Touring Lexington with tea friends

While on the way to our lunchtime tea at Greentree Antiques & Tearoom last week, the tea friends stopped at Thoroughbred Park in Lexington to take photos of the horse sculptures. Aren't these great? I've long admired how sculptors are able to convey movement in a stationary object.

Here my friend Maureen and I are with some of the statues.

Thanks to Linda we also got to make a quick trip to the Kentucky Horse Park. She then drove us through Thoroughbred country, and yes, I think I'd be perfectly happy living in any of those magnificent barns. They were amazing, and it has definitely changed how I think about Kentucky and horse racing. We barely had time to see the Horse Park, though, because we were so busy antiquing after lunch!

I believe I'm one of the few who didn't come home with a teapot, but I did find this beautiful tray and the mystery spoons I mentioned last Friday. The 9-1/2 x 7-1/2-inch china tray with pink roses, just $6, was one of the prettiest things I've seen in a while, and I love how those intricate edges are all in perfect condition after all these years. There's no backstamp, so I have no idea who made it. I'm going to use it to hold a sugar and creamer in a similar rose pattern.

Also at that antique mall, I saw a piece of furniture, I guess you'd call it, that I have never seen before, and I was just enchanted. Do you know what this is?

What if I show you the interior here? Now can you guess? My new friend Lori and I had a lot of fun examining this piece, which was probably about 4-1/2 feet tall or so.

An old ribbon dispenser! Who knew!

Also, I thought I'd give you an update on the mystery of the spoons I first blogged about here. Since I've had several people wonder if perhaps these were serving pieces, it dawned on me I should have mentioned the dimensions. Each spoon is just 6-1/4 inches long, with the widest part of the "bowl" (for lack of any other term) measuring about 1-1/4 inches wide. In other words, these are just normal spoon size, not large enough for serving anything.

Here's the set of four as they were tied together when I bought them, and this way you can see the curve of the bowl.

Here's the backstamp. If only it showed the patent number!

And this will hopefully show you the design of the slits, which are at an angle for some reason. Such a mystery!

I got some great information on spoons from The Sage Book Whisperer, who noted the curvature of the spoon would make it sit nicely on the edge of a glass (as it does here) for drinking Absinthe. Yet when I looked at Absinthe spoons online, I don't see that little scalloped design at the upper left of my spoon. Surely it had a purpose? At any rate, if you want to see some amazing spoons, please pop over to The Sage Book Whisperer's post here. Nancy had suggested perhaps this was a spoon for buttering corn on the cob, and I indeed found such a vintage implement on eBay (go here to see it, at least for the next four days), but the design's not the same as mine. My husband admitted that he was bored the other night and searched every type of spoon he could think of on the internet, yet he can't find what these are either. The search continues, and if I find a definitive answer about what these are, you can bet I'll let you know!