Sunday Antiquing The Tale of the Cocktail Fork

Almost every Sunday we share an item from our Vintage Collection of glassware, milk glass, depression glass, fire king, thumbprint glasses, jadeite along with a few odds and ends we sell at the shop and use often in our tablescapes to show how you can mix your existing collection of tableware with new items each year.  

This week we’re featuring an item I recently rediscovered after it being tucked away last Spring.

As you may know we are currently involved in renovation our home, which is a patchwork of additions over it’s 200 year history with original rooms being built in the late 18th century.

Last January we began the construction of a new primary suite addition on the west side of the first floor of the house.  During excavation my interior decorator brought in something she found in the dirt pile and asked me if I wanted to keep it.

I did of course and tucked It away for another day so I could look at it more carefully and clean it.

Fast forward to this week when I was organizing the tv room in preparation for renovations there when I came across the item again. It was heavily encrusted in dirt so I first soaked it in dawn dishsoap and warm water.

Above you can see the result of soaking for two days.  Most of the dirt was gone but there was still a lot of paint, tarnish and debris. This is when Harley and David decided to help out examining the piece carefully before we moved forward.

Harley said it looked just fine and suggested we take a nap, but David wanted to take it to his Garagazilla and soak it in his paint remover to see what was underneath. There’s a video of this on my Instagram account, but it would not let me post it here.

We soaked it overnight and then he polished it with silver polish and removed the 2 screws that had been put in the bed of the fork prong and the handle, which I can only assume was to make it into a handle or mount it on something?

We examined the back of the fork, where all tableware mysteries are revealed, and after using glasses and enlarging the photo bc apparently we’re old now, we saw embossed “Avon Plate”.  I researched this with my good friend google and learned Avon made silver plated flatware in the 1940’s and most likely this cocktail fork was part of set of flatware.

I believe this would be valued about $4 if it had not suffered the two holes in it, the condition it is in now makes it an interesting piece from the house, but not very high in value at all.

Join us next Sunday for a set of dinnner plates we are using on this week’s table that I think you will find a fun addition and interesting way to use this type of pottery on your Christmas table this year!

Shop all of our Vintage Glassware under the Vintage Glassware tab of our homepage HERE.