J'adore... Vintage Milk Glass

Blogger is messing with me tonight, and seems to want me to draft this post in HTML. NOT COOL, BLOGGER!

But anyway...

Y'all know that I love milk glass. I started collecting it a couple of years ago and have amassed quite a bit of it. I love the way the light hits it. It's not quite as heavy or opaque as china or porcelain. It's so pretty and even the sturdier pieces have a certain delicacy to them. I just love it! I don't think there is a single room in my house, with the exception of Bubba's bedroom, that doesn't have any in it.



Even the dog's dish is milk glass! Um... let's ignore the ugly water container for now, okay? :) It's kind of interesting; I found that dish at a Goodwill for a few dollars, so I picked it up, figuring I'd find a use for it eventually. Well, I saw the same one at the antique mall last week. Apparently it's a candy dish and it's supposed to have a coordinating lid. The handle/finial is a ball with a little pointy spire on it. Mine is missing that piece, so dog dish it is!

I have noticed on Pinterest that there are a lot of photos where people have taken their glass and just stacked it. Do a search for milk glass and you'll see what I mean - stacks and stacks of pretty white glass all bunched together. It looks really cool, so I thought I'd try it with some of my pieces.



I took the dresser that used to hold the television and tucked it in a little space behind my sofa that was just blank wall before. I put a milk glass lamp on top, then lots of other bowls, vases, and serving pieces. With that pale blue wall as a background, it's just so pretty! I love looking over at that little vignette. It makes me smile.

I'm having a few girls over tomorrow night for a little holiday get together. Nothing big - some nibbles, some non-alcoholic punch, maybe a little bit of crafting. I started to get things ready tonight.



Just like Eddie Ross taught me, I've laid out my tablecloth and serving dishes to be sure that I have a dish for everything and space for every dish. I've used a mix of clear glass and my milk glass to bring a little visual interest to my table.

Aw, heck, let's be honest - I really really really just wanted to be able to use my punch bowl along with my pretty milk glass.



Isn't it GORGEOUS? This sucker is HUGE, and super heavy. Unlike the punch bowls they sell in stores now, this one is super thick glass. It also came with eighteen cups!!! I had been admiring the punch bowls at Goodwill for a while, but they were always too ornate, or only had a few cups. When I saw this one, and saw the price tag, I didn't even hesitate before snatching that bad boy up! It's perfect - pretty without being too fancy, and old and sturdy to boot. LOVE.

Of course, there was the issue of it not having a ladle, but a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond remedied that. Did you know you can get a pretty crystal Mikasa punch bowl ladle there for a mere ten dollars? You do now! I even used a coupon. :)

Almost everything on this table came from an antique mall, a rummage sale, or a thrift store. The crystal pitcher was a wedding gift, as were the water glasses. My mother in law got me the glass cake stand for Christmas last year and I found the matching plate and bowl at Goodwill a few months later. The teeny brass spoon is part of a set (five teeny spoons, five teeny forks, and five teeny knives) that my mother found somewhere and thought I would like. I saw just the set of spoons at an antique store for $20! They're made in Thailand. She literally found them, as in, she paid nothing for them.

The gold rimmed egg plate ($2)came from a rummage sale, as did the oval dish($1). The square milk glass dish is part of a set of five for which I paid a couple of dollars each. The napkins are from Pier One. I paid six dollars for the set of eight at a school boutique/craft fair. They were brand new and had the original $7 price tags on each of them. Oh, and those darling milk glass snack plates?



I paid a whopping dollar each at the DI last week for them. They only had two of the matching cups, but that's okay since I have my punch cups. They're very heavy, and so much nicer than just having paper plates would be, don't you think?

I don't really get to entertain much, even though I'd really like to do it more often. I'm so excited to get to pull out all of these pretty things that I've been stashing for a special occasion and use them! I'll post photos of what it looks like once I've got everything filled and ready for company.

It just goes to show you that you don't have to spend a whole bunch of money to have a pretty party! You can have a really nice set up on a budget if you take your time and build your collection slowly.

J'adore... Vintage Pyrex

You may have heard me mention that in the past few months, I've started to collect vintage Pyrex. I resisted it for a long time. The pretty colors and fun designs tried their best to lure me in, but I kept telling myself that I did not need a new collection of anything. Of course, then I found Pinterest (follow me here!) and the rest was history. Now I kick myself when I think of all the lovely pieces I left behind in various thrift shops because I wasn't a collector. *sigh*

The set of four Cinderella bowls in the Gooseberry pattern (top middle of photo, stacked) were my very first purchase. They broke the dam, if you will. I found these before I found Pinterest. I'm a sucker for old things, and pink things. These were in perfect condition and it was only $18 for the whole set at Goodwill. The small round casseroles that you see to the left of the bowls were there too, but I left them behind. I still kick myself for that move.

Even after buying these, I didn't really consider collecting. These were just a pretty one off that I happened to buy because I liked them. They were going to be the only ones I had.

Well, of course, when I Googled them to find out the name of the pattern, I found a bunch of other pink Pyrex out there.

How adorable is this set of striped bowls? I love that the wide stripes are flanked by narrower ones. I think that makes them more visually interesting than if they had used a uniform stripe.

And there are all these pretties. Even though it's the absolute BEST shade of aqua ever, I've never really been a huge fan of the Amish Butterprint. But in the pink I really like it! I wouldn't mind having any of these in my cupboards!

These are the ones I'm really looking for right now. Daisies are my absolute favorite flower, so a combination of pink Pyrex with a daisy design is pretty much meant for me!

So at this point I'm thinking I'll collect vintage Pyrex, but only the pink pieces. Then it will not get out of control! I'm just so smart.

Enter Pinterest, and this photo:

Oh. My. Word. I loved how happy and bright all the colors looked together on that plain white shelf. The way the collector organized the colors just made them look so appealing to me! So, now I'm thinking maybe it wouldn't be so bad to collect it just in general, because it's so pretty and colorful!

I have the blue and the green covered casserole dishes on the bottom right corner of that photo too. :)

I started looking for other photos of vintage Pyrex on Pinterest. There are a lot of them out there! This is another lovely collection that is especially heavy on the pinks and blues.

How could anything that makes a person look this happy be wrong?

I really like her collection of the racks hanging on the wall. These took your Pyrex up a notch by giving them carrying handles or turning them into chafing dishes or chip and dip sets.

This old ad shows a lot of the pieces with their racks. I really love the one with the coffee pot. That brings me to the subject of the ads. I'm pinning those on my Pyrex board as well.

This one shows how versatile the pieces are, going from freezer to oven to table. It also shows one of the casseroles in it's carrying rack.

Here's an ad for the Cinderella bowl sets that gives you ideas of how you could use them. Nowadays companies want you to buy a separate product for each one of those tasks, but back then people looked for ways to get more bang for their buck.

Check out the prices on those ads too, if you can see them. If only those folks had known what these would be worth in the future!

Of course, there are the ones that didn't survive quite as nicely as most of them. According to the blog where I found this photo, this bowl was the victim of too many trips through the dishwasher, and I believe it! Dishwasher detergent doesn't clean like regular soap; rather, it's an enzyme that sort of eats the dirt off your dishes. If there is no dirt to eat, well then, it will just start to eat away at your dishes instead. This is what causes etching on glasses, and why you shouldn't pre-rinse your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. (Just scrape off the chunks.)

I suppose it goes without saying that you should NEVER put anything with a shiny finish that you want to protect, oh, say like vintage Pyrex, in the dishwasher.

This is just a cute casserole that I saw online today for the first time. I love how retro the kitchen designs on it are. Another I'd be really happy to find! I lurrrrve it.

And then there are these. If you think it's hard to find vintage Pyrex that's in good condition, well then, it's almost impossible to find it in good condition in the box in which it originally came! This collector (on Flickr) has a ton of these pieces, many with the original 99cent price stickers and decorative tags. So flipping cool.