We have two annual events which are big numbers. Afternoon tea on our vintage crockery for a hundred and sixty, for a school speech day, and jazz supper for a hundred and thirty. They don’t usually fall on the same week though. This year however the Jazz supper is a week earlier than usual so we had the afternoon tea on Thursday and the jazz supper on Saturday.
This makes for a lot of work in one week especially as we already had a full week of corporate lunches booked too. It has been non stop.
We have a hundred and sixty nine trios. The trios are only a part of the washing up. There are cakes stands, sandwich plates, tea pots and coffee pots, sugar bowls, milk jugs and all the silver ware. The trios are my department as they need sorting back into their sets and then storing in plastic boxes.
First I match them in their sets on our dining table. There are some large sets, some small sets and some single trios. I store them so that the sets are split between each box. Each box has twenty one different trios (and one box has twenty two) and I number the boxes from one to eight with my favourite ones in box one and working down to my least favourite in box eight.
This means we can pull out one box for a small function and as many boxes as we need to make up bigger functions. This annual function means we pull out all the boxes and do a stock take. This is our fourth year of doing this function.
Washing up and sorting the trios
What a lot of crockery! Throughout the year as we have some breakages we replace the pieces from local antique shops to keep the numbers about the same for this function. It is the largest function we do on our vintage crockery. It is fun collecting the pieces, slightly less fun washing it up though!
Click here to see the history of my flock.
I have no idea why but I love the picture of all the crockery stacked up!
I’ve just had a cup of tea as well, but in a mug!
Interesting post, do you wash them by hand?
Indeed we do. The thing about vintage crockery is that it has to be washed by hand. We used to have industrial crockery and a dish washer but as we have down sized towards eventual retirement or at least a slow down, we have got rid of the industrial crockery and with it the dish washer. We now just have our vintage crockery and hand wash every thing.
Well done , It looks amazing.
It seemed to take me as long sorting it back into the boxes as washing it up. Amazingly we had no breakages this time. The first time we did this event we broke several pieces. I am glad it’s done for another year!
I love the look of all the china! Do you use vintage linens for the tables too? I really enjoy the look of all things vintage, but I’m not always good at actually using it.
We don’t use linens. It’s up to the customer if they want linen. If it’s a wedding then they supply linen in the colour they want. On other events if the table needs covering we use paper banquet roll. We supply paper serviettes. We don’t want to add to the washing. The customer will sometimes put bunting up to add to the look. The crockery always looks lovely when its on the table. We supply silver teaspoons, sugar tongs, cake forks and cake slices too.