Swooning over Johnson Brothers Rose Chintz

Remember my happy little tale about acquiring Old Country Roses last Fall? Well I am SO excited to report that today I had a similar experience with Rose Chintz by Johnson Brothers!

Here's what happened: This morning, while procrastinating during "get ready for work time," I noticed an Ebay auction for dinner plates in Rose Chintz, another pattern I have been really in love with but slow to collect. The auction showed three dinner plates available for a reasonable price per piece. The downfall, as always, was the additional shipping cost, which made the total more than I wanted to spend. 

But I did wonder what the combined shipping would for all three pieces together, so I set out to "ask seller a question." In doing that - SURPRISE! I learned that the seller was actually local - so, I quickly messaged her to see if she would allow me to pick the plates up in person and avoid the shipping charges, and she said yes! Suddenly, the price for all three plates was well within my budget AND I could make arrangements to meet up with her and get them this very day! 
I completed the purchase through Ebay, but didn't pay right away. Instead, I met this delightful gal in a grocery store parking lot and traded cash-for-plates. (I wonder if any law enforcement officials took photographs? LOL) So now I have three dinner plates and four dessert plates in this classic Johnson Brothers pattern. 
It's probably kind of silly to get this excited over dishes... but here was the message I posted on Twitter just before I set out to pick up my treasure: 

Squeeee indeed! 

Hydrangea dessert plates - swwoooon!!!

Oh! And did I ever show you these blossoming beauties? I picked these up on a visit to my favorite antique mall a few weeks ago... they cost more than I normally like to pay for plates, but they were soooo pretty... and I only bought four of the 8, and when I got home immediately wished I'd bought all eight of them. 

Aren't they beautiful? They would be dessert plates, I think - too small for luncheon plates... 

I was NOT going to buy them, at $4 each... but my enabler husband said, "Do they make you happy to look at them?" Of course they do! And he bought them for me... so, maybe I can ease my guilt by saying they were a gift!  More soon,

Christmas with Old Country Roses

Okay I am sort of not really thinking of my table settings as "tablescapes," because honestly, all I do really is set the table. But you have to understand, using a tablecloth and clearing the table of electronics before eating is really special in our house and only happens maybe twice a year. So it feels monumental, like a major tablescaping effort has occurred, even when most people would say it's just a centerpiece and tablecloth.  Still, because such a monumental effort did occur, I feel compelled to share. :) So here is my Christmas table, set for our little family of three. I was able to use my new-to-me Old Country Roses dinner plates and many other thrifty bargains to set a lovely little table for Christmas lunch. 

The place settings are made up of a sparkly gold round placemat, Old Country Roses dinner plate, Anchor Hocking gold-rimmed bread plate, and cloth (gasp!) napkins with a gold-tone deer motif ring. 

My sweet daughter, not realizing I had purchased the gold charger mats, gave me a set of four pretty red sequined placemats for Christmas. The photo doesn't capture the scarlet color - they look more orange-red in the picture, but they are a beautiful deep red, a close match to the tablecloth.

I used the gold as planned under the plates, but I did use one of hers to anchor my centerpiece. The centerpiece incorporates the free greenery I found at a tree lot, my faux mercury glass attempts, and two pretty, heavy crystal votive holders I found on a recent thrifting expedition. 

Drinkware is vintage from my grandmother Verdie, flatware is vintage Oneida Chandelier from my great-Aunt Hazel, and the S&P set is vintage from my mother-in-law. All of these delightful ladies have passed on, but I love using pieces from their collections. 

Finally, here are the OCR pieces I used on the table, all (hand-) washed up after lunch and dried with a cheerful vintage dishcloth. 

I have a hard time explaining why it is that having family dinner on Old Country Roses seemed so special to me - I suppose because it took me a long time to get enough pieces together to be able to do it. At any rate, our lunch was delicious and certainly this was the prettiest table we'd enjoyed together for quite a long time. 

I'll be sharing my sweet Christmas table at Tablescape Thursday (even though this is really just a table setting - LOL) at Between Naps on the Porch, as well as Let's Dish over at Cuisine Kathleen.  I hope your Christmas was as lovely as mine! More soon,

Swooning over Old Country Roses

I promise to stop talking about dishes real soon... maybe... but right now I just have to SQUEAL with delight over Old Country Roses. Why? Because I recently completed a "Buy It Now" listing on Ebay for four dinner plates, and they arrived on my doorstep yesterday, just as described (perfect!) and for a great price. With the purchase of these plates, I can now serve dinner for six and am only one plate away from dinner for eight!  

This beautiful pattern by Royal Albert of England is the fairest in all the land as far as I'm concerned. It is  the Holy Grail of dishes for me. It was launched in 1962 (the same year as me!), and is still in production today. It is the most popular pattern ever produced by the Royal Albert company. Yet I cannot remember the last time I saw an individual piece in a thrift or antique store, let alone at a bargain price. And on Ebay, individual dinner plates generally range from $10-16 each, plus an additional $10-12 for shipping. I am just too cheap, and too impatient, to pay that much and wait for reasonable auctions to come along, so my OCR journey has been long and frustrating. 

This past week, however, a few stars aligned. I found an Ebay auction for FOUR dinner plates, with a "Buy It Now" price of $45 - that was only $11.25 per plate, and that included shipping! After carefully reading the listing and consulting a Royal Albert web page devoted to Old Country Roses and its various backstamps, I determined that the plates shown online were actually made in England (not Indonesia, as has been the case more recently) and were at least purported - by a seller with 100% positive feedback - to be in excellent condition. I even had (arguably) a spare $45 to spend. 

After thinking it over for... oh, maybe 30 seconds, I realized that if I were at the antique mall where shipping is not a consideration, and I spotted four OCR dinner plates in excellent condition for $11.25 each, I would snap them up. So I did the "Buy It Now" and then waited anxiously for my plates to arrive intact. Yesterday, they did - and they're beautiful!  
I tell you, I almost cried. For now, after a dozen years of collecting, I think I will finally serve Christmas dinner on Old Country Roses! 

New dish acquisition

I am apparently really drawn to some of the patterns of Martha Stewart Everyday! After stumbling upon these lovely pastel yellow plates, and then later these almost-Irish "Garland" salad plates, I've once again found a great little MSE bargain at a local thrift store. 
Today my acquisition was a trio of these soft blue salad plates with a "weave and pleat" design - I am not sure of the pattern name, but they were a steal at 99 cents for all three. 

I brought these little beauties home and washed them up, and immediately tried them in a couple of different stacks to see how I might use them. Here's one sandwiched between a bright white Corning "Tulip" dinner plate and an unmarked mid-century bread plate. 

Here it is with a Royal China Currier & Ives bread plate: 

And here it is with no bread plate at all -  

These would've looked super cute on my Easter table with the "crazy daisies"! Can't wait to use them! Have you found any special treasures lately while thrifting? 

More OCR coming my way... I hope!

Haven't been around here for awhile but I am soooooo excited about an upcoming change in my Old Country Roses ownership status. I am about to go from having "a few stray pieces" to having SEVEN beautiful dinner plates. I seriously just want to squeal! More soon... I will tell the whole story when I know it's finally true. Fingers crossed! 

Sweet and simple Easter dinner

We had a very quiet but lovely Easter Sunday - just the three of us celebrating - which included a visit from the Easter Bunny (he brought Scripture-themed t-shirts and a "God Is Love" necklace, plus Peanut Butter Eggs, for our daughter) and a very yummy dinner served on a pretty table. Yes, I actually broke out a tablecloth - this is unique because our dining room table usually has computers sitting on it so normally we just shove them out of the way!

It was hard to get a good overall picture, but it sure looked pretty in person. Since there are only three of us and the table normally sits against a wall, I put the centerpiece to the back of the table.



The "Crazy Daizies" really looked bright and cheery in my white ironstone pitcher. The white runner is actually a pillow sham (thrift-store find).



The plate, dish and relish spoon are for the butter and jelly that accompanied the dinner rolls. The jelly dish is a vintage piece of Depression Glass; I believe the pattern is called Swirl.



I haven't done too much in my table settings with lots of accessories yet; I tend to keep things simple so we have plenty of room to pass the dishes. We are of course using my beautiful everyday stainless flatware, "Chandelier" by Oneida.



I liked how the sun was coming in through the dining room window for most of these pictures.



Here are the plates at each setting - just 2 layers. The gold-rimmed plates (from Pier 1 many years ago) were for bread...



... and of course the Corning Centura "Tulip" plates were for the main meal.



Here is the detail on the dinner plates - so pretty! I recently got a set of sixteen of these (8 dinner and 8 salad) at the Goodwill, in pristine condition, for $2.99!!



Our meal consisted of "grilled favorites" (bacon-wrapped sirloin filets for my daughter and I, and a rib-eye for hubby), cheesy scalloped potatoes, a giant crab-stuffed portabello mushroom (split three ways - it was HUGE), and dinner rolls. And, after our tummies had settled, dessert was served: strawberries and ice cream served on homemade shortcake - yum!!



Hope your Easter celebration was delightful!

More soon!

Pink Spring Table

Spring has sprung (finally!) and I've been eager to set a small luncheon table to celebrate. I've used several pieces from my previous "speedset" table, but also some new items. Let me give you a tour of the table before we enjoy our lunch!

First, you can see that our dining spot is situated at one of my favorite spots in the house: next to the large bay of living room windows. I've set the table with an emphasis on pink and Spring.


Here's your seat - you can watch the robins hopping around on the lawn by looking out the window to your left. We'll be using these first pretty plates for dessert, so we can move them off to your right while we enjoy our salad. I don't know the name of this pattern, but I love the creamy white background, gold edging, and pretty roses.



Our salad plate is a soft yellow. The wide rim and pastel colors remind me a lot of a vintage brand called LuRay, but these are marked "MSE - Microwave and dishwasher safe." A moments' research revealed that MSE means Martha Stewart Everyday, so the fact that I got a pristine set of 2 dinner plates and two salad/lunch plates at the Goodwill, for a grand total of $2.99, makes me very happy!



At the bottom of the stack, our entree will be enjoyed on beautiful Homer Laughlin Glenwood. I acquired these plates through Ebay; the other two plates shown above were Goodwill finds.



Our beverage mugs are mis-matched, but they are from the same series. Your mug echoes the pale yellow of the salad plates...



...and mine repeats the pink theme around the table. I have a third mug in this series, too - together they are one of my favorite sets, and I don't even drink coffee!



Here you'll find we are again using my Oneida Chandelier stainless flatware - believe it or not, this is the only set of flatware I own! It was a long-ago gift from my Aunt, and I've decided there's no sense in saving it for special occasions - I love to use it every day! You can also get a much better view of the pattern on our vintage tablecloth - very Springy!



Feel free to pluck a pink napkin from this scrolly heart, another Goodwill treasure...



...and shoo away this visitor if you wish, she is only here to watch the birds!



Here's the view from my side of the table.



I'll be happy to pass you the salt in this pretty pink Depression Glass shaker. (Sorry, no pepper with this meal as I don't have any kind of shaker that complements this one!)



Oh! And I want you to meet our seatmates - our Spring-time friends Rob & Jay. Rob is a hand-painted Lefton figureine, and Jay hails from The Whitehall Society. Robins and Bluejays are among my favorite birds. Don't they look right at home with the rustic white picket tops? (You might remember that I won those picket tops recently from Donna's give-away over at Funky Junk Interiors! My little birdies love them!)



Here's a peek at our floral accompaniment - a vintage pink Diamond Point vase by Indiana Glass Co., filled with a simple silk stalk from elsewhere in the house.



Finally, the table where we're seated is extra special to me: it is an antique that sat in my grandparents' home for decades, and I kept it after they both had passed away. You can see the lower portion of it in this picture, and I've included below a full view of the table without the covering and dishes.




Now let's enjoy our lunch and this beautiful Spring day!

More soon -