Time for Tea

Teapots are  collectibles that are fun to display.  Line them up across the top of a cupboard or a mantle and they provide a dressed up feeling to the room.  For those of you who like the Victorian era of decorating, this is the perfect collectible for you.  I enjoy the teapots in my collection and they are fun to use on special occasions to serve tea.  Anyone can drop a teabag into a cup of hot water, but to make a pot of tea and pour your guest or spouse a cup of steaming hot tea from a beautiful teapot takes that cup of tea to a whole new level.  I guarantee that your guest will feel very special to be served this way.   One of the pink teapots in the top picture was a gift from my daughter which started me on the route to collecting the other pink pieces to coordinate.  I have even paired the collection with a pink Meyda Tiffany library lamp for greater impact.  The second white and gold teapot is from England and was purchased in an Antiques shop.  The third teapot and matching cup and saucer was a gift from my staff when I worked at a bank.  The fourth teapot and pitcher are not old and I purchased them because I loved the vibrant colors.  The fifth picture is a "tea for two" set that I purchased for a song at a yard sale many years ago.  It is a Hall piece.  The sixth picture is a wooden tea kettle from Costa Rica from the late 1970's that I purchased from an elderly friend.  The last picture is part of my Pfaltsgraff Winterberry collection.  My mother started this collection for me many years ago.  For three or four years at Christmastime, she bought me another serving set of these dishes.  She later added some bowls and serving pieces.  My son bought me the salt and pepper shakers.  Over the years, I have added several more pieces including the large pitcher, coffee server and teapot pictured above.  Our family uses these dishes from Thanksgiving through New Years for family dinners every year.  If you keep your eyes open, you will be able to pick up teapots for your collection in many various places.  Purchasing teapots at different places preserves so many memories of that place in time.  I love the thrill of the hunt for special pieces. 

Mystery Tea Pot

We like to refer to this beautiful teapot as our  "mystery teapot" because the circumstances that surround our acquisition of it remains a mystery to us and the story remains one of our favorite collectibles story.  My husband, Clark, and I have always loved stopping at yard sales.  We have found some very interesting items in some of the most unusual places.  One day Clark stopped at a yard sale and spotted this teapot without a lid.  He asked the gentleman about it and he said it was very old and had belonged to his mother.  He said he didn't know what had happened to the lid over the years.  Clark bargained with the man and got it for a steal since Clark convinced him that it wouldn't be worth much without a lid.  Clark thought that he might be lucky enough to find a lid that would at least fit it.  He's always up for a good challenge like that.  On the same day, he drove several miles on down the road, in fact near another town and stopped at another yard sale.  At this yard sale, there was a box of odds and ends.  Clark said there were several lids among the junk contents of the box.  He thought it looked like the lid might fit.  He paid the gentleman a quarter for the lid.  When he got back to the truck, sure enough, the lid fit perfectly.  He brought the teapot home and told me the story.   We had no way of knowing what the original lid had looked like, but at least we had a lid that would fit the teapot.  Several months later, I was looking through my current edition of Country Living Magazine and I couldn't believe my eyes.  There on the page was a picture of the teapot with the exact lid that Clark had found those many miles from the teapot.  It must have been meant to be that the teapot was reunited with it's original lid.  Now, if that's not a mystery!

Old Coffee Grinder

The coffee grinder featured here is a Logan and Stonebridge model.  We are not sure of it's exact age but this company manufactured coffee grinders in the nineteenth century.  We purchased it from my late step father when he had an antiques shop.  To own an antique coffee grinder is having a piece of history.  Not only can you still use them to grind coffee beans, they also serve as a wonderful piece of Primitive decor for your home.  The hobby of collecting antique coffee grinders is growing in popularity since more collectors are learning that these wonderful pieces are not only decorative, they are also very useful.  Many coffee lovers claim that once you have tasted coffee ground in an antique coffee grinder, you will never go back to a modern electric one.  In these old manual models, there is no motor to overheat and give the coffee a burnt taste.  Antique coffee grinders come in a wide variety of price ranges.  If you are looking to add one to your collection, it helps to understand the best brands to look for.  While the very oldest ones are held in museums, most people look for coffee grinders manufactured in the 19th or 20th century.  The brands that are most sought after by the collectors are: Steinfeld, Logan and Stonebridge, Arcade, Wilmot Castle, Elma, Kenrick, PeDe, Armin Trosser and several more.  If you are looking for a coffee grinder to use for coffee grinding, you should look for one made purely of metal.  On some of the older wood and metal ones, the screws and wooden parts might not be strong enough for daily use since it was used 50 to 100 years ago.  If it will be used purely as decoration, it will not matter to you.   The wood and metal scoop and tea towel pictured above  will be available in the Persnickety Primitives shop.

(Research taken from "Love to Know Antiques" and "2010 CoffeeGrindersReviews.com")

Valentine Memories

Valentine Memories

Grandma's book of valentines
Rekindles memory's flame,
Of days when she was just a girl
And life a happy game.

Each lace-edged card a getting bears
From friends of long ago,
Girls in gingham dresses
And that “special” Sunday beau.

It brings a twinkle to her eye,
Dissolving lines of age,
As we sit in the lamplight
And turn each well worn page.

It makes me kind of wonder
If perhaps some distant day,
A grandchild shall sit at my side
And leaf each page this way.

‘Cause I could sit for hours,
There at my grandma's knee,
And listen to the stories
That the valentines set free.

A book of antique valentines
That reaches black in time
To tell the tales of yesteryear
In illustrated rhyme.

Shirley Sallay

Primitive Outdoor Oven

My brother recently had a heart attack that forced him to cut back on his activities for a while during his
recooperation.  During that time, he still kept his mind busy planning his activities for when he could resume his daily routines.  He constantly dreamed of building an outdoor oven.  Once he was well enough to put his plan into action, he built the outdoor fireplace that you see here.  That's him putting one of his famous pizzas in the oven.  He makes the crust completely from scratch and let me tell you, his pizzas are awesome!  He lined the oven with fire brick that holds the heat.  He builds a fire in the oven and once it is good and hot, he rakes the coals to the back of the oven.  He then sets his baking pan on the heated firebricks and puts a little door over the oven opening to hold in the heat.  He has also become quite the expert on bread baking in the oven as well.  He bakes the bread in a covered cast iron pot.  The bread is tender on the inside and crispy and brown on the outside.  It is heavenly spread with butter and homemade  blackberry jelly that his wife, Faye makes.  I remember once our families were on a camping trip and my brother and I decided that we would cook supper outdoors for our families.  It poured the rain that evening and we cooked under a canopy.  Despite the weather, we had fried chicken and all the fixins' that evening.  Another time, he invited us to his campsite where he baked  a pie inside a cast iron pot over a campfire.  The lid on the pot was indented and he filled the indentation with hot coals and set the whole pot in the hot coals.  It made a perfectly golden brown pie in his little "oven".  My brother and his wife frequently go camping with their horse club.  They like the old way of doing things and frequently try out some of the old methods of cooking. 





Visiting My Amish Friends

I will be the first to tell you that I thoroughly enjoy all of my modern conveniences: my coffee maker, my microwave, the telephone, my car and of course, my computer and the internet.  There is still something that draws me to the Amish way of life and the wonderful people.  I have some wonderful Amish friends and I am certain that they add a lot of enjoyment to my existance.  The Amish have helped us with many repair and building projects over the past several years.  They have built a garage, a grape harbor, a gazebo, a swing harbor and a pergola as well as building a large addition onto our home.  We have also purchased several pieces of furniture from them over the years and I will tell you that their craftsmanship is outstanding.   I feel fortunate that a large Amish community lives within ten miles of our home.  While working at a bank in Hillsboro, I had an occasion to meet some members of an old order Amish community that had recently settled in the nearby area.  A few of the members of the community had come into the bank inquiring about banking services.  It would be the bank's first experience with Amish customers.  One of the officers of the bank suggested that we visit some of the people in the community to try to make their transition to our area a little easier.  We told them what day we would be visiting and they agreed to have several of the "men folk" attend our little meeting.  A few families had recently moved to the area and bought a farm which they divided amoung them.  Some of them lived in existing houses, some of them built a home and the family that was our primary contact took the barn as their home.  The day that we arrived at their barn, it was a warm, wet, muddy day.  When we got out of the car, we had to be careful where we stepped to avoid the mud and the horse manure.  There was a little porch on the entrance to the barn where one of the girls had displayed "mud rugs" that were for sale.  We knocked on the door and were immediately invited in.  Walking into that barn was like stepping back in time and I know my eyes were as wide as saucers.  The family of six that lived in the barn consisted of the husband, the wife, three adult sons and one daughter-in-law.  One by one, horse-drawn buggies began arriving.  Before long, there was about five or six men including the community Bishop.  We were told that their community was an "old order Amish" group.  This meant that they were not to ride in an automobile unless it was a medical emergency.  The inside of the barn was full of wonderful primitive furnishings, a wood cook stove and a large table surrounded by benches in the center of the room.  We were invited to sit at the table and the lady of the house offered us coffee from a granite coffee pot from the wood stove.  She asked if we would like some banana bread and we accepted.  She went into a pantry room and came back with the wonderful aromatic bread on two small plates.  The floors were smooth and swept clean.  The men sat around the table and asked questions pertaining to starting a banking relationship.  While we talked, the daughter-in-law quietly sat in the back of the room working on a quilt that she was making.  The quilt frame that she was using was suspended from the ceiling of the barn by chains.  She told me that they pulled it up and out of the way when she was not working on it.  The window in the barn was raised and I could feel the cool breeze that blew the curtains as it came through the window.  The chickens just outside were lazily clucking and picking bugs from the ground.  There was a small building with a tin roof a few feet from the barn.  It looked like a little storage shed.  We were told that is where the son and his wife spent their nights.  We enjoyed our visit that day and were made to feel very welcome in their home.  They told us that they sold jams and jellies and homemade bakery items.  Just up the road, one of the families made handmade baskets that were for sale.  I went back to their community several more times.  I purchased wonderful homemade apple butter and several beautiful baskets.  They soon began building a basement just across the driveway from the barn and one of the sons and his wife moved into the basement until they could build a house on top of it.  On one occasion, I had some paperwork to deliver to one of them.  That day the men were not at home and one of the ladies told me that they were just down the road at the home of one of their neighbors at a barn raising.  She gave me directions and I found the place easily.  It was an awesome sight seeing all of those men swinging hammers and getting that barn built.   One day when some of them were in the bank, one of the unmarried sons told me that they were going out of state to bring back a wife for him.  She was the cousin of his brother's wife and they had met her at the brother's wedding.  I just saw them the other day at the grocery store and they have two children now.  The bank installed a hitching post behind the bank in Hillsboro to accomodate their horses when they came to town.  The bank officer who initially went to their home with me went to the store for them every week to purchase flour, sugar and other baking essentials that he delivered to them.  The relationship was more than just a professional one - they had become our friends. 



Old Walls

"Listen softly . . . hear my walls whisper of a simpler time,

What stories I hold . . . in these walls of old.

Like an old freind, you stand worn and tattered . . .

Once filled with life and things that mattered."

 (Unknown Author)
I was driving through Brown County, OH this afternoon and passed this old house.  I was somehow drawn to it and turned my car around and went back and took this picture.  The lines above just seemed to fit.