Ahoy, Thar Be Treasure This Wednesday!

Begin comedic pirate voice/

"Aye, scurvy lasses and lads! This be Treasure Chest... er... Box Wednesday, so gather round as this blogging wench shows ye this week's booty!"

/end comedic pirate voice

(Ahem)

Actually, the main treasure this week is in the form of a gift I'd gotten my dad for Father's Day. Ye Olde Dadde is partial to items reminiscent of the sea and its tales. So over time I found a couple of items that I thought might shiver his timbers...


The sailing ship lamp here is spelter and probably dates from the early 1900s. It still has a bit of its bronzed patina to it, but some of it's worn away... I thought it had character....


I also liked how the base of it is molded to look like a swelling wave.

And then here, I'd found a lovely little storybook with a variation on the Little Mermaid tale, "The Little Sea Maid"...


Delicately tinted illustrations and a poem made this quaint, unusual item just right to send with the lamp. It's also probably from about the same time period.

I believe Dad was pleased.

Now as for thrifting this week, mostly I ended up cleaning up from a flood that hit late last week. So I had time for only a little leisure. However, I did find this cute lavender lamb planter...


And a piece of shell pink milk glass-- this one's a sugar bowl...


It seems strange I'm finding so much of this right now when it was impossible to find outside of antique stores about a year or so ago. But, these things come in cycles, for some reason. Sometimes you see a ton of one type of thing, and six months later-- not a single piece.

Anyway, that's the main plunder for this week!

But before you go, I did want to share with you all a bit of good news, I'd had...

I'd entered a fiction contest for short humor pieces at Humor Press, and actually came in Second Place! Can ya believe that? I about fell over when I saw the notification in my Inbox.

• If you have a moment and you're curious, you can check that out here. Mine is called "Of Bullets and Bad Comma: A Tale of Grammar Noir."

Hope you all have a booty-ful week yourselves! Arrrrgh!

Think Zinc: Decorating with Spelter

Zinc. We use it to relieve colds. We include it in our multi-vitamins. And some of us even decorate our homes with it.

And now, I’m going to show you how to make a mosaic out of zinc tablets...

Kidding, kidding. Zinc tablets dissolve too easily for effective mosaic-ing.

So instead I guess we’ll have to talk about spelter. Spelter is the metal zinc, which is sometimes mixed with lead. And while spelter may not carry the innate value of gold, silver and bronze, the Victorians did use it to create beautiful statuary, tableware and personal care items. This allowed the growing middle classes to own status items similar to those of their wealthy counterparts, but at less expense.

And spelter is versatile; it can be coated in a patina to make it look like higher-end bronze or silver. For the Victorians, who loved to entertain, appearance was everything.

I suspect the little cherub above is a spelter piece coated to look like bronze. Why do I say that? Well, by scraping gently on an obscure area of the statue, say here under the base at the left, the mark appears more white in color than bronze. (So this is a good reason to make sure you know what you’re buying when someone tries to sell you a bronze piece!)

Here at right you’ll see spelter in its more natural state. Items like this bowl may have been silver-plated at one time, but while they now lack the brilliance of their silver sisters.


Yet notice the delicate art nouveau designs. You can tell the art nouveau style by the sinewy vines and mystical maidens that peer from the metal. They pretty much don’t make ‘em like that anymore! So spelter is an affordable piece of history.



And occasionally, it’s very affordable. Would you believe the hand mirror below came from a thrift store for under $6? I’ve found two that way. Spelter is quite a soft metal, so general use means spelter pieces may have dents, holes or dings. But considering the examples here are approximately 100 years old, this looking-glass lady is still a fair beauty.

My most recent spelter find was the two art nouveau busts in the photo at the top of the page. I stumbled on them two days before Christmas in a back booth of a flea market. The dealer, whose flea market specialty was in selling all-you-could-fit-in-a-box-for-$3, was genuinely certain they were bronze. The telltale white metal shining through the patina told a different story.

But quick negotiation and the nouveau ladies had found a happy new home. (And no, they weren’t $3-- let’s not get too over-confident. :-) ) Today they peer from my bookcase with all the dignity of their bronze sisters.