February - Buried in Glass!

Have you ever been thrifting before? It is the act of shopping all day from one thrift store, goodwill store, or consignment shop to another. It is so fun looking for that perfect treasure for your home or putting an outfit together for under twenty bucks, complete with shoes! Many of the thrift stores exist to benefit a cause. The Estuary Thrift Shop , located at 889 Boston Post Road, Old Saybrook, CT, benefits the meals-on-wheels program for the nine surrounding towns. This program feeds the homebound within these towns equating to 90,000 meals per year!!!

Michelle and I chose this shop to volunteer in for the month of February. The shop’s manager, Kim, was happy to schedule us one Saturday from 9am to 2pm. That Saturday morning, we were ready to go! We were so excited, you would have thought it was our first day of school or venturing into a new job. We showed up anxious to find out what we would be doing (Oh, please no bathroom cleaning, I thought). Kim brought us to a display within the store loaded with glassware. Dishes, saucers, platters, saucers, bowls, saucers, and more saucers! I have never seen so many saucers without cups!! Where are all the cups?

Our task was to go through all of the glassware and remove anything that was really worn and old looking. I learned something new, there is a name for when the glazed finish on a dish gets that crackled look, it is called crazed. (Crackled-glaze….crazed…who knew?) One by one we went through the mountain of dishes. If it was crazed, or scratched, we put it aside in boxes along with saucers without cups and plain white dishwater. These items would be donated to a local church. Anything chipped or broken would go into the trash. We eventually ended up with shelves of dishes that we would merchandise into a display.

Now the fun part! Using our creativity to display the dishes in a fashion that would be pretty, interesting, and easy to shop. Remember, the goal is to make the dishes sell so the money would feed the needy! Being in a thrift shop, there were many items at our disposal to create the display. We used picture easels to prop up plates and a basket covered with pretty material to put single dishes in so they could be “flipped” through. We thought carefully about what to put on the top shelf so that things would not get lost. We decided to put items up there that had multiples. We would display one in the front and put a little sign on the item to say how many there were! Worked like a charm. Michelle and I had a couple favorites. She fell in love with a rooster platter and I loved a wine glass with a silly mountain goat guy etched in the front! It was really hard not to shop while we were doing our task! In the end, our display was beautiful!!! We were so proud of our work and Kim seemed happy too when she sent us to lunch.

We visited TJ’s Restaurant & Pizzeria in Old Saybrook for lunch. It was so delicious! What a find! If you are even in that area, you have to try this place, the food was so good and fresh! Anyway, we took a bit longer than we should have for lunch, yet Kim was easy on us! Our task continued with the clear glassware including drinking glasses, cordials, and stemware. There were so many pieces that had etching on them that could not be appreciated in the sea of clear glass. I found a royal blue piece of material and cut pieces of it to put in the glasses with etching so that the image or writing would visibly pop. We organized as much as we could and had almost all of the shelves done when it was time to go. Kim came over and said that she would have someone finish up the next day. Michelle started to say, “We were going to put these glasses…” and then she stopped. As volunteers, we had to realize that our vision ends where another’s begins! Time to go. We brought our treasures that we found up to the cash register to pay for them. We left exhausted and energized. It was fun doing something different while helping out a good cause.

There are many ways to help out at the thrift shop! If you are interested in volunteering a day at the Estuary Thrift Shop, you can reach out to Kim, the shop manager at 860-575-9960.