Me in Place

I think antiques and handmade things should be Pharisaical – you know, not hidden in closets, but living life in public and out in the open! Therefore, I have been cleaning out my closets and trying to find places for cool objects I have.

Here’s what I accomplished today: I have had three wooden spoons, made by my Grandpa Massey, sitting in a cupboard for a couple of years. I also had two plates given me by Grandma Massey (she reports they were plates of her mother’s) sitting in the same cupboard. I kept wondering how to hang these items so they could be displayed. And here’s what I did:

1. I emailed Grandma to ask her how she had hung her plates (she has a couple of the same ones on a wall in her home) – she pointed out to me that there are two small holes in the rim of the plate on the back to thread a string or wire through to hang. Oh! I found them… I looked up the china mark online and discovered the plates were made by a factory in Bavaria, Germany called Porzellanfabrik Moschendorf back around 1900. The owner of the factory, Otto Reinecke (just prior to WWII) refused to use his factory to produce items for the German Army, but he was forced to close up his shop and portions of his land were used to build a labor camp – a branch of the Dachau Concentration Camp, then, later, it was transferred to ownership of another camp. After the war, Otto was not allowed to open up his factory for some time, because the Americans thought he had been a supporter of the German Army… after his name was cleared, his factory was reopened.

Okay, that was a tangent – but I thought it was interesting!

2. So, after figuring out how to loop twine through the holes in the back, I took note of the blank wall in my kitchen: and was inspired.

3. I got out the small hooks and started hammering away. It was at this point that my 7yo asked, “Mommy, does Daddy know you have a hammer?” And 5yo said, “Yeah, you should ask permission.” I reassured them that Mommy could handle a hammer and continued. I used my Short Attention Span Method of Measuring by taking a piece of paper, and making sure the spoons and dishes were a paper apart from each other and here’s the result:

With a closeup of a spoon and of one of the plates:

Ed. Note: Although objects should be pharisaical, people should not be! Let’s be clear on that! 

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.