Hutch filled with melamine dishes, in the Cooler at Rural Origins Antiques, Royalton, MN. November 2011.

What could be more mid-century than Melmac? When we started on this mid-century venture, we gave no thought to Melmac. It was all Fire King this and atomic lamp that. And then we started spotting Melmac, which is a brand name for melamine dishes, and went ape for it, as you can see by the contents of the hutch pictured above …. and the one below.

The upper shelf in this pic shows pink and white melamine coffee cups and saucers and a sugar bowl and creamer. The other dishes are NOT melamine. October 2011.

Melmac came in lots of  fun colors and patterns. Dishes made of melamine were considered everyday dishes because they could be knocked around and were hard to break. True Melmac was made by the American Cyanamid Company, but other companies made dishes out of melamine resin. We have melamine dishes by Boonton, Texasware, Branchell, Westinghouse, Prolon, Watertown, Allied Chemical, and even one by Fostoria. There are also a number of melamine pieces that are unmarked.

The Fostoria piece we have (top picture, second shelf, light turquoise bowl on far right) is unusual in that Fostoria is commonly known for glass, but produced melamine for a portion of one year. (The year may have been 1958, but we can’t pin down a source on that.)

Come on in to Rural Origins Antiques in Royalton, MN, and check out our collection of Melmac. Items come in a variety of prices.

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Here are a couple of extra online sources related to Melmac:

[iramency.hubpages.com] Collecting Vintage Melmac Dinnerware: History and Information

Retro Chalet: Melmac Central

Bordallo Pinheiro Cabbage Leaf Teapot in the Cooler at Rural Origins Antiques, October 2011.

Item: Bordallo Pinheiro Cabbage Leaf Teapot

Price: $52

Available at: Rural Origins Antiques in Royalton, Minnesota

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Isn’t this teapot a dandy? I found it at a thrift shop, sitting in an unassuming manner behind some clear glasses. I almost missed it, but as soon as I laid eyes on it, I had to pick it up and turn it over to look for a maker’s mark. This is advice that Erik has passed on to me about picking antiques and vintage items. Never be afraid to thoroughly examine an object to look for a maker’s mark. He’s even been known to crawl under tables in the hunt for a mark. (It goes without saying that if you pick something up, you need to be careful not to break it. That’s why I was never in the habit of looking for makers’ marks before.)

The maker’s mark helps dealers and the public to identify who created a piece, which, in turn, can hopefully help to date a piece. The date on the teapot is unknown. (The date isn’t always easy to figure out if a company has been in business a long time and hasn’t kept track of the dates of its product lines or hasn’t shared that information with the public.)

When I turned this teapot over, I was met with a fine maker’s mark that also showed some artistry.

Bordallo Pinheiro maker's mark on cabbage leaf teapot.

Check out that great frog.

The maker’s mark often provides enough information for an effective online search. This one sure did. From it we know the name of the company, Bordallo Pinheiro, and that it’s located in Portugal.

A Google search brought up some great information on Bordallo Pinheiro. It turns out that not only is this the name of a ceramics company founded in 1884 that is still operational in Portugal, it is also the name of the artist/cartoonist who founded the company. Now we know why that maker’s mark is so artsy … not to mention the teapot itself. Pottery from the Bordallo Pinheiro company tends to have a nature theme (animals, fish, flowers, leaves, etc. – the frog mark is certainly appropriate) and is done in the Majolica style. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of Majolica:

Majolica, an English version of the Italian word maiolica, is a term covering a wide variety of European tin-glazed pottery, typically brightly painted over an opaque white background glaze, with an earthenware body. 

Bordallo Pinheiro, whether the man or the pottery, is highly respected in Portugal. With the beautiful design of this teapot, I can see why. It’s so tempting to keep this one to myself.

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For more information on Bordallo Pinheiro, see the following sources:

[Wikipedia] Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro

[Wikimedia Commons] Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro

[eBay Guides] Bordallo Pinheiro pottery and dishware

[eHow] How Do I Collect Bordallo Pinheiro Pottery?

[Wikipedia] Picture of the Bordallo Pinheiro Factory in Portugal

[Portugal Daily View] Bordalo Pinheiro: The artist who would give Moody’s the finger – I love this article because it shows how important Pinheiro is to Portugal’s history, his sense of humor and justice, and how influential his pottery studio is.

[Muselia.com] Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro museum

Huntley hutch** in the Cooler at Rural Origins Antiques, October 2011.

Item: Huntley hutch

Price: $215

Available at Rural Origins Antiques, Royalton, MN

**Items in hutch are sold separately.

Additional info: According to this page at antiquerestorers.com, the B. F. Huntley furniture company merged with Thomasville Chair Company in 1961. This would indicate that anything marked Huntley is likely from before this time.

This info is further repeated on this page of Thomasville history at fundinguniverse.com and again at mahalo.com.We couldn’t find a more official source for this info, like the Thomasville website. There are so many furniture companies in North Carolina, where Huntley and Thomasville were/are based that Huntley doesn’t seem to make it onto most history sites. There are nice pictures of a B. F. Huntley Furniture Company fire in 1956 on the Digital Forsyth website.

This hutch has a Huntley marking in the top drawer (see pic below).

Huntley marking in Huntley hutch in the Cooler at Rural Origins Antiques, October 2011.

The Cooler at Rural Origins Antiques in Royalton, MN. There's a freezer, too. You'll find cool mid-century vintage items of desire in The Cooler. October 2011.

On August 6, 2011, Rural Origins Antiques opened in Royalton, MN. We, Erik and Mary Warner, were just helping out our friend, Jody Scott-Olson, in filling her new store with a few antiques we wanted to sell. Within a month, we were renting our own space and searching for our niche in the antiques business. After another month, we moved to a larger space, the walk-in cooler in the back, and had found our niche: Mid-century vintage objects of desire.

If you’re looking for funky atomic lamps, mid-century Danish furniture, melamine and Fire King dinnerware, or other items from the 1940s through the 1960s, come visit the Cooler filled with cool stuff. To get the location and operating hours of Rural Origins Antiques, visit the store’s website or Facebook page.

I’ve done it again. Taken on another personal blog that I don’t have time to keep up. This one is the Mid-Century Vibe blog I started to go with our part-time antiques business.

I love setting up blogs and tweaking the theme in order to get the look I want. And while I’d like to be able to produce content for a blog with a specific theme (as opposed to my all-over-the-place Woo Woo Teacup Journal), I don’t have enough time away from work and other obligations to keep up with more than one blog.

Here’s the argument I have with myself when I have two blogs and a limited amount of time:

Self: It’s time to write a blog post.

Self: I know. I’ve got ideas for both blogs, but only enough time for one. Which one should I work on?

Self: Well, you’ve got more time and effort in on The Woo Woo Teacup Journal. It’s also your online home.

Self: I know, but I really should add to the other blog.

Self: Should nothing! The Woo Woo calls!

Self: I can’t resist!

Self: No, you can’t.

Self: Woo Woo it is.

As you can see, a blog has got to give and it’s not going to be The Woo Woo Teacup Journal.

I will not, however, abandon all the work I put into Mid-Century Vibe. While I only wrote 8 blog posts and a sticky post there, I put a lot of research into each (well, not so much into the sticky post). I have taken the text from the sticky post and created a page for it here. (See the menu above the banner.)

I’ve recreated the 8 blog posts on Woo Woo and they will be posting each day starting tomorrow until they’re all here.

The Mid-Century Vibe blog will be going away within the week. I simply can’t have that extra open channel out there to keep track of. Nor can I confuse the Googles or readers with identical posts on two different blogs.

When I want to post something related to our antique space, I will do it here. No longer will my Self have to argue with my Self about which blog to post to.

As a consumer who doesn’t want to consume more than she can possibly use, I’m not a very good capitalist, but I know someone that is. Meet canis lupus familiaris, more specifically, our very own canis lupus familiaris: Aleksandr. He is a consumption machine.

Caught in the act, Aleksandr destroying his dog bed, January 2012.

When he is not lounging about the house, Aleksandr is busy consuming the products we buy for him. In this picture, he is finally lounging on his new dog bed (less than 2 weeks old), but only because he has taken all the stuffing out and created a nest for himself. Apparently it’s more comfy that way.

Industry must love these four-legged engines of capitalism. “Consume away, doggie! We’ll make more!”

But only if we dog owners give in and continue to buy stuff for canis lupus familiaris to consume.

While we won’t be buying a new dog bed for Aleksandr any time soon, he’ll surely be the recipient of numerous toys over the duration of his life, each of which he’ll eventually destroy. Capitalism lives on in the Warner household.

Since Daughter is also having a few vague symptoms that make her feel less than healthy, we both decided to make appointments. We’ve both been put on elimination diets, which basically require one to remove every possible allergenic food from the diet and eat lots of vegetables and fruits. It’s not an easy diet to maintain, at least not at first, because so much of the available food in grocery stores contains common allergens (soy, dairy, peanuts, oranges, corn, wheat & other glutens, eggs, refined sugar, and most meats). It’s getting somewhat easier now that we are a week-and-a-half in, but we’ve done our share of kvetching and fresh fruits and veggies are expensive.

We’re supposed to be on the diet for a month, then we add back allergenic foods one at a time and note any symptoms they cause. The diet is meant to detox the body while also helping to determine foods that cause ill health. The only other way to figure out food allergies is to take an expensive test that involves lots of needles over a few days.

I have definitely suffered from diet adjustment and detox symptoms, gas, rumbling intestines, notably muscle weakness, fatigue, trouble focusing (brain fog), and headache. Nine days in and those symptoms are mostly gone. I still have the rash, though. I’ve read it can take longer for the body to get around to healing the skin because it works on more vital organs first (liver, kidneys, etc.)

While we’re working through the elimination diet to figure out food allergies, we also went through traditional environmental allergy testing using a scratch test. Quite the interesting experience. It felt like we were using our bodies for a science experiment. The nurse used these plastic devices that had eight round thin cylinders with teeth at the bottom. The teeth were coated with different allergen proteins and were ground into the skin of our backs. If that sounds unpleasant, it was, although the first “bite” was the worst.

We were tested for 37 substances and our nurse did an excellent job of explaining her process of comparing the reaction from these substances to the positive and negative control portions of the test. My skin is so sensitive to touch (and biting plastic) that the positive control had a larger reaction than any other substance tested. There were only two things I had a reaction to: Pigweed and Hormodendrum. I had to look up both as I had no idea what pigweed looked like and didn’t know that Hormodendrum is a type of fungus.

The really good news is that I’m not allergic to …

Kitties with glowing eyes, 2008

Or …

The Cute Puppy, December 2011

Just got word that Springboard is hosting three FREE artist workshops in January and February, so if you’re a starving artist in need of career help, you should sign up. Here’s the lineup of classes:

Wednesday, January 18, 9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Your Promotional Toolkit

Wednesday, January 25, 9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Simple Business Plans for Artists

Wednesday, February 9, 9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Pricing Your Work

All these workshops will be presented using real-time distance technology, with artists meeting at the Franklin Arts Center in Brainerd, MN, and presenters teaching from Minneapolis. The class is open to everyone and, in case you missed it, it’s FREE!

I’ve taken all these classes and learned a lot, so I highly recommend them.

If you’d like to register, call Andy at 651-292-4381.

This past Christmas (yeah, we’re in 2012 already), after having taken a bookbinding class earlier in the year, I decided to make books for everyone. Here they are:

Handmade gift books by Mary Warner, 2011

Okay, here they are again, lined up nicely:

Handmade gift books in some kind of order by Mary Warner, 2011

When I made these, I purposely chose cover papers that I felt matched the personality of the recipient.

My personal favorite is the dark blue one in the upper left corner because it’s subdued on the outside, but …

Shiny green interior paper on handmade book by Mary Warner, 2011

… there’s a party going on inside.

Here’s what the books, with pens, look like wrapped:

Wrapped handmade books & pens, 2011

They look like candy this way.

In keeping with the Warner family theme of handmade or consumables, one of my sisters-in-law knitted various items for everyone. Here’s what she made for me:

Slipper socks by S. Warner, 2011

Another sister-in-law has recently taken up pottery, so she made everyone pots for Christmas. Here is our set:

Handmade bowls by J. Warner, 2011

My other sister-in-law, who loves to cook, went the consumable route. She provided everyone with ingredients for a favorite chili recipe (all except the meat, onions & garlic). She included her modifications to the recipe. The chili was delicious.

Do you give handmade or consumable gifts for Christmas, or do you have some other interesting gift-giving tradition for the winter holidays? Please share in the comments.

One dying trend that I’ve heard some moaning about is the fact that we don’t all gather around the same five television shows every week. When television was king and there were only three major networks in the U.S., we had this common starting point for water cooler talk. With the advent of hundreds of cable channels and the internet (with its millions, or maybe billions, of channels), our individual interests have caused us to scatter away from each other and into these various channels. But, then again, maybe not.

I’ve noticed that our propensity for sharing common culture is alive and well on Facebook. This week alone, I’ve seen the same Little Red-Haired Girl in a LEGO ad numerous times, shared by friends of mine who don’t even know each other. I’m sure you’ve witnessed the same phenomenon on your own Facebook feed or other social networks.

Our need to share our culture socially has led to the rise of services such as Pinterest, wherein sharing culture is the specific goal of the service. Incidentally, it was Daughter who told me about Pinterest, so there’s another example of culture sharing.

I can’t be sad about the loss of television as a common connector for people, not when I’m seeing that sharing is a driving force in human nature and we’re sharing now more than ever.

Happy New Year, all! Go forth and share!