Thirty-Two Dollars, Four Stops, One Purple Candy Dish I Didn’t Need

I have a rule about thrifting that I break constantly: don’t buy it unless you have a place for it. Reader, I don’t have a place for a purple candy dish. I bought the purple candy dish anyway. Let me walk y’all through the damage.

Here’s a thing folks don’t always know about me: I have a route. A regular loop of thrift stores I hit in a regular order, the way other people have a coffee shop or a Sunday drive. This particular run was four stops, and (spoiler) one of them sent me home empty-handed. That’s part of the deal too. You don’t find the good stuff every time; you find it because you keep showing up when there’s nothing. More on that in a minute.

The whole haul came to right around thirty-two dollars. Once I lay it all out on the table by the window (the good light spot; every food blogger has one, and this is mine), it looks like a lot more money than it was. That’s the thing about thrifting well. It isn’t about finding the cheapest stuff. It’s about finding the stuff that photographs like it cost four times what you paid.

Stop one: Goodwill on State Bridge Road

Two things came home from here, and one of them nearly made me lose my composure right there in the housewares aisle. A round wooden serving board with leather strap handles and brass rivets, and when I flipped it over: Dansk, burned right into the wood. Dansk. The Danish-modern housewares people. Four dollars and nine cents.

For the folks in the back: this is the Dansk Hamund serving tray, the very same one the Museum of Danish America carries in its design store. An actual museum-shop piece. And I pulled it off a Goodwill shelf for four dollars and nine cents. It isn’t about the money (though the money is pretty funny); it’s that something nice enough to live in a museum store was sitting in a thrift bin waiting for somebody to notice it. Reader, I noticed. Forsooth, I did a little victory shuffle right there in the aisle, and I’d do it again.

Here’s the catch, because there’s always a catch: once I cleaned it up the finish showed a few cloudy damaged spots (you can see them in the close-up; I’m not going to pretend they aren’t there). Totally fixable. Next time I pull out the sander it’s a quick sand, a fresh coat of finish, and some food-safe poly and it’ll look brand new. In the meantime? A little styling, a strategically placed hunk of cheese, and nobody’s the wiser. Four dollars for a Dansk board is four dollars I’d spend again in a heartbeat.

Also from here, a little gray salad-plate sized dish with a raised lip for a dollar thirty-nine. Matte, moody, exactly the kind of dark background that makes bright food pop; I don’t own enough of them and now I own one more.

Stop two: Goodwill on Holcomb Bridge Road

This is the stop that actually justified the whole trip. Four little white au gratin dishes (they’re stacked two and two in the photo, so count again if you only spotted a pair), two twenty-four apiece, fluted French-white sides, exactly the individual bakers I’ve been wanting.

Here’s the part that made my whole day: the older gentleman behind the counter took one look at them, told me I’d found something good, and then he brought up Ina Garten’s zucchini gratin, completely unprompted. Sir. You have no idea. That’s nearly word for word what these are about to become. If you catch the blog this week you’ll see them again, holding a lighter, spicier take on exactly that dish. Function AND form, and a stranger’s blessing on top.

Also from here: a silvery marbled rectangular platter for three-oh-nine. It’s the perfect size for sandwiches and sides, and I bought it purely because it looked expensive and it didn’t cost much, which is honestly the entire philosophy of this post in one sentence. My only regret is that they had exactly one. If there’d been a pair I’d have grabbed both without blinking.

Stop three: Furkids Thrift Store on Holcomb Bridge Road

About two miles up the road, and the site of my crime.

Twelve dollars, even, went to one thing: that amethyst Westmoreland candy dish with the lid. And yes, twelve dollars at a thrift store is basically highway robbery by my usual standards; I’ve talked myself out of a two-dollar mug on principle before. But this one stopped me in the aisle. It’s Westmoreland’s Swirl & Ball pattern (the cone-shaped covered candy dish, if you want to get specific): deep grooved ribs that swirl up the body, a fat row of little glass balls around the widest point, and a pointed finial on top that makes the whole thing look like a tiny glass wedding cake. Flip it over and there’s the overlapped WG maker’s mark, which Westmoreland used from 1940 to 1980; so this beauty is genuinely mid-century, not a modern lookalike. Most folks find Swirl & Ball in milk glass, so the amethyst is the rarer, funner version, and it catches window light in a way that’s going to earn its keep in about a hundred future photos. Turns out it’s a genuine little collector’s pattern too, which means for once I didn’t just fall for a pretty face; I actually stumbled into a real find. I’m not selling it (it lives on the windowsill now, obviously), but there’s a particular kind of satisfaction in learning the twelve-dollar impulse buy was the smart money all along. Worth every one of those twelve dollars. I regret nothing.

While I was there I grabbed a pressed-glass pitcher (the floral one) for a flat three dollars; it’s going straight into rotation for iced tea and probably a summer cocktail or two. Furkids runs on round numbers, by the way. Almost everything is a flat dollar amount, no odd change, unless you’re digging through the fifty-cent bucket (which I always do, on principle). It’s a rescue thrift, so the money goes to animals, which is a very easy thing to feel good about while handing over cash you told yourself you weren’t going to spend.

Stop four: Furkids on Haynes Bridge Road (the one that got away)

And then I drove over to the Haynes Bridge location and found absolutely nothing in the kitchen and dishware section that popped for me. Not one thing.

I’m including this on purpose. Because if I only ever showed you the wins, I’d be selling you a version of thrifting that isn’t real. Most days the shelves are full of stuff that’s just fine and none of it is for you, and you walk out with your same wallet and your same afternoon and that is completely okay. The empty trips are the price of admission for the twelve-dollar candy dish. You don’t get one without the other.

The math, for the folks who like the math

I like the math. The Dansk board was $4.09; the gray dish $1.39; the four gratin bakers $2.24 apiece; the platter $3.09; the candy dish an even $12; the pitcher an even $3. That lands right at thirty-two-and-change, exactly like I told y’all up top, which is the rare and beautiful occasion when my math and my memory agree, spread across three receipts and four stops. For that I got a Dansk board I’ll baby back to life, a candy dish I’ll photograph for years, four bakers earning their spot this very week, and three more pieces for the prop shelf.

Anyway. That’s how a “quick loop” becomes four stops and a purple candy dish I didn’t need. Tell me I’m wrong. (You can’t. Look at it.)

P.S. Zach walked in, looked at the candy dish, looked at me, and said “where’s that going to live?” and I still don’t have an answer. It lives on the table by the window now. It lives wherever it wants.

P.P.S. I fell down a pressed-glass rabbit hole trying to ID this thing and, for once, came out the other side with an actual answer. Along the way I nearly convinced myself it was Imperial (their IG mark looks a whole lot like Westmoreland’s WG when you’re squinting at a blurry photo of the bottom of a candy dish, which is a sentence I didn’t expect to write today). The tell is the letters: a W has pointy peaks, an I is just a straight little post. Mine’s a W. Case closed. (If you’re the type to fall all the way down this hole, the National Westmoreland Glass Collectors’ Club is exactly where it leads, and I mean that as a warning and an invitation.)

P.P.P.S. There was a milk glass one sitting right next to it at Furkids, same cone shape but the diamond-hobnail texture instead of the swirl (that one’s Westmoreland’s English Hobnail, the actual hobnail sister to my swirl). If it’s still there next trip, it’s coming home with me, and y’all will hear about it.

P.P.P.P.S. Remy supervised the entire unpacking process and found none of it edible, which is the highest praise a thrift haul can receive.