Hi everyone. In the interest of time, I’m doing an ensemble photo for most of our thrifting finds (click on the photo for a bigger version). We had another great Friday. There seems to be more items showing up at thrifts and estates.

After a long dry spell of Kokeshi dolls, I found all six of these Kokeshi in one day. I’m fairly certain these are all vintage, but haven’t researched them yet. I do know that the “grandfather and grandmother” ones are the “Shingata” style, which employ non-traditional shapes and styles (thanks Bit of Butters for the info on that). The little kid with the pointed head is a little different, but I don’t think he’s in that shingata style. I think the taller kokeshi in the back may be older than the others. I actually had a fun time explaining to the estate sale folks what these dolls were.

The big blue bowl the kokeshi are sitting in is of course a Bitossi Rimini Blu piece from Italy. These pieces are unbelievably heavy and solid. I think it’s a bowl and not an ashtray because it doesn’t have the indentations that an ashtray would have. I wasn’t passing it up either way. Unsure on the dating, but I think this is an older one.

The tall Madonna and child stoneware figure to the right of the Bitossi is a David Stewart for Lions Valley piece. I don’t think I’ve seen this one before, so I’m not 100% on attribution, but it looks too similar not to be. I often pass on the religious figurines, but had to get this one because it was DS. Interestingly, it has a store sticker on bottom “La Mirada, The Pear Tree, California”. I couldn’t find this store listing, so I think it may not exist any more. Anyone know? It sounds familiar…

Below the DS piece is a Barbara Willis bowl! This is a newer piece from 1996, and while it’s not that much to look at compared to some of her other work, it’s still a great find. It was not cheap, but I couldn’t pass on it. We have another small new Barbara Willis piece somewhere in storage. We’ve found older pieces with the bird decals, but her non-decaled vintage stuff eludes us. Sadly, Willis passed away very recently – more info is on our Potteries of California page if you’re interested.

The frying pan is an interesting find. I’d remembered our friend Scott from New Documents / Sllab writing recently about an uncommon Michael Lax cookware line. This aluminum 8.5″ #809 pan with wooden handle dates to around 1975-1980 and was designed by Lax for Copco. I think they were produced in several countries – seems to be Denmark, Spain and Japan on quick glance, and ours is the latter. This piece has quite a bit of gunk on it, but I think it’ll clean up some.

The large chartreuse and dark green vase in the back is from Hull. I probably should’ve passed on this one, as it doesn’t bring in the big bucks like some of the other Hull pieces. It’s a three lobe #110 vase. But it was in fairly good condition which is sorta rare for large ceramic vases at our thrift stores, so I ended up getting it.

I’ll end this thrift roundup with an interesting find. You might remember we found a David Stewart signed handmade bell awhile back. Last week, I came across a single candlestick which looks to share a lot of the workmanship and glaze choice as that bell. However, this one is signed GAIL Stewart. It turns out that she’s David Stewart’s daughter! She actually studied for a time at Pond Farm too, and as far as I can tell she worked as Marguerite Wildenhain’s assistant as well for a time. I think she may have transitioned into painting versus pottery, but she also worked with her father at their shop in old town San Diego.

As far as I know, she’s still producing artwork. I never would’ve picked up the candlestick if I didn’t know about David Stewart’s style. I just sort of took a guess that it might be related. It’s always interesting for us to find out about artists in this sort of roundabout way. On that note – we’re going to be making a special post in the next couple weeks on an elusive company that we’ve recently found out more info on. It’s a surprise (unless you follow our tweets).

Happy Thrifting!

This post is linked up to ATG’s Thrift Share Monday and HLA’s Flea Market Finds.

Did you find something cool at a thrift or flea market lately?
Please leave a comment here if so…

Hi everyone. We had a good Friday thrifting run this time – I actually left a ton of stuff behind, but we still did come home with stuff. We’re going to spread the goodies out over a couple weeks’ posts, but here’s a sampling of a few of the finds.

This Holmegaard bowl from Sweden was created by Per Lutken in the 1950s. We believe this line was called “Fionia”. It was a nice surprise to find this at a run-down garage sale.

At the same garage sale, we came across this graceful Bauer Pottery bud vase in a speckled green color. This one is likely based on the molds that Bauer bought from Cemar (another California pottery) and adapted to several of their lines.

I found the same Libbey “Mediterranean” atomic fish glasses that I came across awhile back. Funny, this was also found in a set of 3! I wonder if it’s because one glass gets broken, so they just decide to donate the remaining three.

I’ve been taking a closer look at ceramics from Midwinter from England. There’s some popular patterns. I think this piece is a gravy in the Stonehenge shape in the “Moon” decor.

Enamels are one of my favorite thrift items to look for. I’ve come across Kareka before, but haven’t ever purchased because of the condition and price. The rainbow of mini-jewels in the center is kinda cool. Not much info on the company, except that they were from Hyannis in Massachusetts.

I’ve been hoping to find an Arkipelago glass candleholder for awhile now. This was designed by Timo Sarpaneva for Iittala. This one is definitely newer (had a barcode sticker on the bottom) but it’s still a great find.

Speaking of Iittala, this only the second time I’ve come across Festivo candlesticks. These are also originally designed by Sarpaneva, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were inscribed with the “TS” on bottom that’s believed to be an indicator that they’re vintage. However, I was sad when I got home to discover that one of the candlesticks has an enormous crack on the top (it was camouflaged by candle wax!). Not sure yet if we’ll keep them.

OK, so this one passed my “no ashtray” rule because it was an unusual piece. It’s signed “Le Richeaux” – and I remembered that this was actually an early pen name for the well-known California potter Marc Bellaire (funny but “Marc Bellaire” is also a pen name – for Donald Fleischman). However, I’m not 100% sure this is the work that pre-dates Bellaire’s production stuff – Chipman’s Encyclopedia notes that the La Mirada pottery purchased the rights to the “Le Richeaux” name from Bellaire and produced similar stuff under it. Very confusing…

I couldn’t believe this Dorothy Thorpe pitcher was sitting there at the thrift. Although it’s not marked, I thought more people would know about it by now because of Mad Men. I’ve actually seen similar ones several times, but they usually have too much silver loss. This one only had a little bit, so I picked it up. Not sure which size this is either… I think it could be the 80oz model, anyone know?

Lastly, I grabbed the larger green Dansk Kobenstyle baking dish shown above. I wasn’t sure at first, because it was priced fairly high at the thrift. But a few of the thriftbreak folks let me know that green was a more uncommon color. It’s funny, but we found the smaller green one shown at a flea market – and at the time, we paid DOUBLE the amount for it, because we didn’t know as much about Kobenstyle. I actually wasn’t sure they were different sizes, Since they are, I think we might have to keep the set together at our house. LOL, hoarding again…

OK, hope you’ve had a great time thrifting!

This post is linked up to ATG’s Thrift Share Monday and HLA’s Flea Market Finds.

Did you find something cool at a thrift or flea market lately?
Please leave a comment here if so…

Hi everyone. We had some good luck this week thrifting, but this post is only going to focus on one item. I’ve never really had good luck with fine art prints or paintings – though I’ve seen lots of thrifters come home with amazing finds. The problem is that the art pickers in our area are crazy ravenous – I’ve seen them out there with their jewelry loupe in front of the thrift store stack of paintings.

So I was pretty amazed to find this Toko Shinoda hand-brushed lithograph at a thrift last week. It was sitting in one of the rolling carts along with a few other similar prints. I decided to flip through the paintings and prints since I wasn’t having any luck with pottery or glass. I rarely look through them, because it’s almost always complete junk.

This time, there were one or two interesting “modern” signed prints. I didn’t think anything of this one, though I liked the brush strokes. I figured if it was anything special, some art dealer-type would’ve already grabbed it.

So I left it and headed for the door. But along the way, I decided to punch in the name Toko Shinoda on the iPhone just for grins. I couldn’t believe what I saw – there were lithographs of hers selling upwards of $1000!

I made a quick U-turn that probably would’ve been illegal if I were driving a car, and went back to get the lithograph. I grabbed it and went to the front to pay. At the cashier, a lady in front of me said, “Oh, that’s an interesting print.” I heartily agreed, though I didn’t mention how much I thought it might be worth, LOL.

When I got home, I saw that it likely was a real Toko Shinoda lithograph (thanks to Scott from New Documents for the help with confirming that it looks legit). What I’d thought was damage around the edges is likely just part of the handmade paper. The print is called “Ascend” and it’s an edition of 50. I think that the “AP 5/5″ might stand for “artist proof”, though I don’t have much experience in this.

I haven’t done that much research on Shinoda yet, though I know she’s still alive and approaching 100 years of age! Her works focus on sumi paintings and prints, with abstract brushstrokes like this one being a very common style for her. She actually adds brush-stroke painting to the lithographs.

Since everything seemed to say that she’s extremely well-known in Japan, I was interested to see if my mom had heard of her. She hadn’t, though she was impressed with the find. She also noted that the characters in Shinoda’s name are actually “Toukou” (where the “o” is a long “o”), which means “red peach”, and that this wasn’t a given name but her artist name.

You can read more about Shinoda on Wikipedia, and on the other gallery sites that display her work.

I’m trying to figure out how we might sell this type of print in our shop – it may need to be re-framed, though I’m not sure yet. In any case, we’re pretty thrilled to have found it. It’s the first really valuable print that I’ve found. It also just goes to show that you never know what you’ll find when thrifting, even in places where it seems highly unlikely.

Happy Easter and Happy Thrifting!

This post is linked up to ATG’s Thrift Share Monday and HLA’s Flea Market Finds.

Did you find something cool at a thrift or flea market lately?
Please leave a comment here if so…