mid century spice rack | Hepcats Haven

Kitschy Items for the Kitchen and BBQ

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Hepcats Haven

You are being watched by these little helpers in the kitchen. (The names of the spices on this souvenir set are written in Finnish)

Call me crazy, but I love these little souvenir spice sets. Each one is unique because it was hand painted, usually in Japan. There were soo many makers of these such as Woodpecker Woodworks, Napco, Price Imports, Fitz and Floyd, Westwood Products, Ucagco, Norcrest Standard Specialty, MG and others. Many of these were purchased while folks were on vacation in the states and all over the world. Here are some we recently picked up.

I plan to use this set with the Royal Chef BBQ we recently restored. I going to add a spice rack on the right side to hold these little guys. That way, I can season the food as I cook.

Besides spice racks, these companies made all kinds of kitschy items for cooking including things for barbecuing! Below are a few items we purchased off of Etsy.

As you can see, these were made by MG of Japan and I love this set. There are 3 different characters to help you mark your steak; a bull for rare, a chef for medium and a cowboy for well done. I also dig the holder, it’s a tiny corral!

Looks like I need to replace one of the toothpicks on one of the bulls. It just makes you think that they made eating such an experience with little things like this to spice up a dinner.

This is what I would have on my steak, hate to eat a steak that is still bleeding. These little guys are so cool.

Here we have a set of extended salt and pepper shakers for using on the BBQ. This saves your knuckle hair from getting burned off when you try to season your meat. I knew we needed a set of these to add some style to the BBQ.

Since I plan to also restore the other BBQ made by Huntington, I needed BBQ utensils and extended salt and pepper shakers for that unit as well. Now that I have this, I need to purchase a set of spices to place in the tray on this BBQ.

There are soo many different kinds of souvenir shakers like these out there. Here are a few other ones that I thought were cool:

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This is a cool set made by Napco.

The colors on this set are great. These little guys even have earrings!

These shakers come in all sizes. Some shakers are large or small or squatty like this set.

Here are a couple of black cat shakers. The cool thing about this set is that they click together with magnets!

This set is known as the “I love Lucy” set. A set just like this one sold on ETSY for over $100!

These two look a little formal. He appears to have on a tuxedo and she has her mothers pearls on.

These little pieces really help show your personality when in the kitchen. Do yourself a favor and pick up a set that catches your eye and enjoy them.

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Posted in The Makin's Of Our Pad and tagged mid century bbq, mid century cookware, mid century kitchen, mid century kitchen utensils, mid century shakers, mid century spice rack, mid century utensils, retro bbq, retro cookware, retro kitchen, retro kitchen utensils, retro shakers, retro spice rack, retro utensils, vintage bbq, vintage cookware, vintage kitchen, vintage kitchen utensils, vintage shakers, vintage spice rack, vintage utensils. Bookmark the permalink.

Here Are Some Quick Picks

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Hepcats Haven

These chairs belonged to the grandfather of the guy I purchased them from. He had them in his man cave. The upholstery job leaves something to be desired. I plan to remove the back rests (they are not original) and redo the seat bottoms in a different color. I tried to find info on the manufacturer but was unsuccessful.

I came across these on Craigslist and knew I wanted them. I love the style of the metal backrests.

There is a lot of surface rust, but a little sand paper and paint will fix that.

I need to figure out where to get new feet for a couple of the stools.

I have seen this style in a table and chair form, but this is the first time I have seen the style in barstool form! I think we will replace the stools that we are currently using with our…..

We purchased this bar a while back and love it. I think I may have blogged about it before, but cant find the post!

Here the bar is in its upright form

Here is the back of it. It has holders for glasses and bottles that lay down when the bar is folded into a coffee table!

Here is what the bar looks like when folded into a coffee table. Such a cool design by the ABCO company!

Here it is all the way folded down. This could slide under a bed for quick and easy storage. This is going under a covered patio of our next place for entertaining.

We picked this up for a quick $40 off of Craigslist as well. It needs some restoring but that will be easy. We have 2 of the pink and 1 brown versions of this lamp, so we thought aqua would be a nice contrast.

I picked this lamp up at one of our local haunts. The lampshade is one we had sitting around. This will go into our booth for resale.

These lamps are our friend Stephen’s. They require repair so we traded for the magazine holder below.

These lamps have damage around the switch but that shouldn’t be too hard to fix. The lampshades for these lamps are in fantastic shape. Stephen is going to throw them on eBay once the repairs are done. These have no maker listed.

Here is a nice jadite set that will be goin’ in the booth.

Thinking I would like to be more proactive in the repair of our radios. I picked up this working Conar model 224 tube tester for $15. In a later post I plan to recover this unit with new stag material.

It appears you can test radio and television tubes. I have never used one of these units, so I hope its self explanatory.

Here is a mauve frieze couch we recently picked up. It is in surprisingly great shape for its age.

I can imagine this in our home with a couple of Heywood Wakefield end tables on each side and a cool looking Carlo above it. We are torn if we will keep it or put it in our booth.