Reviving our Swedish modern dish

Today I want to share with you a teensy little project I did earlier this fall. But before I do, I just wanted to give my many thanks for all of the comments on my fair isle pullover. I was so, so tickled reading your comments! ♥ And I’m tossing around an idea that Katie from The Little Red Squirrel planted in my head: doing a knit-along for “vintaging” a modern knitwear pattern. I know I’ve fallen flat on my attempts to keep up with posts for the Vintage Knitting College since my posts were becoming so time-consuming (though I do plan to try and get back to that at some point), so this might be a good time to do another KAL. Knit-alongs are kind of hard in the blog world as they take longer and have less interest than sew-alongs, but I’d consider doing another one. So if it’s something you might be into, leave a comment or email me suggestions (even if you have a different idea for a KAL). No promises, but it would be fun to engage with you all again since the last KAL I ran was a year and a half ago!

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Anyway, onto the project. When Lladybird Lauren was in town in August, and she, Liz of zilredloh.com, myself and our various significant others went to the Vintage Garage, Mel and I picked up a vintage Swedish modern dish. I keep wanting to call it Danish modern, but actually if you look at the hallmark on the bottom, you’ll see it’s Swedish.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a before photo of the dish. It’s stainless steel with wood sides and feet. It was nice as we found it, but had some sticky goo on the bottom, the wood was super dry and the stainless steel had seen better days. It needed a little love.

Here’s what the feet and sides looked like. Parched! And you can see a bit of the splotchy metal.

I used Howard’s Feed-N-Wax on the wood. I originally bought this two years ago to treat the wood on my rigid heddle loom (bet you didn’t know I had one of those… I need to do another weaving project!). Since then, I’ve read fabulous reviews of this on Retro Renovation. I also used De-Solv-It on the sticker goo on the base of the dish, but you could use anything that gets rid of goo. That’s just what we had around.

In the photo below you can already see the different between the wood in the treated feet and un-treated side.

Before treating the side…

And after, with the Howard’s still soaking in (before I rubbed it off). Big difference, isn’t it?

I wasn’t terribly careful with the Howard’s to keep it off the stainless steel since I knew I had to treat that too, but I imagine you could potentially use painter’s tape if you were worried about other surfaces. I used Brasso (safe on stainless steel) to polish up the metal.

All in all my few minutes of labor really revived this awesome dish! Isn’t the shape fabulous?

And here’s how it’s being used currently. In a month it’ll probably hold our vintage glass Christmas ornaments that I can’t hang on a tree because they’re much more tempting as cat toys.

Yes, that’s a wee glance at a couple of the changes we’ve made in the living room, but I’m not sharing more yet, there’s still lots to do…