A few of my favourite things...Beautiful old kitchenware

My collection of flour sifters...

One of my favourite things to do on a Saturday morning is to head off to yard sales with my family.  A summer morning when it still a little bit cool with the promise of lots of heat by noon is the perfect kind of day.  Over the many years we've discovered the best places in the city to get the best deals.  When the kids were little we shopped for kids clothes and toys.  Now we've discovered new things to search for - or rather OLD things to search for.

My love of well worn antiques is nothing new.  My home is an eclectic mix of new, old and dragged-off-the-side-of-the-road or yard sale furniture and accessories.  I get a thrill of fixing something up that someone else considered trash.  A coat of paint sometimes or just re-purposing something makes it new to me!

My greatest love is kitchenware from back-in-the-day.  

Rolling pins and hand-cranked egg beaters...

Old jars re purposed to hold spices and tin measuring cups...

 Enamelware kitchen utensils and some butter pats for working the whey out of the freshly churned butter...

Biscuit cutters and tart pans...

A replacement of a set of measuring cups given to my by my next-door-granny as a child that stared this obsession with beautiful but functional kitchenware.  I dropped my original set as a young bride and cried many tears over it's loss.

A berry picker, an old fashioned wind-up alarm clock that I borrowed from my Mom in order to teach my son how to tell time - she never did get it back!

What is this fascination I have with these tools?  It reminds me of quilting bees and bake sales.  Of being given a set of measuring spoons embossed with the local hardware store logo as a gift for my hope chest from my granny - along with those measuring cups.  Canning and gardening and eating Granny's chilli sauce with roast and biscuits, drinking tea out of real china tea cups...all these things are things are treasured memories of being a child.  I enjoy having them around me as reminders every day of a life that seemed simpler and quieter - something to strive for when I get stressed out over the garden or the kids or life in general.

It's hard to drink tea from a tea cup in a hammock but you get the idea!

Quote taken from an old cookbook: "Thank God for tea!  What would the world be without tea?  How did we exist?  I am glad I was not born before tea!"  - Sydney Smith