Still Recycling

I just can't stop with this trash talk. I wanted to show you one last garbage vignette in my "new" room. This time it is another little shelf thingy that my sister crawled out onto the burn pile to rescue. It spent some time in my New Hampshire basement feeling rejected, but made the cut and was loaded into the moving van when we headed west to New Mexico. 

Good thing, too! Old New England trash like this is considered "antique" out here in the New West, and is hard to find. So, the battered little shelf became shabby chic and ended up as part of a proud display. 

That lusterware plate below the shelf came from--you guessed it--the Swap Shop in my old town in New Hampshire, where I found it down at the bottom of a pile of cracked plates in the kitchen recycling section. Ditto the two little floral plates in the top photo.

That bit of hand work casting the lacy shadow (below) was also someone's discard.

The little ceramic animals were collected when I lived in Canada many years ago. They were made at the Wade Pottery in Burslem, England, and used to be found as premiums in boxes of Red Rose Tea Bags. 

The old bottles and the little creamer were dug out of the ancient dump behind the stone wall at our old colonial home back east. Every spring, we would find different items near the surface, moved there by the frosts of winter--in much the same way that New England farmers and gardeners have a new "crop" of stones every season.