Tour de (Pyrex-Laden) Kitchen Cabinet

I'm rapidly hitting the point where I have Pyrex stashed all over the house. At the moment, there is Pyrex in the kitchen cabinet, displayed in a bookshelf in the dining room, on top of the refrigerator, on top of the shelves in the living room, on the bench in the dining room and on my bedside table.

Here's my kitchen cabinet:


On the top (basically unreachable) shelf is my recently completed set of Pink Gooseberry Cinderella bowls. I never set out to collect Pink Gooseberry, but my mother-in-law still has the complete set from when she was first married in 1958. Most of them are in pretty bad shape, having hosted 50+ years of dinners, family get-togethers, and not a few trips through the dishwasher. But, for some reason, the 443 was still in pretty good shape, and she gave it to me a few years ago.

Since then, we found the 442 in the discount section of a Jubilee thrift shop in central PA (yes, they have a discount section in the thrift shop), the 441 at Unique Thrift in suburban DC, and just last week I found the 444 for $10 at an antique shop in Uniontown, PA (while sneaking out of a business trip to Pyrex hunt!). I think I paid $15 for the whole set, when all was said and done.

Next to the Pink Gooseberry is the Butterfly Gold gravy boat. I found mine without the underplate, and have been on a multi-year quest to find the underplate. If anyone has one to trade...

Below the Pink Gooseberry is the square Yellow Hostess set. You can see the larger bowl and lid- the smaller bowl, with lid, and two of the small ramekins are nested inside. The two bowls are one of my best ever Pyrex finds- $7 for both, including lids. I love them so much, I actually paid $7 EACH for the little ramekins when I found them at an antique shop several years later. I justified it by figuring that $21 for the whole set was still reasonable.

(Does anyone else find that the smallest pieces often have the highest price tags? Is that because the small pieces are "cute", or that they were used more, broken more, and therefore more rare?)

Next to the hostess bowls, is the Cranberry Visions set. I received these new shortly after graduating from college, and have dragged them from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again. Several times. I don't really think of them as collectible, and even thought about giving them away to make room for more milk glass Pyrex, but I'm glad I held onto them.

If you look closely, there are some Spring Blossom Green mugs mixed in with the coffee mugs. These were a gift from the woman who runs the Pyrex Museum in Bremerton, WA. Last August, we ended up with an opportunity to visit the Seattle area, so making the trek to the Pyrex Museum was one of our must-see sites. We took the ferry from Seattle to Bremerton, walked around the town and spent over an hour in the Pyrex Museum (I'll post pictures in another post). The owner, Amy, chatted with us and told us how her Pyrex collection started, shared some of her favorite pieces with us, and was asking what brought us to the museum. When we told her we had come from Washington DC to see the Pyrex Museum, she was floored that we even knew about it. She videotaped us talking about Pyrex for her local cable show, and then gave us the mugs as a gift. Interestingly, the two mugs have different stamps on the bottom- one indicates "microwave safe", the other does not.

Last, but most used, are the 501 fridgies and the cream and sugar sets on the bottom shelf. We have the cream and sugars sets for Old Town Blue, Golden Butterfly and Snowflake Garland. The creamers make great milk pitchers for cereal on breakfast trays. There is also a Federal Glass orange "atomic dots" bowl. It's my place holder until I find the REAL orange dots bowl!

Hope you enjoyed the Tour de Kitchen Cabinet.