Found: Orphaned Mexican Duck. Any Information will be Appreciated

          

We stopped at a garage sale this Fourth of July weekend and even before I got out of the car I spotted this beautiful Mexican pottery duck.

The sale had been going on for a few hours but nobody else saw anything special about this exquisite duck. (IMHO) I loved her at first sight.  She’s HUGE by most Mexican pottery bird/duck standards:  15 inches long by almost eight inches wide.  She’s about 10 inches tall to the top of her head.
I thought at first she might be a Ken Edwards piece, but she’s signed “Mateos Mexico.”  I’ve seen this kind of pottery many times, but nothing so big.  And I didn’t know the Mateos name.  So I went looking.

I couldn’t find much about my guy Mateos, but I think I can pinpoint this piece to the potteries in Tonala, Guadalajara.  At least I hope that’s where it came from, maybe because of this:

This small town on the edge of Guadalajara is an absolute goldmine of potters and pottery and has been an important pottery center going back 3,000 years. When the Spanish Conquistadors arrived on the scene in 1530 they promptly named Tonala the “Factory of Paganism” as it was then a center of production for the clay idols worshipped in surrounding villages.

Nothing like that pagan art!

I found a few mentions of a Tonala potter named Mateos, but most of them came from eBay descriptions so I couldn’t confirm.  However, I found a tantalizing clue on a blog called Jim and Carole’s Mexico Adventure.

[Salvador Vasquez Carmona] is teaching his craft to his sons and also has instructed numerous apprentices who later became significant ceramic artists in  their own right. One of these, Juan Antonio Mateos, showed up at 7:00 AM for his first day as instructed. After two hours Sr. Vazquez showed up and opened the shop. This same scenario went on for several days. Finally the apprentice asked why he was told to come at 7:00 when work didn’t begin until 9:00.  Sr. Vazquez told him that it was a test of his seriousness. Sr. Mateos later became a gifted potter in his own right.

Is this my Mateos?  Again, I hope so.  I’m under no illusions that my beautiful duck is a precious work of art.  No, I’ve actually found a piece very similar in design and size on eBay.  These were probably done for the tourist and/or retail trade, but I’m okay with that.  Beauty is beauty wherever you find it.

I do want to know who made it and when it was made.  I’m mad for anything vintage, so I hope it’s at least from the Seventies.  I have a feeling it’s fairly new, though.  The glaze appears fresh and there are no signs of staining or grime or cracking.  (Cracking on the unglazed bottom is expected on old Mexican pottery, I’ve heard).

So if you know anything more about her, please let me know.  Anything at all.  We’ll be fine, the both of us, with whatever you might come up with.

But isn’t it amazing that mi pata hermosa de México looks so at home in my up north cabin?  (I think she’s going to be very happy here.)

 

Story Book Settings - New Treasury

I won't be posting every treasury I make on my blog here--promise. But this one, my second, turned out so great (not bragging, it's the content, not me) I just have to share it here. See what you think:

'Story Book Settings' by deerpathvintage

Lovely, lyrical, whimsical vintage story book looks.. From The Vintage Village, Etsy Vintage Team, and more.

Ye Old Worlde Tea Shop ... VintageWantsNo... $10.00	1920's - 'Lonel... dawnandross $5.00
Cottage Dreaming OllieBollen $21.00	Vintage CARRIGALINE Iri... treasurehuntvi... $8.50
Treasure Island. Vintag... Kultur $18.00	Jack and the Beanstalk ... calloohcallay $12.00
The Fire-Fly's Love... wonderdiva $60.00	Two Digital Images Slee... vintagescrapbo... $2.50
Ucagoo Hand Painted Pla... goodlookin $14.70	The Fairy Tale Book 195... judygovintage $
1920's - 4X6 Illust... dawnandross $10.00	The Little Match Girl, ... HamiltonBay $17.50
For The Duchess .. 1938... TheFancyLamb $8.00	Vintage 1920s 1930s Com... sewmuchfripper... $24.50
Vintage Brown White Tra... pennyzw $22.00	5 Chromolithograph Stor... robinseggbleun... $17.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com A/B image testing.

Did I mention that I love Silhouettes?

I really do love silhouettes. I think it started in kindergarten when the teacher sat me sideways in a little chair, shined a light on me, and copied my shadow on a paper taped to the wall. I still have that silhouette somewhere, though I can't find it at the moment. That would make me really sad except that the silhouette is of me in the dreaded pigtails. How I HATED pigtails!

But I love silhouettes, and seem to gravitate to them wherever I am, whenever I can.

I thought I would share some of them here, because. . . did I mention that I LOVE silhouettes?



I found a wonderful Mother Goose coloring and drawing book from 1928 that has several pages of silhouettes. The adjoining pages are blank so that a child might try a hand at drawing them. If it weren't so old and so wonderful, and if a long-ago child hadn't done some pretty good drawings in the book, I would be tempted to take it apart and frame this one. Instead, I'll just look at it every now and then.

Over the years, I've collected sheet music with silhouettes, too.

I love the silhouettes on dinnerware.

But my favorites are the small framed silhouettes that were all the rage for a while from the 30s to around the 50s. All have different backgrounds, but the silhouettes are reverse-painted, which means they're painted on the back side of the glass and not on the paper itself. When they're painted on convex glass it creates a 3-D effect with shadows. Most of the 4x6 convex silhouettes were made by the Benton Glass Co., Cleveland, Ohio in the 1940s.

Here's a better view:

The two convex glass silhouettes have printed pictorial backgrounds. Sometimes there is enough detail that a plain background works better.

Like this one.

They were commonly used in advertising, too. This one is from The City Oil Company in Perrysburg, Michigan.

These are a little larger and have backgrounds made up of pressed milkweed spores and straw flowers. They give them a beautiful, shimmery look.

Here is a closeup.

These are just a few from my silhouette collection. I take silhouette photographs, too. This one is of my frog-hunter grandson at the end of the day, still looking. (Don't worry, he only keeps them for a little while, then lets them go.) It's absolutely one my favorites!

What a difference 20 years makes!

I've been thinking a lot about Etsy's decision to use "20 years or more" as the mark of a Vintage piece. When I first saw it, I had to laugh. I thought, "That's just silly". But at the same time, I wholeheartedly went along with the idea, because it meant I could list more items there.

After many debates about, say, 1988 being Vintage, I think I'm finally beginning to see the light. Here's why:

Great changes have taken place in 20 year spans. Not only societal and historical changes, but major changes in home and fashion styles. I can't help but think about the giant leap society took between the 20 years from 1900 to 1920. At the turn of the century, they were just barely out of the Victorian era, still wearing blowsy shirtwaists, bustles, and full length bathing suits. But by the 1920s they have moved on to bathtub gin, short flapper dresses, and cupid's bow lips.

When I was a young housewife in the mid-50s, anything from the mid-30s was considered positively antique--so out of it and old fashioned! We were well into modernistic, streamlined, Scandinavian influences and people were throwing out that 30s junk by the carloads. (Especially the clunky Mission Oak furniture we now associate with Stickley and other sought-after Craftsman era makers. It was way too big for our little ranch homes.)

By the late 50s and early1960s, we were throwing out the old cast-offs from the 1940s--those stuffy old mohair sofas, those rose-strewn rugs, those chenille bedspreads. Who would want that tired old junk? We didn't become nostalgic for it until years later, when it suddenly became popular again. It's that cycling of the old stuff--our grandmother's stuff-- that we've come to call "nostalgia".

In the 1980s, we were throwing out the 60s and 70s stuff, including the eye-popping psychedelic remnants of a free and easy culture, and heading toward the more abstract, the more natural, earthy (or earth-bound) aspects of a hippy generation that leaned toward hand-thrown pots, macrame, and unpainted barn siding.
And now here we are, in the 21st Century, already getting nostalgic for that past century. . .

I wonder what life will look like 20 years from now?

Toward a New Year

Happy, happy New Year and a belated Merry Christmas. Blogging went by the wayside in December, as I got further and further behind and worked like the devil to catch up. (I never did catch up, and the New Year started anyway.)

But I had to show you two super Christmas presents I was absolutely THRILLED to receive:

Pearl China Tea Set

The color is a teal green, and the tea pot has the Pearl curlicue on it. The scroll and flowers are a bright gold. Lovely! I have to do more research to find the pattern and year(s) produced.

Homer Laughlin "English Garden"

This is my absolute favorite American china pattern. I have three small pieces, and am always lusting for more, but this gorgeous platter was beyond my wildest dreams! Here is a closeup of the cottage (Love it, love it, LOVE it):

And. . .I know Christmas is over, but I wanted to show you some pictures of my daughter's Department 56 Snowbabies collection. Every Christmas for almost 20 years, I've bought her a new little bisque Snowbabies figurine, and it's become almost as much fun as buying something wonderful for myself!

For the past five or six years, my granddaughter, now eleven, has done the choosing, and I'm happy to let her. She takes a long time, and chooses very carefully, because her auntie has promised that the collection will be hers someday. What an incentive!

Every year my daughter and her niece, the Snowbabies heiress, come up with new ways to display them. This year they outdid themselves. They placed different sized boxes here and there in a garden window, laid tiny light strings around them, and covered the whole thing with yards of batting. They look adorable!

This is what it looks like at night.

Snowbabies started in Germany some time in the nineteenth century, and are still being made there. Department 56 began issuing their own versions around 1986, and kept to the original all-white figurines until recently, when they joined up with Disney and Warner Bros, added color, and totally ruined them, as far as I'm concerned. My daughter and granddaughter agree. They prefer the classic Snowbabies, though you'll notice there is one partially colored "Frosty the Snowman" in there. Who could say no to Frosty?

My best wishes for a Glorious year ahead for everyone.

New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. ~Mark Twain

What is "Vintage"?

There's been a whole lot of discussion on the Etsy forums about what "vintage" really means. Some of the writers seem to think it shouldn't be used for anything except wine. They have a point. The word "vintage" comes from "vintner", which means "winemaker". You can see from the following reference on Dictionary.com that they stress the wine connection, too:

vin·tage

1.	the wine from a particular harvest or crop.

2.	the annual produce of the grape harvest, esp. with reference to the wine obtained.

3.	an exceptionally fine wine from the crop of a good year.

4.	the time of gathering grapes, or of winemaking.

5.	the act or process of producing wine; winemaking.

6.	the class of a dated object with reference to era of production or use: a hat of last year's vintage.

–adjective

7.	of or pertaining to wines or winemaking.

8.	being of a specified vintage: Vintage wines are usually more expensive than nonvintage wines.

9.	representing the high quality of a past time: vintage cars; vintage movies.

10.	old-fashioned or obsolete: vintage jokes.

11.	being the best of its kind: They praised the play as vintage O'Neill.

–verb (used with object)

12.	to gather or harvest (grapes) for wine-making: The muscats were vintaged too early.

13.	to make (wine) from grapes: a region that vintages a truly great champagne.

–verb (used without object)

14.	to harvest grapes for wine-making.

For most of us vintage sellers, Numbers 9 and 11 fit what we do best, I think. I personally was happy when "Vintage" became the catch-all word for the things I collect and sell. I never was completely comfortable with "Antiques and collectibles". Not all of it is antique, and not all of it is collectible. Most of my things are what I call "useful". Kitchen and dining goods, linens and laces, quilts, etc. When I think of "collectibles", I think of Franklin Mint or Bradford Exchange or Ashton Drake. It used to be that anything called "collectible" was something that might add to somebody's collection, whatever that was. But now there is an entire industry created to produce "collectibles". (And most of them now are essentially worthless, much to the dismay of the people who bought them thinking they were making an investment.)

At Etsy, "Vintage" is anything 20 years old or more. While I'm happy to go along with it, mainly so that I can post more listings on Etsy, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything from, say, 1988 as "Vintage". But the other thing that bothers me about that "Vintage" designation is that it has the potential to open the door for all kinds of junk. As long as it's older than 20 years, it's okay by Etsy. That's wrong, in my opinion.

"Vintage", as the dictionary says, should be "representing the high quality of the past" and "being the best of its kind". I think most Etsy Vintage sellers take pride in what they sell and use those thoughts as a guideline, so I don't see Etsy being inundated with junk any time soon, but I would love to see something about quality in their vintage guidelines. What do you think?

(Please note: My signature on this post is "Mona at Cabin and Camp". This is because I lack even a smidgen of technosavvy. I have two blogs on Blogspot, and I didn't realize I had to sign out of one in order to post on the other. It let me create the post, but now it won't let me change to my "Deer Path Vintage" name! I've worked on this for about an hour now, trying to change it, and apparently I can't. Boo Hoo. . .so here it is anyway, and from now on I'll try to get it right! Either way, it's me.)

Welcome to Deer Path Vintage

Hello and welcome! This will be the place where I'll talk about my vintage finds and share any info I come across about all things vintage. I dearly love American Pottery from the 20s to the 50s, but I'm thrilled to find any kind of wonderful pottery, ceramics and glass. I love vintage clothing, too, as well as dolls and toys and souvenirs and ephemera, and. . . okay, yes, I love it all.

I have a store on Etsy.com where everything is at least 20 years old or more. I must admit I have a hard time thinking of anything from 1988 as "vintage", but that's where Etsy draws the line, and because of that, I often will, too. But most of my things are much older. Some have been weeded from my own collections, and some have come from antique stores, thrift stores and garage sales.

I live in a small cottage in the north woods, and I just can't keep it all--as much as I would like to! Small spaces and pack rats just don't mix. I swear I'm just going to look every time I go through the doors of those places, but somehow there are always things I just can't leave behind. So now I'm finding that I love being a seller. Researching my finds and writing the descriptions is just so much fun! And meeting new people, if only through emails and convos, is simply icing on the cake.

So please feel free to comment on anything on these pages. I would love to hear from you.

Mona