and watched some you tube.  I bought a new toilet and a new pedestal sink and I replaced my toilet.  All alone.  By myself.  And it is working.  With no leaking.  The pedestal sink is out of the box and laid out in pieces on my couch.  It is going to be installed today.   Or tomorrow.  Sometime this weekend.  Learn and do.  Our family is replete with DIY'ers.  We all tackle projects.  It is in our DNA I guess.

I have several woodworking projects that I want to accomplish.  One of them is nearly complete.  My dish pantry.  It just needs the door.  That will happen today.  Or tomorrow.  Or this weekend.  I kind of see a trend here.  I am a bit of a procrastinator but it is time to bite the bullet and get it done.  In order to do my wood projects I needed to get my own tools.  Now that I have tools I have no excuses.  More on these other projects later.
 
Another plan that I have involves food.  I like to cook and bake.  I have a huge number of actual cookbooks, a very extensive pinterest recipe collection and more ebook cookbooks than I should and tons of recipes that show up in my inbox from other bloggers.  I am not afraid to tackle complicated or unusual recipes, I just don't.  I live alone and much of the time I am cooking just for me so it is easy to do the easy, quick stuff.  My new plan is to learn to use an unfamiliar or exotic ingredient.  Not living close to a large metropolitan city I may have to be a bit selective in what recipes I select or plan far enough ahead that my big city offspring can shop for me before they come to the farm to visit.

As a start, yesterday I made a salad using wheat berries.  My friend Bobbie discovered the recipe and was going to try it.  I decided to try it too.  I had never cooked with wheat berries  before but they were good in the salad.  Wheat berries, roasted beets and feta cheese with fresh herbs and a homemade vinaigrette.  Tasty and filling.

And today I made a soup with several new ingredients.  I am a little embarrassed to say that I am slow to the coconut bandwagon but the soup that I made has both coconut oil and coconut milk.  It also has lime and turmeric and bok choy and several kinds of mushrooms.  It did not have tofu in it since I forgot to buy it so I went without it.  It was good.  Interesting flavors.

I have several other soups on my list.  Maybe my goal should be a big pot of a new soup each week.    And a salad.  With greens from the winter greenhouse once they are ready. 

I will have to do a Part 2 of this post with other things from my To Do list.  Stay warm. 

The dish pantry is done--kind of

I am an avid dish collector.  My sister and I hit the closest thrift stores pretty regularly, at least several times a month and there are some others that we frequent when we get further out of town.  Because I have been pretty successful at finding dishes that appeal to me I was finding myself short of dish storage.  I live in a small farmhouse and storage in general is nonexistent.  My house has a total of three small closets, one in each bedroom.  No linen closet, no broom closet, no coat closet.

What I do have is a small entry that at one time was added on to the house.  I don't think that it is original to the house.  When we moved here nearly 30 years ago this little entryway was sort of a pass through from the back door, which is the door that we use, to the kitchen.  On one side was a homemade closet only 11 inches deep with thin plywood doors and some hooks for hanging a couple of coats.  There was an upper cabinet and the lower cabinet and at some point after we moved we removed the doors on the lower cabinet and made three cubbies.

On the other side of the entryway was a shelf about a foot down from the ceiling and a built in bench with a lid that raised where you could sit to put on your shoes or boots.  We also took out the bench and added a three more shelves.  For quite a few years I used the area for pantry storage with canisters and canning jars and a table below the shelves.  When I was given a shelving unit from IKEA for Christmas one year by my daughter for in my kitchen that became my pantry storage and I put dishes on the entry shelves.

I have been coveting this pantry ever since I first saw it on pinterest.

 

Source

My space is not nearly as big and certainly not tall enough to justify a ladder but wouldn't that be fun.  It is kind of an awkward place for dish storage, next to the exterior door but space is at a premium and that space is not well used right now.  I happened upon a narrow vintage French door about a year ago and it has been hanging out in my shed just waiting for me to use it.

I also like the narrow display area in this photo:

 

Source

So shortly before Christmas I decided the time was right to take on this project.  I don't have a lot of experience building anything this big by myself.  Our family built the winter greenhouse from scratch and I participated.  I have helped with projects and built some small stuff like bird houses and a rustic table.  And I do have that trouble with distorted vision.  I bought myself some tools that I have been wanting for a long time and some bead board and lumber.  I tore out the old shelves and started covering the walls with the bead board.  I built two narrow walls that would flank the door and built the shelves.  Then I painted.  And painted.  Two days before we were to celebrate Christmas I was washing dishes and glasses and putting them away in the new pantry and between loads I was painting my vintage door which was laying on the dining room table.  The door was kind of a challenge.  There were 10 divided lites to paint around both on the front and the back.  It was taking multiple coats and the morning of our celebration, I discover that the door I had been painting for two days would not fit.  One of my walls is apparently not quite plumb and so the door fits fine at the top but not at the bottom.  So back out to the shed it goes until I can decide what to do with it.

So far I have come up with these options:

Rebuild the offending wall so that it is plumb and square.
Plane the door or the door frame so that it fits better.
Leave the door off and use the door for a different project perhaps like this:

 

 Source

Anyway, here is my dish pantry.  Without a door.

 

 

It is 53 inches wide by 25.5 inches deep.  There are 7 u shaped shelves that are 11.5 inches deep on the back wall and 9.25 inches deep on the side walls.  They are deep enough for my dinner plates but some of the platters protrude a bit past the front edge of the shelves.

 

I have soup tureens on the very top and five not quite complete sets of china, stoneware and glasses on the middle five shelves and platters on the bottom.

 

I know that it will need some adjusting.  I have some things that will probably be replaced with other things that are stored elsewhere in the house.  It was a fun project.  I am glad for the extra storage.

I am sharing this with

Dishing it & Digging it here.
Metamorphosis Monday at BNOTP here.