OK - I have to admit, I'm a little surprised that we've been having some decent direct sales through our A La Modern main shop lately. I don't know whether the blog is actually helping out, or if it's just search engines chewing on our long tail search terms on the product pages, but it's encouraging either way.

I actually expected to get no sales at all for at least a half year, mainly because we just don't have the web traffic. And if I look at the stats, it's not like traffic has gone up that much recently. Funny, but a large portion of the inquiries on our items have come from afar - that is, from non-U.S. peeps. So I'm trying to figure out how everyone is finding us, but in the meantime - hello there!

Lucite Polygon Paperweight

I got a little excited when I stumbled across this interesting lucite cube paperweight at the thrift. I knew about the Vasa Mihich ones, and those are fairly valuable if you can find them. However, this one has some different characteristics - the lucite looks like it has flat planes of colored film(?) embedded in it instead of solid color sections. It also has a different signature that I couldn't make out - if you know who it is, let me know!

Anri Form Teak Bowl

I spotted this Anri Form teak bowl at the flea market and knew what it was right away. The seller had a bunch of old dominoes in it, and when I decided to buy the bowl he said, "Well, where am I going to put the dominoes then?" I kind of started blankly at him and handed him the money. I have to admit I don't have the greatest people skills, which often results in sellers not giving me the "best" price at the flea market.

Interesting that this bowl only has one handle, I haven't figured out if it's more rare or not but it seems like it might be. Which means if I stick it on Ebay later on I better be sure to say RARE in the title...

Harrison McIntosh 2009 Exhibit

Ok, ending with a bit of a detour - the well-regarded ceramics master Harrison McIntosh passed away last week. I'd originally found out about his work when we started to get into California Pottery in the mid 2000s.

Harrison McIntosh 2009 Exhibit

We got to see quite a few of his pieces, including the 2009 exhibit called "A Timeless Legacy" at AMOCA in Pomona. These pictures were taken from that show.

Harrison McIntosh 2009 Exhibit

We never got around to meeting him or owning one of his pieces, and I really wish we had. Actually, finding one of his pieces in the wild is definitely on my "thrift bucket list". I know it's not very likely, but you never know - weirdly enough, there was an estate this past week that had one of his pieces in it, but I decided not to go. I'm wondering who ended up getting it...

Well there's your abbreviated "thrift roundup" for this week. If you've found something interesting at the thrift this week, please leave a comment below. Or not. I'm guessing most visitors are lurkers, but that's OK with me since no one blogs any more, and the comments are third party and live offsite anyhow. Oh - so, speaking of how much I hate dealing with third party programs... our host has decided to drop the interface that was running all our contact forms. So, I've been writing my own code AGAIN. Therefore - the contact form(s) may be borked off and on, as I'm still figuring that part out.