Vintage China Rental Durham Archives - Southern Vintage Table

Vintage Adventures – Repost of a Great Vintage Saga

Did you know a humble set of four spoons helped launch one of the most iconic names in home canning?

In 1911, Alexander H. Kerr, founder of the Kerr Glass Manufacturing Company, introduced a revolutionary wide-mouth mason jar. But before that invention made its way into nearly every kitchen in America, he funded the company with the profits from—yes, really—four silver-plated spoons he used as a promotional giveaway for his first business venture.

Those spoons were part of a brilliant marketing strategy to encourage sales of his “Kerr Home Canning Book.” It worked, and that spark helped light the path to Kerr becoming a household name.
Photo from Kerr Jars Healthy Canning

We know you’ll enjoy the fascinating tale of canning jars made by Kerr Glass Manufacturing Company. A little preview to get you hooked!

“From fruit jars, to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a scandalous divorce and marriage, free teaspoons, centers to help orphans and children with developmental needs, and one of the first women executives in manufacturing – whew!”

Vintage Adventures – The Story of a Teaspoon & a Jar

Next time you spot a Kerr jar at a flea market or tucked in a family pantry, remember—it all started with just four spoons and a whole lot of ingenuity.

Feature – Sweet Spring Decor & Table Setting Inspiration from Our Archives

Spring is a season of renewal, and what better way to celebrate than with a beautiful Easter gathering filled with vintage charm? Over the years, we’ve styled some truly lovely spring tablescapes and seasonal vignettes, and today, we’re taking a little stroll down memory lane.

From soft pastel china to dainty glassware and whimsical bunny touches, our Easter decor pieces bring warmth, nostalgia, and timeless beauty to your celebration. Whether you’re planning a brunch, an outdoor garden party, or a sweet family dinner, these looks are full of inspiration.

We adore adding playful elements like ceramic bunnies, egg cups filled with florals and moss, and vintage postcards to our place settings and centerpieces. These charming details bring out the childlike wonder of the season—and guests always notice them!

Looking to host your own vintage-inspired spring brunch or celebration? We’d love to help you bring your vision to life with our curated collection of china, flatware, linens, and seasonal decor. Let’s make this one to remember—with timeless beauty at every place setting.

Southern Vintage Table Vintage China Rental NC

Southern Vintage Table Event – Donuts & Vintage China

Yummy, right? Writing today’s post is going to take willpower because there’s a lot of deliciousness in these photos! We are featuring Mabyn Ludke photos of Katie and Lee’s May wedding reception, styled by Amy Wurster, owner of Knots ‘N Such. We had the pleasure of providing the dessert table serving pieces and plates as well as the place settings for the sweetheart table. Take a look and see how pretty everything turned out!

Congratulations, Katie and Lee, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to help with this beautiful day. See details and more photographs from this wedding on Mabyn’s blog. Amy, we love working with you and look forward to our next collaboration with Knots ‘N Such!

PS – We are always so pleased and grateful when our clients give us a shoutout. Here’s our review from Katie on Wedding Wire!

Katie said…

5.0/5.0 Quality of Service: 5.0 Responsiveness: 5.0 Professionalism: 5.0 Value: 5.0 Flexibility: 5.0

Southern Vintage Table provided beautiful mismatched vintage plates for our dessert table and sweetheart table! Shelly has a gorgeous collection that went perfectly with my vintage-rustic-romantic wedding!

Vintage Feature – A Symbol of Love and Prosperity is… Wheat

While collecting vintage china patterns for Southern Vintage Table, I have found many vintage patterns with wheat shafts. Why wheat, I wondered? It’s brown and umm … brown. I knew there must be a story behind it. Well, of course, there is.

Wheat symbolizes many good things in life. To name just a few – prosperity, love, home and hearth, harvest, spring, birth and hope. In the bible wheat is the symbol for righteous people. No wonder it was popular on china, to be seen everyday at the family dining table!

One of the most prevalent patterns in the mid 1950s was Golden Wheat by Homer Laughlin, featured in the middle of the photo above. It was a marketing gimmick of Duz detergent – they wanted to have an edge over Tide, so they started including china dishes in their boxes of detergent! Don’t you wish someone would do that again?

The third image above is a beautiful golden scalloped edged pattern on a luscious cream background. I came upon it at a local thrift store – there was an entire set! One of the volunteers, Polly, and I sat down on the floor and examined each piece, reveling in its design and beauty. The pattern is from Grindley, manufactured in England and dates during the 1940s-50s. Of course, I bought it!

One more trio of wheat images is below from the 40s-60s. The first two are on fine porcelain china and the third has a beautiful teal coloring.

So, lovely wheat is in – at least on vintage china patterns – and we have them available for you at Southern Vintage Table!

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Southern Vintage Event: Reisling Vintages with Vintage China

It was her turn to host the monthly wine club dinner and Rowena wanted to do something special for her friends. The wine club’s mission is to ferret out the best wines in every possible category. For each meeting the members contribute a dish for the meal and then they try different vintages of the featured wine. A difficult task but these dedicated women are up for it!

This month’s featured wine was Reislings and what would make this festive event even more fun? An assortment of vintage china! Rowena arranged for Southern Vintage Table to set her table and each guest enjoyed a lovely unique place setting from our elegant collection with themes of pink and green. The final “plat de résistance” to help uncover the best Reisling vintage – an assortment of vintage hats!

Southern Vintage China Vintage China Rental NC — The bold salad plate sets off the delicate flowers of the berry bowl and dinner plate.

Bottles of Reislings and a delicious meal on beautiful vintage china – the perfect recipe for a spirited time! Having a dinner party, book club meeting or wine tasting event? Contact Southern Vintage Table for unique vintage china place settings that will get the conversation started!

A Vintage Adventure – Vintage China, A Cup & A Business Friendship

This vintage china rental business is a perfect fit for me. I love vintage stuff – love the smell, the feel, the look, the beauty, the energy encapsulated in it, the history. I also love to go hunting for it – what a thrill when you find something interesting and imagine sharing it with others.

One day I was looking carefully at each piece I had placed in my shopping cart at a Durham thrift store and an attractive woman approached me. She commented about the array of dishes in my cart and I mentioned to her that I was looking for china for my vintage china rental business, Southern Vintage Table. We chatted a bit and she went back into the china aisle. A few more minutes later she returns with more pieces of the same pattern I had showed her. The kindness of strangers – don’t we all love that!

The next time she came back to my cart she was holding a coffee cup with “Terry” on it. It turned out to be her name.

Now, here’s the beautiful, eerie part – as she’s showing this cup to me, she’s explaining that it must be a message from the cosmos to talk with me about Southern Vintage Table. She shared that she had worked as a consultant with some prominent local companies in the area, which certainly caught my attention, My cosmic antenna was also up that day and I deeply felt this was not just a chance encounter. We exchanged names and numbers.

Our fateful meeting turned into a wonderful business collaboration for which I am very grateful. Her insight, experience and expertise helped get my business up and ready. Thank you, Terry Melville, for understanding the message in the coffee cup!

Southern Vintage Table is ready to help you with your next event – birthday, shower, anniversary, wedding reception, dinner party, tea party and any other gathering – with beautiful, interesting vintage china!

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Vintage Tips – Pinterest Tip for Rearranging Pins

One of the key web tools for sharing inventory of my vintage china and accessories is Pinterest. I love this site! It’s easy to import, or pin photos, and organize them onto boards. Plus, the presentation is professional and, with great appreciation, free!

When I first started using Pinterest, I uploaded photos from my website, Southern Vintage Table, and from my computer. I wasn’t thinking of the order of my uploads because I thought I could later reorganize them on my board. As I added more photos and looked back at the board, I realized there were large clusters of the same type of photo and I wanted to mix them up a bit. When I looked up how to do this, I discovered you can’t rearrange pins within a board.

But, I found a semi-solution that helped break up the clusters. I chose a pin within the clusters and reassigned it to another board. (Click on the pencil/edit icon in the upper right of the photo. Next to the board field, scroll to find a board to temporarily pin the image.) Then I opened the new board with the moved pin at the top and re-reassigned it, pushing the pin to the top of the original board. With repinning to another board and then re-repinning to the original board, the end result is a better mix of photos and an overall more attractive board.

Using this technique, you change the order of an entire board. Just start a new empty board and repin your photos from the original board in the order you want them to appear for your viewers. Remember to think backwards with the pin you want to be seen first being the last one you move.

(FYI – Pinterest lets you easily change the order of boards. Just click on the board and drag it to the new position. Hopefully, they’ll make it just as easy to move pins!)

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Vintage Feature – Wisdom from Ronald Reagan

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.
– Ronald Reagan (www.brainyquote.com)

Southern Vintage Table is ready to help you plan for your upcoming events this fall. Have a wedding, anniversary, birthday party, baby shower or a dinner party coming up? Let us help you set the table and get the conversation started!

Check out our inventory of vintage china and accessories on Pinterest!

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Vintage Tips – Three Cleaning Products for Thrift Store Vintage China (and other stuff, too!)

When I first started my vintage china collection for Southern Vintage Table, I labored over removing the stickers, tape and permanent marker prices. I would peel, scape and soak every dish to get that mark off! Now, I use three products that make cleaning thrift store vintage china a breeze!

1. Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. This product is fantastic – it will quickly remove the permanent ink some thrift stores use for pricing and easily takes care of sticker glue and tape residue. It also does a terrific job of cleaning the bottoms of plates and other china so that when you are finished, the plate looks almost brand new! Do be gentle with some china patterns, especially if they have gold layering. I also use Mr. Clean Magic Eraser for other cleaning tasks. Today I cleaned the outside of two vintage suitcases and removed most of the scuff marks. They both look amazing all cleaned up and are now ready for my next event!

2. Eucalyptus Oil. This stuff will also remove sticky stuff on dishes. Sometimes the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser won’t get the mark off so I’ll dab some eucalyptus oil on a paper towel and wipe it off. It also smells nice and clean.

3. Very fIne sand paper. Some of the older china that’s crazed or china that’s unglazed on the bottom will soak in the permanent ink pricing. Using a very fine sand paper and lightly sanding can sometimes do the trick. Be gentle. I have also sanded down chips or sharp places on glass dishes and some china so that the imperfection is almost imperceivable.

Hope these tips work for you. If you have any other hints or advice for cleaning thrift store finds, please share!

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Vintage Feature: The Blue Vintage China Table

blue willow set — Clementine would be pleased that her Blue Willow teapots will be enjoyed by many admirers of her favorite china pattern.

What do The Andy Griffith Show, The Munsters and old Westerns have in common? Well, yes, they are all midcentury classic television but there’s something even cooler – they share a common dining table setting, the Blue Willow vintage china pattern. These famous shows set their table with this blue and white pattern because it is crisp, vintage and full of history. First designed in the 18th century, Blue Willow has been on generations of family dining tables and continues to be popular today. Read more about this fascinating pattern on Wikipedia.

There’s something special about blue vintage china that many folks appreciate. Blue Willow features dark indigo against white that’s so striking. Blends of light blue vintage china are soothing and inviting. Vintage turquoise has a romantic flair while blues with greens, pinks and yellows present a cheery table.

Whether it’s the classic blue and white vintage china table setting, a myriad of blue vintage china stoneware patterns or a mingling of soft elegant blue vintage china patterns, your guests will love it. Check out more blue vintage china patterns available at Southern Vintage Table on our Pinterest Board!

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