A Few of My Favorite (Kitchen) Things: Vintage Tea Towels!

By dramamamafive July 11, 2014 Uncategorized 29 Comments

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Looky here. Gentle Reader, this is quite an accomplishment for me. With this post, I’ve participated in my own self-appointed Friday series two Fridays in a row! That’s pretty consistent for me. I’m even a little puffed up with the glory of it all. It feels good. I feel grand. Structured. Accomplished. Maybe–just maybe–I’ll do a third entry next Friday . . . I’m just a bit dizzy . . .

And remember. . . once my vomitingchicken.com Facebook page gets to 1,000 “likes,” I’m going to do a giveaway with a nice package of some of My Favorite (Kitchen) Things. My dad already made me a special French rolling pin (Amalia has been eying it, for her hope chest, but I say to her that Grandpa will make her one) to include in the package, so encourage your friends to like my page, and we’ll get to that number all the sooner! Please, by the way, don’t notice that that French rolling pin post, which began this series, was nearly four months ago. Yikes. How embarrassing.

Oh well. Onward and upward: here’s my favorite kitchen thing for today: vintage tea towels! Do you love them as much as I do? They are so cute and so handy. I buy them whenever I see them at my favorite thrift stores, for very little: from 25¢ each to $1.00. It seems that not many people treasure them, which suits my budget. I especially like the ones with the Aunt Martha designs hand embroidered on them. At our farmer’s market one week a couple summers ago, an older lady showed up and set up table after table covered with hand-embroidered tea towels and lots of other handwork. Crocheted afghans, potholders, and so forth. I bought a couple sets of those tea towels, which were beautifully done. She only came for a week or two, and then we never saw her again. I wish I would have been able to buy her out. Who does that anymore?

I always regretted not buying more of those sets of tea towels from her. Not many people embroider any longer, and I think that’s a shame. They still make the Aunt Martha transfers. Maybe I’ll just start a movement. A movement away from the screen (this is delicious irony, as I type away on my Apple ‘pooter) and back to front porch pursuits, like embroidery. Banjo playing. Homemade lemonade. Playing cards. Doesn’t that sound sweet?

Isn’t this a cute one? And it’s so cheap, too.

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I found a few embroidered tea towels at the Etcetera shop in Seward just this week. I love them ardently. The embroidered designs are so cheesy. Here’s one of them:

“Pair.” Sweet. And, duh. Oh well.

I picked these up for a song (a cheap song) because they are stained, as you can see. But. I have a supersecret stain removing method that works every time. I’m sharing it with you, my Gentle Reader, just in case you occasionally encounter very stubborn stains that give you fits.

Here’s what I do: I run the hottest water that I can possibly get, into a big bucket. Then I stir 1/4 cup of dishwashing crystals, and 1/4 cup of a bleach substitute like Oxyclean or Clorox II. Then I push the stained articles into the hot water, and let them soak, overnight or even longer if they need it. Then I run them through the washer with my homemade laundry soap (more about that later) and I hang out the now-sparkly clean and unstained articles in the sun, for a couple days if need be, for further whitening. It works so well!

You can buy vintage-like towels from lots of places. Here’s some that I like:

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Can you guess which of these tea towels flapping on my laundry line are really vintage, and which one I bought brand new? (Answer* at the end!)

It’s worth buying a few of these just to see how pretty they look flapping on the line, don’t you agree?

I use my vintage towels to line baskets when I serve bread, and to pretty-up my farmer’s market bread boxes, and for lots of other uses, too. I keep them in a special place, so they don’t get used to wipe up chicken vomit on the kitchen floor, or to clean the bottom of somebody’s muddy shoes. 🙁 Not that anybody in my house would do that.)

Basicallly they just add a lot of “pretty” to my kitchen. And that’s why they are one of my favorite kitchen things.

Here are my bread boxes, packed and ready for farmer’s market. See the embroidery on the towel on the left? Cute, huh?

So that’s it for today, Gentle Reader. Thank you again for stopping by. I’d love to hear about your favorite kitchen things in the comments. What do you just love to use in your kitchen every day, and why?

**Guess what I forgot?! I forgot to give you the answer to the quiz. A few astute readers called me on it, and I’m thankful that they did! Here it is: the second towel from the left, with the stripes along the long edges, is the new towel that I bought (from amazon.com). All the others were purchases from thrift stores, and are much older.

Something else I nearly forgot: The Prairie Homestead’s Barn Hop! Join me over there, won’t you?