Almost six years ago, I started this little blog. It is still very much a little blog, and I would like to see what I can change about that.
It all began here with my desire to become the expert of Anchor Hocking Wexford that I couldn’t find out in the world. Am I the Wexpert? No. Am I a Wexpert? Maybe. I am most definitely moving in that direction.
How it Started:
Way back in 2010, I was still living in my working artist’s studio while working second shift as a machine operator. I was struggling to produce art while also living paycheck-to-paycheck. It was rough. It was a struggle. It was also glorious! I was living in an ancient warehouse in the old trainyards, surrounded by some of the most inspiring artists in the metro.
To keep my life within means, I began thrifting everything I could. This is where Wexford snuck into my adult life. The building had semi-annual Open Studio weekends where any artists in the building could opt-in to show and sell their stuff. Many other artists would buy into their friends’ spaces in the building for the weekend, set up a corner, or rent a hallway wall and join in the experience. While it was off the beaten path of the art district’s First Fridays, and wasn’t scheduled to coincide with it, it was it’s own Big Damned Deal™.
As part of the unoffical queer enclave of the building, I did what I could to make my studio and the experience within it extra fancy. I started thrifting big, chunky, random pieces of glass servingware. No snacks were set out in black plastic trays. No foil pans were used. ‘Gingerbread men’ sugar cookies with royal icing tighty whities. Peep chicks with decorating candies as pasties. I was living my best-on-the-brink-of-broke life.
At the start, I brought home any big chunky glass platter (in clear or green glass) I could find. Any pattern, anything with height off the table. I grabbed the best of what had that Sunday’s five-for-a-dollar color code scrawled across it in china marker. The first Wexford piece I can prove I owned was the cookie jar.
After leaving that studio space and pausing my art production, I continued to gather random glass serviceware. I abhorred disposable products and worked to minimize them in my life. I picked up fifty ultra-clearance cloth napkins at the old Pier One clearance store the metro used to have. I thrifted dishes and glassware.
Eventually, I had gathered enough random Wexford pieces to notice their similarities, their design features. Next, I began to notice those features on other glassware in the thrift store. Many other pieces with those features. Sometime in 2014, after moving in with my now husband, I connected some dots, or rather some pressed glass diamonds, and realized that the odd little rectangular relish tray my mom picked up in the 1980s to add to her mishmash of servingware for cranberry sauce at the holiday was, indeed, Wexford. I would eventually replace a damaged larger relish tray from the gifts at their 1960 wedding with one of the Wexford 5-part relish platters. She seemed to enjoy that it shared a pattern with her cranberry dish.
Moving forward, every new piece of thrifted Wexford was a reinforcement of childhood memories. Yes, even though my mom owned exactly one piece of Wexford. Eventually, I learned (incorrectly) that the patterned was introduced by Anchor Hocking in 1967, my birth year, and this tethered me to my memories, to my life experience at a time when living in the present was a struggle. The modern, affordable, mass-produced mimic of higher-end lead crystal became an analogy for myself: thick, durable, hard-to-break, extra-fancy.
I would eventually learn that 1967 was inaccurate, that the small bit of recorded information I had gathered was written by individuals with shoddy research skills that rarely cited sources. I am no longer the same age as my collectible glassware. If you would, send tots and pears as I work through my trauma. 😉
wexford: a study 