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Thursday, February 23, 2023

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.
petit point design plate


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?
Petit Point cake 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.
1930s plates maker 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.
cake plate lid


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

7 comments:

dlhviz said...

My mom had a cake cover like that one! I had forgotten about it until I saw this.

vanilla said...

Interesting; and aren't the interwebz wonderful?

Ellie said...

I have a cake plate cover exactly like yours, inherited from my mom,so probably from the 1930's. Mine goes with a round clear glass cake plate that is a perfect size for the cover. I have trouble parting with things that I remember from my childhood!

barbmi said...

I have a cake cover similar to that. My mom got married in 1948, so it's probably a little later style. It had a cut glass plate. I don't think your plate actually went with that lid. When I was a kid we kept that cake plate on top of the fridge. I opened the door and it fell off and the plate broke. She eventually got a plate that was thet milk white glass, with a scalloped edge. When I got married, living in CA I found that exact same cake plate and cover at a flea market. I bought it for my mom. Brought it home and she had found the plate herself at a flea market, so I kept it. Right now it's lost at my daughter's house. I have the cover here, but not the plate.

Ann said...

Cross stitch was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the design.
I don't have a cake plate or a lid to cover one.

The Oceanside Animals said...

Lulu: "Our Dada says the plate pattern reminds him of 8-bit pixel art! But of course he's a computer nerd, so he would say that."

Unknown said...

My mother also had a cake cover like yours. I think it was used with a glass plate.