I'm
on a little bit of a mission to replace everything in our house with
something that either has meaning or is cool and vintage.
(Can't replace EVERYTHING, of course. I don't necessarily want a vintage toothbrush. *shudder*)
The most recent target of mine was dishes.
Way more interesting than it sounds, believe me.
The Great Dishes Quest began, like most boring-sounding projects, with marriage. James and I had been subsisting on a mish-mash of cheap-o dining materials we had lugged with us to and from college, along with a cereal bowl I'd "borrowed" from my mom for approximately ten years. We had never been able to afford a matching set of dishes.
Enter: the wedding registry!
We only registered at Target - after twenty minutes of the Bed, Bath, and Beyond wedding lady INSISTING we needed to pick out fine china, we dipped - so we were limited to what Target offered. That was fine: going from nothing to everything was overwhelming, to say the least. My mom, raiser of three children and haver of a husband (in my experience, husbands can be as dexterous as children), had an opinion about only one thing when it came to the wedding registry: dishes.
Not about whether to get fine china (obviously no one's doing that) or what color or how many or anything like that.
"CORELLE,"my mom said. "GET CORELLE."
I grew up using Corelle, and I will not forget that pattern until I die:
I never knew it was called "blue lily" until I wrote this post, though.
I don't know how long my mom had these dishes, but I do know they will outlast all of us. Corelle is indestructible. According to the internet, the dishes are made out of a three-layer glass laminate that not only makes them durable, but incredibly lightweight. I don't recall a single one of Mom's dishes getting so much as chipped, let alone breaking. The freaking pattern never even had a scratch.
Unfortunately for me, the Corelle patterns of 2013 were boring as hell. I was leaning hard towards stoneware because it was sooooooooo pretty, but James and I ultimately chose Corelle - not just because of its sturdy nature, but because of its stackability. We would be moving into our first home after we got married, and this new home of ours didn't have much storage space.
Enter: the stoneware.
For whatever reason, I found stoneware to be very glamorous. Maybe it was because we didn't have it as kids. Maybe it's because the colors are rich and gorgeous. Maybe it's because of the patterns etched in, or maybe it's because of their weightiness. Whatever it was, I was getting STONEWARE.
I picked out a Target brand (always Target) called Threshold Kingsland.
The dishes are dark iridescent blue with geometric patterns etched into the surface. Mom happily took our square Corelle dishes, and my sister Darrah inherited the Corelle of childhood. (I think my brother Mitch has someone else's Corelle - I'll get back to you on that.)
The stoneware was great... for a year.
At which point James and Phineas (mostly James, let's be honest) started breaking plates at an alarming rate.
Why don't I just replace them? Other normal people have dishes break all the time?
Because they're now discontinued.
Even the similar pattern (called "Kingsfield") I used to replace the FIRST batch of broken plates (yes, we were that short on plates) is also discontinued.
Corelle, I was wrong to forsake thee.
I
shopped around a little bit for new Corelle, but the patterns were
still quite underwhelming. There were a few new patterns that I liked, but I didn't LOVE. If I was getting my third new set of dishes in nine years (which to me seems almost embarrassing), it was going to be my LAST for DECADES. Most Corelle sets I saw also came in sets with
mugs, and the last thing we need are more mugs. (And if we do get mugs,
guaranteed they're going to say something snarky on them.) And I had learned my lesson: after my unfortunate journey into stoneware, it was Corelle or bust.
But then it hit me: vintage Corelle.
Why didn't I just buy some damn vintage Corelle? The patterns were SO much better, and I wouldn't get saddled with any mugs. Plus, if the bowl patterns were boring, I could mix-and-match for my own bowls.
So I did.
When you figure in shipping, it did end up costing slightly more than it would have to buy a new Corelle set outright. But let's ignore shipping, and in that case, I got way more bang for my buck.
Ignoring shipping, I bought:
nine wildflower dinner plates:$40.95
eight wildflower salad plates: $40
four blue onion dinner plates: $17
seven gold butterfly cereal bowls: $9.95
A regular brand-new Corelle set is $100 and comes with 16 pieces: four dinner plates, four salad plates, four bowls, four mugs. I didn't want the mugs, so that would be only 12 pieces I'd actually use.
$100 for 12 pieces, or $8.33 per piece.
Vintage 4ever.
(Plus, Mom LOVES to have something to hunt for at Goodwill, so she's on the lookout for cool Corelle pieces to marry into our new collection. She's already found us three green daisy dessert bowls, so our dish set number is actually 37!)
Now we have amazing dishes that are not only a mix of gorgeous patterns (YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE JUST ONE PATTERN!) but toddler and adult male-proof! Plus now, should anyone comment on the dishes, I have a fun ebay treasure-hunt story to tell them.
We also have enough dishes to feed a shit-ton of people - lack of dishes was getting to be a bit of a concern the more friends we made in Luverne :)
OOOOH! Now can I tell you about my drinking glasses????
