Weird? Or Not

  First, I want to show you a little 6-inch plate that I found somewhere. It has no family history. I like the design and it will eventually go up on my kitchen wall as part of some decor I'm working on.

I like the design. The colors aren't as bright as my favorites, but there are all the primary colors, if a little muted. I did a little bit of internet research and discovered it is a design called Petit Point, from the 1930's. This closeup shows that it is made to look like needlepoint or perhaps cross-stitch. Technically, petit point is finely stitched needlepoint, which means the yarn only goes on one diagonal, not both like cross-stitch. This looks more like cross-stitch to me, but I didn't name it.

Now here's where it gets weird. I hardly ever need a cake plate. Most cakes I make are just baked in a rectangular pan and get cut in squares right out of the pan. But the lemon cake I made yesterday is a round layer cake. I do own three cake plates. One is clear glass- I have no idea where it came from. One is a brightly colored fruit design that I like- I think it came in a box of free stuff. The other one was my mother's. I remembered that it had some kind of floral design, but it was on the bottom of the stack. I decided I would like to use Mom's for the lemon cake. I pulled it out, and...

It's the same Petit Point series as the small plate! It's a larger design, but clearly part of a set. Maybe there was some unconscious reason I liked the small plate?

Of course the pictures are the same size, but this is a full size cake plate- about 12 inches across.

I turned them over, and they are not from the same company. The small plate is Taylor Smith. There are quite a few of these plates floating around on the internet. It seems my small plate is worth about $6. The cake plate was made by Kitchen Kraft Ovenserve. I found a lot of that, also with the Petit Point design, but not a cake plate. Here are the marks.

Designs like this are put on tableware with a special kind of decal that seals to the glaze when it is fired. I think it's obvious that some decal company was selling this design to more than one manufacturer.

I could not find a cake plate like this one, but similar ones are only worth about $20. Still, it was Mom's. And just now as I was writing this my brain gave a little spark and said, "There's a lid that goes with this plate." Sure enough, another trip to the pantry located the lid which is aluminum with a wooden knob.

I believe this was a wedding gift in 1943, but that's a long time after the 1930s, so perhaps she owned it before she married Dad. Of course, popular patterns may have lasted longer back then too.

In other news: I got back on track and did some work on most of my projects. I have all the Michigan pictures from Dec 1-24, 2021 in the database.

See Yellow Dinner