We had a pretty successful “picking” session this week at some of the stores east of us near Pomona. The thing with picking is that you’ll never have a great thrift run every single time. We find that only a combination of persistence, knowledge and luck (in that order for us) will result in a higher percentage of successful thrift store picking sessions.
This was one of those days where every store seemed to have something interesting. We actually left a ton of goodies behind because they weren’t a good fit for the shop, or they were too pricey.
Starting on the top left of the photo, a nice steel blue US Pottery of Paramount #7 flower pot. We actually really like these California pots because they are often cheap (compared to Bauer, Metlox, etc.), come with a predrilled hole and are pretty good quality gardenware. We must have over 20 flowerpots and saucers now…
Next to that is a really weird black matte glazed vase with various colored glaze circles. We think this is probably West German – it is signed, but the only word we can make out is “Keramik“. Interesting aquamarine blue interior glaze on it as well. Next to the vase is a nice Nissen Danish teak salad bowl with a serving fork. Unfortunately, we didn’t find the serving spoon! On first glance we’d thought Nissen was a Japanese company – like Nissan, or Nissin noodles – but it turns out it’s a Danish company that specialized in teak items like this.
The cheeseboard to the right of the Nissen bowl is a little obscurred. It’s actually a rectangular teak board made by Goodwood. While these items are a little newer, we think that this one must be a slightly older model. One thing we like about this one is that it has lucite plastic handles along with teak wood, glass dome and ceramic cheese cutting board.
In the second row, starting from the left we have a familiar Pyrex casserole base that was a promotional called “Tree of Life“. It’s getting harder to find uncommon Pyrex promotionals – if you’re interested in more info, we just happen to run the popular website Pyrex Love. Next to the Pyrex bowl is a beautiful red Emalox bowl from Norway. Emalox bowls are fairly common, but sort of difficult to find in good condition.
Next to the Emalox bowl is an unknown Italian flower pot with interesting sort of sgraffito technique. We aren’t certain who might have made this, and it’s often impossible to tell with pots like this that are just signed “Italy”. The green mugs next to them are also Italian, but in this case they’re signed with the company name which is Baldelli. Baldelli made some super cool ceramic banks in the shape of animals like owls and lions that we’ve been hoping to find one of these days.
Moving to the third row we have yet more unknown Italian ceramics. These two oval individual ashtrays also have an sgraffito design with multicolored splashes. We thought this looked similar to some of the Rosenthal Netter or Raymor Bitossi items, but we don’t know enough yet to tell if they might be made for those companies. Rounding out the finds are a small vintage flower pot that we’ll probably keep, an unknown mug with green/orange pattern that has similarities to a Stig Lindberg pattern (Bersa) and finally a Tensor desk lamp.
Ok, enough talking about the vintage goodies- we’ve got to work on putting more of them into the shop!
