igloochic -- meet your salt & pepper shakers!

rmkitchen

15 years ago

And then for your placecards:

And of course for your bottles of wine:

{{!gwi}}

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Comments (16)

rmlanza
15 years ago
OH MY GOD!!! She is gonna LOVE those! Great find rm!

rm (hee hee)
rmkitchen
Original Author
15 years ago
RM -- Of course I've always felt an affection for you given our ids! But yours is interesting ("Robin") whereas mine is mundane ("rocky mountain") ... and you were really nice to me when I was questioning spending any amount on a kitchen reno when I'm a SAHM of small children and you totally validated me! You let me know you'd had the same thoughts yourself and that it was only human and motherly of us. You made me feel so much better! So, in addition to our like ids, I'll always have a warm spot for you.

igloochic, in case you see this, something crazy is happening with my sterling in the dishwasher. For years I have put sterling flatware in the dishwasher and never, ever had a problem. Well guess what? Within the past fortnight I've been noticing black spots (like really, really foul tarnish) on the flatware I pull out of the dishwasher. I am totally bemused. When I first noticed it I polished the pieces but just this morning, as I was unloading the dishwasher I noticed more of the black spots. I haven't yet asked my husband if we're using different detergent because otherwise I cannot think of anything else which is different. Maybe that thread about washing / not washing sterling put a hex on me ... so I'm disappointed and pissed, because I absolutely do NOT believe in handwashing! Polishing occasionally I enjoy: handwashing daily will put me in an early grave. Grr.
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I do my research on glass and pottery at the library, or at one of two specialty antique stores here in town and I'll tell you why. Most of the glass books are indexed by pattern. If you don't know the pattern it's a hunt and peck process. Secondarily, some are indexed by manufacturer and then sub-indexed by pattern. That helps somewhat if you have a suspicion as to who made it. The local antique dealers often have specialties where it comes to pottery or glass because it's of the proximity of a lot of these factories int he area. If they don't know they'll lead you to a dealer who does know. Buying a general book on glassware is great for just getting a handle of it, but it would do you little good trying to get information on who made an item and when or what the pattern name is.......if it's unmarked. Linda is steering you to pressed glass and I still don't think that set is pressed. The roughness at the lip of shaker doesn't indicate it. So, you could spend a lot of time barking up the wrong tree looking at thousands of pictures. Your first step is to verify how this set was manufactured. A really reputable antiques dealing can clear this up pretty easily. If you peer down into the top of one of your shakers look to see if the interior surface has any relief at all or is perfectly smooth. If you can see any of the pattern inside, then most likely it is blown if it's perfectly smooth,then most likely it is pressed glass. The thinner the glass, the more relief you will see on the inside surface, if it's thick glass it may be almost flat. That's why I'd suggest having someone look at it in person. She may be right, and I may be wrong. But if you do go to sales sights on similar shakers of that age, most of them are described as mold blown.
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Numbersjunkie - we are talking about salt and pepper for cooking, right, not at table? I.e. placed next to the stove? In that case, using a pepper mill is only "a pain" as you put it if you don't have a good mill. If you have a mill that will grind the maximum amount of pepper with a minimal amount of effort, you won't regard it as a pain whatsoever. I have to say that once you eat food with pepper you've ground with a mill, you won't go back to that pre-ground stuff--it'll just taste like sawdust, after the piquancy of fresh-ground pepper. The pepper mills with the most avid devotees are the Unicorn pepper mills. They comes in several sizes, but I like the 6" keytop version (not too big, not too small, easy to grind with wet or greasy hands). I have never had an electric pepper mill, but America's Test Kitchen tested them and said "During research, we came across several electric models. Unfortunately, they had a Ã¢ÂÂcheapÃ¢ÂÂ construction, which Ã¢ÂÂfelt like it might fall apart.Ã¢ÂÂ Most important, the mills were incapable of producing finely ground pepper. We canÃ¢ÂÂt recommend any of them. " I don't know which electric mills they tested. As to salt, I turned against the common table salt like Morton's because of the chemical treatments and anti-caking used in processing--but that's just my hippie-new-age-granola-paranoid-organic-preferring self. (Sidebar for my soapbox: I use sea salt whose only processing is being left in the sun to dry. All of the trace and micro-nutrients are intact. The sodium and chloride are from the sea, as well as calcium, magnesium, potassium and 90 other trace and micro-nutrients--OK, end of soapbox). If I used processed salt, then I would definitely have on my countertop the one similar to what Alton Brown uses, which I'll link below. The one I've linked is only slightly different than Brown's because it has a silicone gasket to seal it shut, even better. When you are cooking, it is MUCH easier, and more precise, to spoon the salt than to shake it into what you are cooking. If you do decide to try sea salt, then you must use a salt mill because the sea salt crystals are large. A salt mill differs from a pepper mill because it uses ceramic grinders; the metal grinders would corrode from the salt, so ceramic grinders are used. Ikea makes a wonderful one (I learned about it on this forum), very cheap, wonderfully adjustable grind, though not gorgeous. Very utilitarian next to the stove. You can use it for pepper too. It also won't leave salt/pepper dust on your table, like a lot of mills do. Unicorn Keytop Peppermill Salt Cellar with Spoon by RSVP Ikea Salt or Pepper Mill with Ceramic Grinders
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I've talked to my credit card company claims and depute department. They have made notes about this transaction and will send over all the paperwork. I do not want to go this route as I don't want to take another day off, repackage everything and wait for the freight truck to come in. I honestly don't know what the manufacturer will do...It's not like they can resend a bunch of boards with the correct thickness. If that's how they have been cheating customers for years, that's all they have. This morning, I measured the bottom panels and guess what? They are all off by 1/16" inch thick. The claimed 3/8" is already thin but actual is 5/16". If you look at the layers that make up a piece of plywood, multiple thin sheets/piles, make up 1 piece of plywood. In this case, from what I can see, each layer is 1/16" thick. So there should have been 6 sheets of the 1/16" thick sheet to make up the 3/8" thickness. Instead of the 6 sheets of 1/16", I got 5 sheets of 1/16" to total up to 5/16" total thickness. At this point, I am waiting for a respond from both thertastore and indirectly from the manufacturer.
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mjsee
15 years ago
rmkitchen---do you have stainless in the same load? I've heard that can be a problem...if you've sterling and stainless together and they touch...

I always handwash my sterling...I think my grandmother would haunt me if I didn't!
igloochic
15 years ago
Rm you crack me up and get me in trouble :oP (Did you see the monkey corkscrew? It's going to be MINE!) LOL

And what were you doing shopping for crocodile salt and peppers? :oP

I won't say "I told you so" but ummm ITYS don't wash your silver in the dishwasher silly :oP (But I did hear that you need to be sure there's no stainless in the same load as well)
katmandu_2008
15 years ago
ok brooke, two things: (1) in my mind's ear (?), I have been calling you roomkitchen which never made much sense to me. Now I get it and it makes much more sense! and (2) what on earth are you doing using sterling every day? How devil may care! I spent many a day in my youth polishing silver.

And igloo, in case you check back, I have been meaning to ask you, I think (based on increasingly failing memory) you have a corner sink and your counter angles straight out a bit before making the angled turn down the side counters (that totally doesn't make sense, my liguistic skills are failing me). Or the sink is cut in a bit. Hopefully I am right and you understand me. Question, do you like that? My KD drew it that way but it is up to me. Thinking I might bump my hips into those little jut outs a lot and find it annoying. Also, now that I think about it, is there some modification in the cabinets beneath there? Thanks for you input on this little detail.
bluekitobsessed
15 years ago
RM, where are you finding these and are there any others besides alligators? or are they crocs? they are tooooocute!

Real sterling is like real pearls and real cashmere, and complaining about hand-polishing it is one of the ways you show that you appreciate it :)
oldjgw
15 years ago
but how can you tell them apart in the dark?
holligator
15 years ago
RM, where are you finding these and are there any others besides alligators? or are they crocs? they are tooooocute!

They're alligators--trust me on this one. :)

I, too, must know where to find these.
rmkitchen
Original Author
15 years ago
They kinda jumped out at me from the Vivre catalogue I was mindlessly thumbing through yesterday, and remembering igloochic's Kieselstein-Cord glasses immediately thought of her! They also have elephant head shakers.

{{!gwi}}

The salt & pepper shakers are described as crocodiles, the place card holder as a lizard and the wine stop as an alligator.

Okay, so about the silver flatware! My husband said he did switch the detergent -- not on purpose, but when he bought some it was a different formulation, so maybe that's it??? But it's just so weird that after all these years of putting it in the dishwasher that just now it would start to speckle like this. It rubs right out, and we don't own any stainless so that's not the culprit ....

Oh katmandu -- you know my life is so decadent! Ha ha ha ha ha on me! Did you catch me earlier cleaning my son's toilet? Now there's decadence! On a different thread I wrote igloochic that I enjoy polishing silver, which is good because we have an incredible amount. Incredible! But I love it. I love looking at it and I even love polishing it. It was something I enjoyed doing as a girl and as I've grown up collecting silver from around the world and inheriting / receiving as gifts more silver it's just made me happy! I daydream as I polish and I also think about what each piece means to me -- the rattles I had as a child which I shared with my children; the trays my grandmother received from her various "civic" activities (does the DAR count?) and golf / tennis tourneys; the serving pieces I purchased in Portobello Road when my husband surprised me with a trip to London for my thirtieth birthday (we were living in Belfast at the time, so it wasn't quite as grand as it sounds!) .... These are real warm fuzzies for me, plus it's fun to so easily have proof of my work: tarnish here, now gone!

So polishing a few times a year is one thing, but handwashing on a daily basis? Nope.
kitchendetective
15 years ago
RM, Next time you have an overwhelming urge to polish, come on over. I'll entertain the darling tots. You can have at it with the copper and the silver. ;)
rmkitchen
Original Author
15 years ago
kitchendetective -- the thought of childcare (from others) and daydreaming (for myself) is so tempting!!!
holligator
15 years ago
The salt & pepper shakers are described as crocodiles, the place card holder as a lizard and the wine stop as an alligator.

I'm telling you, you need to trust me on this one. The shakers are gators--crocodiles have much more pointed noses. The card holder looks like a gecko, and the wine stop could be an alligator that has been a bit squashed. But, the shakers are gators. Holligator knows her alligators. We get them as visitors in our yard and I see them several times a week at work. :)
mustbnuts zone 9 sunset 9
15 years ago
How about some gorgeous tile critter to go with the S and P Shakers?
igloochic
15 years ago
nuts those tiles are ssooooo cool!

kat, yes my sink is inset (that's what I call it) in the corner, with little jutting edges on the sides...that no one is yet complaining about bumping into. I actually like it because it allows you to be in just a bit from the actual walkway (and ours is a busy intersection). Here's a pic:

Then just to complicate things, I coppied a gw'ebber and did little bumps OUT next to the range, because it stuck out a couple inches from the counter edge and I just knew that was going to be a hip getter. I guess the difference in my mind is that you are walking when you go past the range, but when you're at the sink, you're not moving around so you don't end up hitting those little bumps...

(I didn't know which pic would help show it best so you got a bunch of them LOL)
katmandu_2008
15 years ago
Thanks igloo! I'll let you know what I decide. Your view is to die for!
bayareafrancy
15 years ago
Ok, so now I've got this image of igloo handwashing her sterling, and getting...um...up close and personal with that steer head! Yikeys. Do protect yourself! Or maybe that would only be a problem for one who is 6 feet tall? (Hard to tell the exact height of the pull in the photo.) Your DH does a lot of cooking. Can I make a joke about athletic cups, or is that too risque for this forum?

Do you have more knob photos igloo? I saw the squirrels. The pig was always my favorite, and I'm wondering where you decided to put him/her.

I always pronounce the 'rm' of 'rmkitchen' as "erm." Rocky Mountain--now it makes sense!

Erm: I'm intrigued by the notion of putting the sterling in the DW. I don't really have any sterling b/c I refuse to handwash anything. Well, I have some in the attic that I collected from flea markets in my youth. I think it is pretty tarnished right now. If I want to put it into circulation, I assume I need to first polish/remove the tarnish, and then I can start putting it into the DW?

francy

igloochic -- meet your salt & pepper shakers!

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rmlanza

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igloochic -- meet your salt & pepper shakers!

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