| This page is dedicated to the hobby of collecting. This can be both a fun and educational pastime. The items that people collect across the United States and the world are as diverse as the people are themselves. You can collect anything that you find an interest in. Collections range from buttons to baseball cards, from coins to marbles, from A to Z and everything in between. The more you get involved with your collection, the more you want to learn about it. This page will be used to display the items my family and my students enjoy collecting. This page will be ever evolving as friends, family and students share their own collecting interests with us. Click on any small picture to see a larger, more detailed view of it. |
| Below are some pictures of my collection of Fire King Glassware. It is one of the many different types of what is called "Depression Glass". This particular type is called "Sapphire Blue Fire King" and was produced from about 1941 to 1956. It has a beautiful, distinctive pattern etched into the light blue glass making it very popular with collectors. |
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This is a pretty good picture of my entire blue Fire King glassware being displayed in a corner cabinet. | |||
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This is the same collection displayed in a larger hutch. The ways of displaying collections are only limited by your own imagination and creativity. | |||
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Shown here are four closer views of some of the blue Fire King glassware ranging from coffee mugs to baby bottles to a large roaster. |
| Dolls like these few shown here can be a fun choice to collect! | Cars of all types from match box to full size are popular to collect. | Doll houses along with all the furniture inside are great to collect! | Books of all types are as enjoyable to collect as they are to read! |
The two display cases shown below house my daughter's Morton Pottery animal collection. She started finding and learning about these as a child and still enjoys them as a young adult today. |
Marbles are a great choice for collecting. A huge array of colors, shapes, and sizes were made over the years, and are still being made today! And you can play games with your collection! | ||
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Almost anything that is old is collected today. Searching for, finding, and learning about things from our past gives us a chance to connect to our heritage. The old kitchen utensils pictured here are a good example of items that remind us where we came from, where we are now, and where we just might be headed in the future. |
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Pictured at left is a fine example of an old hand operated grater. |
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Toys of all kinds have always been a fun and popular collectible! They not only connect us to past, but also to some of our best childhood memories. My older brother enjoyed countless hours of imaginary construction with this old toy inloader from the 1960s. |
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The many children that played with this old toy cash register may have not only had tons of fun with it, but may have learned a lot to help them as young adults. |
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This old pull toy from decades ago may have been a young child's first pet. |
| Collecting old fishing tackle is a fairly new area in comparison to many other sub-groups of collectibles, but it's growth has been tremendous! My husband and I have been involved in it for over thirty years now and it has captivated us the entire time. Almost everything used for fishing is now collected, from the rods and reels to the lures and the tackle boxes that housed them. The list goes on. Most of those who got into this field of collecting soon found a desire to narrow their interest down some what within it. They started specializing in fishing reels, or rods, or wooden lures, or plastic lures, or fish decoys, or all the colors of one type of lure, or lure boxes, or lures in boxes, or tackle from one state, or metal lures, or tackle boxes, or what ever was found in the bottom of tackle boxes! The list seems endless! | |||
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In the very early 1980s, we made one particular fishing lure our main focus, the Surf Oreno. It is a wooden lure made by the South Bend Fishing Lure Company out of South Bend, Indiana. It's production began around 1916 and evolved continuously over the years lasting well into the 1960s. Here are a few pictures of our Surf Oreno collection shown to the left here. |
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Another interesting group of fishing lures to collect is handmade baits. This small duck shown here is a good example of one fisherman's attempt to make his own mark in the lure making world. Many individuals made their own lures. Some because they couldn't afford the store bought baits. Many of these resemble the name brand baits that were just too expensive. Others just wanted to see if they could come up with the next great fish catcher! Others still just enjoyed the craft of lure making. I picked this original little duck up at a lure show about twenty years ago. It has never been fished but the gentleman I bought it from assured me that he tested each and every bait he made in his bathtub. It is in excellent condition! |
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