Heresy

Warning:  this blog contains graphic images of dismemberment that could cause strong palpitations, offense, or just annoyance in weaker individuals.  Please read with caution!

But before we get to the investigative autopsy, I wanted to post a picture of "the ring" from the last blog.  Seriously, I wrote the entire post while I walked, even took the picture on my phone, but I couldn't figure out how to embed it.  Yes, I could've fixed it when I got home.  Where's the fun in that?

ACK!  Speak of the devil!  I just (literally now) went to retrieve the photo I emailed to myself from my phone camera, hitting the usual blogspot button to do so, and what do I find?  It asked me if I wanted to get the image from my phone!  Damn!  I leave for a couple of months, and they change everything!

No, not hard to tell I took this while walking - well, I paused there, of course.  (Crap, I have old hands, don't I?  Thank heaven for blurry pictures!)  If you didn't remember what "barley twist" meant, now you do.

And no, the ring isn't the focus of today's post, but it sort of fits in.  How?  It's all about learning.

So, a few years back, I found a pair of sterling ("weighted") candlesticks at a yard sale one day, another at an estate sale within hours.  Then a Revere comport (20's, I think) a couple of weeks later.  And dozens of plated things over the next few months.  I began a Gather.  I had the idea that I would have all sorts of formal, shiny things in my dining room (y'know, because I entertain so much ... not).  Well, long story short, I decided I liked color more than grayish, and decided to eject the silver and simply add to my great-grandmother's glorious, multi-hued collection of carnival glass.

Last Fall, I donated boxes of silverplate to an animal shelter (that has a thrift store), but not the sterling.  I decided to play mad scientist instead.  I really, really had to see what it meant when it said "weighted."

So I started in, first with a pair of pliers.  I thought it would be easy.  It's not plated, after all, but weighted, right?

No, that's not a demended tulip.  It's the top part of the candlestick, pried open at length by my semi-arthritic hands.  I can't tell you how much work went into that.

This was worse, though, trust me.  That little bit of tough foil took some seriously tight holding of pincers, twisting around to score the stuff before finding a purchase and stripping (which was more like peeling a tree rather than a banana).

Finally got the little bugger loose, though, and laid bare the steel bar.

Gross, right?  And I hurt.  If you're very observant, you might notice the base in the background.  Okay, okay, at some point I figured out I could use a hacksaw to get things moving.  Funny thing was, once I got a nice slicey hole and pulled with the pliers, I found it was actually just layered on anyway.  No hacksaw necessary for the base.

The interesting thing was what it was weighted with - looked like rosin.  Yes, the stuff you spread on a bow if you played violin, viola, cello or base (which I did).  Banged it out with a hammer.  Took less than a minute.

Overall, however, it took nearly 40 minutes to strip that first one.  Kind of theraputic, really - turning a pair of beat-up (yes, dented beyond belief originally) candlesticks into scrap turns out to be good for a treasure hunter's soul.  And knowing really helped, too.





This is the start weight of one candlestick (yes, a three-digit weight).

And that's the end.

Not bad for the pair, considering what I paid for it, but nowhere near what I see these things tagged at antique or even (these days) thrift stores.  Of course, the pair I autopsied in these pictures is not common.  These are.

Look familiar?  I see these all over.  I wish I knew why - they're not particularly pretty, are they? But they were affordable, and this company (especially) knew how to tap into the market.  Let's face it, people with serious money got solid sterling, gold, and porcelain.  The rest of us bought weighted, plated, and milk glass to emulate those whose ranks we aspired to join.  (And now we copy rappers and sports stars, and wear designer names on our asses.  Oh, how far we've come.)

Anyway, you can see it went from 146 grams to 13.  Not plated, true, but not much substance, either.

These particular sticks were weighted by plaster, by the way.  Very messy.  Very, very messy.

Okay, the next pictures might make you faint.  Oh, don't worry, it's not the Revere...

Yes, this is weighted, but it's really quite amazing.  It and a British inkwell are the only things of sterling-not-jewelry that I still own.  They have places of pride in my treasure cabinets (well, my imaginary cabinets, but you know what I mean).

Now.  Onto the pictures I warned you about.

Seriously, did you think it was stupid candlesticks??  Man up and keep watching.

Look familiar?  You've seen these pins in antique malls.  Gold, heavy, t-bar pins in the back, very Victorian, very collectible, yes?  Well, I found one a few days ago in a thrift shop, and since there weren't any hallmarks for the pricers to drool over, and the back was clearly silverish, not gold (which they are sometimes), it was ... quite reasonable.

So I ripped its throat out.

The top is, indeed, gold - and about the same thickness as the sterling "foil" of the candlesticks.  In fact, the things that look sort of like pecans are the bigger pieces of what was the "weighted" bit (and are rosin - very old rosin).  The back is low-grade silver, with two really bad solders that lifted the back from the front and justified, in my twisted mind, the total trashing of an antique.  Amount of gold here - less than 1 gram.  The feeling of relief that I'm recycling a piece of history, priceless.

"Buyer beware" isn't really the message today.  More like "buyer aware".  Many of us learn by blindly picking up anything shiny, with the assumption that it must be worth what it feels like.  Not always. But don't take my post the wrong way - I'm not saying don't buy these things, especially if you love them.

Just buy them smarter.

Happy hunting!!