Plastics Melmac Dinnerware Blog 1 Yr Old and 40000 Views

Me and Mom and our TexasWare bowl!

Happy 1st "real" Birthday to The Melmac Central Blog!  I started working on the blog last November but I wasn't really posting alot until December of 2010  Now this little blog is officially ONE YEAR OLD, and I've been blogging about lots of retro art and design plastic, jewelry, melmac dinnerware, and fantastic plastic!

I just wanted to say thanks for reading. In just one year my little blog has reached over 40,000 views and have had visitors in over 26 countries! I'm currently at a Page Rank 4 in Google and steady rank a 3 or better.   I never knew people would be reading!

What you may not know is how special this little blog is to me. You see, it was a side project at first to tribute my love of plastics to my friend Derek who had been lost to cancer.  I had not really done much with the blog, until my mother ended up with Colo-rectal cancer and I decided posting would get my mind occupied on something!  Mom beat the cancer so to speak, but died later that night in the hospital, just one year ago to be exact--so I posted, and posted, and posted! I guess you could say  posting was an outlet, and the one thing  to keep those wonderful memories of me and mom baking in our plastic fantastic alive....and my friend Derek's love for plastics too.

So thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading.....

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If you have any pictures of your collection of plastic-anything, or have stories about your favorite retro plastics or vintage melamine dinnerware stories, please email them to me!

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Russel Wright Melamine Flashback Melmac SFO Museum

Credit: SFO Photos, see them here.  Organized by McKinley Williams

Here is a photo from the past exhibit at the San Francisco Airport Museum (SFO) featuring the wonderful designs of Russel Wright. This is a shot of the melmac, and some the wonderful plastic here belongs to yours truly. The exhibit ran from March 2009 to October 2009. You can read more about it here. I am very pleased that  McKinley Williams included the plastic designs in this exhibit.


Melmac Identification Above:
Flair patterns in Ming Lace and Golden Bouquet.
Residential in Lemon Ice, Sea Mist Grey, Salmon and Turquoise.
Home Decorators in pink Flowertime Pattern. 

Hey! Check this out! 
For those of you who love all things Russel Wright, join his Facebook group "The Designs of Russel and Mary Wright" here.

Branchell Colorflyte and Kaye Lamoyne Originals

By the Wayside has these great Colorflyte bowls for sale!

Deenis Teepe (Rhode Island) has done a ton of research on The Branchell Company and Colorflyte melamine dinnerware. His site, all about The Branchell Company has great 100% free information and photos.  It was in St. Louis, Missouri!  I really do hope you will visit it and drop him a line sometime, and tell him how much you appreciate him keeping the information out there, sort of a free encyclopedia on Branchell!

What you may not know, is that Dennis is instrumental in my love for plastics. I remember in the early days corresponding with him, as he was a wealth of knowledge on plastics. Not to mention he would outbid me on most everything I wanted on ebay.  Come to find out, he used to live right by me --within a few miles. What were the odds of that, considering he could have lived anywhere else in the whole USA?

Ashtrays, getting harder to find,  by GrandmasVintageAttic  on Etsy.

We ended up getting together to talk and see plastics.We decided not to bid against each other and it made acquiring some pieces we liked a heck of a lot cheaper.  I had a room for plastics that was so-so, but Dennis topped the cake by having a whole basement done in 1950's retro kitsch! Complete with an old dinette, old kitchen cabinets, all filled with vintage plastics. From old toy cars to melamine in the boxes,  it was truly amazing.  I had never seen anyone's collection so large and so vast.  Dennis alsohad a love for vintage toys like Puzzles and they were cool too.

Rare Kaye LaMoyne Originals, Kaye was the designer of the Branchell Melmac lines....these offered by JazzyMarie

Now I had been collecting many patterns, but leaning towards the Home Decorators Flowertime because I liked Russel Wright's designs but I had not seen the half of them. Dennis started trading me his Russel Wright overstock for some of my pieces he needed.  I then decided to trade all my other lines just to obtain Russel Wright.I suppose he's really the one responsible for making me the Russel Wright guru I am today. Had I never met Dennis, I probably would not have found all that Russel Wright had to offer and learned so much.  So today, out of my graphics studio, I made a great little icon to link his site too, as I was tired of the old one.

So, I hope you will go to his site, and find out all about Branchell, Colorflyte, and Kaye Lamoyne Originals!!!