Chicago Bears Cufflinks
Chicago Bears Cufflinks
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Chicago Bears NFL Football Cufflinks Cuff Links $59.95 The official logo of the National Football League’s Chicago Bears. Enamel finish cufflinks on a nickel plated backing. N0-Risk Guarantee! If for any reason you are not satisfied with your purchase, simply return them for a full Money Back Guarantee! I will refund your full purchase price to you, plus pay for return shipping!… |
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NFL Tie Bar
Officially Licensed NFL Football Tie Bar. Sport your ties in style by adding a NFL Licensed Tie Bar. A shiny, rhodium plated sliding tie bar makes it easy to declare your allegiance front and center. Dimensions: Approximately 2″ x 3/8″… |
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Chicago Bears Cufflinks – NFL Football Sports Themed Formal Wear $59.95 Dress up in style with these stylish cufflinks. If you are wearing a nice shirt, you should wear nice cuff links also. These stylish “links” will let you show a little attitude….have fun…. |
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NFL Money Clip Team: Chicago Bears $33.95 PD-CHB-MC Team: Chicago Bears Features: -NFL money clip.-Celebrate the home team in style.-Officially licensed. Construction: -Constructed of enamel on a silver plated setting…. |
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Chicago Bears Money Clip By Cufflinks Inc $44.95 Carry your team passion wherever you go with the officially licensed Chicago Bears NFL team money clip. Boasting a heavy-duty forged 27 gram weight construction and rhodium plating, our team money clips are certain to make a loyal companion for years to come. Each team money clip is delivered wonderfully presented in the official NFL gift box complete with turf interior.PLEASE NOTE:* All Available… |
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Chicago Bears Retro Cufflinks $59.99 This pair of Chicago Bears Retro cufflinks is the perfect accessory for any suit. Whether it be at work or at your best friend’s wedding- show your team spirit with this exquisite pair of Chicago Bears Retro cufflinks. Enamel finish on a nickel plated backing. Officially licensed by the NFL. |
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Chicago Bears Cufflinks $59.99 Now available – Vintage Chicago Bears Cufflinks for the true Chicago fan. Cufflinks- Inc.’s throwback design features the Chicago Bear in all its ferociousness. Constructed from rhodium plated base metal and enamel- pick up a pair for yourself today! Offi |
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Chicago Bears Cufflinks and Money Clip Gift Set $99.99 The ultimate gift combination for the executive sports fan. By combining the officially licensed Chicago Bears Cufflinks with a matching Money Clip- we have eliminated the worry about if the gift you give will be used.  Represent your team loyalty with subtle elegance. Packaged so nicely- all you need to add is a bow.Officially licensed by the NFL |
The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum of Guadalest by Derek Workman
Salty Spain – The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum of Guadalest
“You must go and see that strange American woman who’s opening a museum,” a friend told me when I visited her in Guadalest on Spain’s Costa Blanca a couple of months ago. I’ve always been intrigued by ‘strange’ people, American or otherwise, so I went in search of her. And she’s not strange at all — a bit quirky, perhaps, but there again, I suppose you have to be to amass a collection of over forty thousand pairs of salt and pepper shakers. And she’s not American either, she’s Belgian, although she’s lived in the US for many years, something you’d never guess by her luscious ‘French’ accent.
Andrea Ludden began her enormous collection almost by chance. As a trained archaeologist who’d worked in Latin America for many years, when she moved to California with her family she was at a bit of a loose end. In a country where anything over a couple of hundred years old is considered ancient, archaeology doesn’t have massive amounts of openings, but one day Andrea bought a pepper grinder…. and from small acorns big oak trees do grow.
“That first one didn’t work, so I bought a couple more. I used to stand them on the window ledge of my kitchen, and neighbours thought I was building a collection. Nothing could have been further from my mind! They began to bring me some beautiful ones, and eventually I had about 14,000 on shelves all over the house, even in the bedrooms. One day my husband said, “Andrea, you either find somewhere to put these things or it’s a divorce!” So we decided to create a museum.”
As Andrea shows me around her Museum of Salt and Pepper Shakers I find it hard to believe that the twenty-thousand pair display of fat chefs, ruby red tomatoes, guardsmen in bear skins, The Beatles, Santa’s feet sticking out of a chimney, pistols and potatoes, a copy of the salt and pepper shaker cufflinks that Lady Diana wore, (which, fortunately, are sealed, or their contents would have sprayed everywhere when she shook hands), have any other reason for coming together than simply being someone’s idea of being collectable – but they do.
“When we moved to the States there was no work in archaeology so I began to look at social anthropology,” continues Andrea, “because it’s often by looking at the apparently more mundane articles in everyday life such as salt and pepper shakers, that you can build up a broad picture of a specific period.”
Being a Brit, I’m a bit confused about what a salt shaker is, to me the whacky collection on display are salt cellars. But that’s where I’m wrong, isn’t it. A salt cellar is a small bowl or box with a small spoon in it that would be placed in the centre of the table, whereas a salt shaker is a container that has holes in that salt can be poured out of. Well, you learn something new every day, don’t you!
Salt has a tendency to attract moisture and become lumpy, and it wasn’t until the 1920′s that it became possible to pour salt from a sealed container, when Chicago-based Morton Salt added magnesium carbonate to their product. From this moment the salt shaker was born.
“Morton’s development was the beginning of the salt shaker, but, funnily enough, it was the automobile that lead to them becoming collectable items,” Andrea tells me. “It was because people could travel more freely, either for work or on vacation, that the souvenir industry came about. Salt and pepper shakers were cheap, easy to carry and colourful and made ideal gifts. Imagine you lived in an isolated village somewhere and your son or daughter brought you a set in the shape of the Golden Gate Bridge when they came on their annual visit home. It wouldn’t get used, it would be carefully kept as a decorative item. That’s how, in the main, many of the early collections began.”
I can understand the attraction of such a collection, but I don’t really see the significance of such a humble thing as a salt shaker in social anthropology. Andrea soon enlightens me.
“There’s almost nothing you can imagine that hasn’t been copied as a salt and pepper shaker, and many of them reflect the designs, the colours, the preoccupations of the period. For example, a cooker from the 1940′s will look totally different from the cookers of the 1990′s, and it’s through using these differences and the materials they were made of that we can get an idea of how people lived at any given time.”
And the world of salt and pepper shakers knows no boundaries; from the Cellini Saliera, cast in solid gold (and sometimes referred to as the ‘Mona Lisa of Sculpture’), insured for $60million, to the prosaic plastic red pepper, a steal at only 75 cents at the local bargain shop, there’s something for everyone.
Displaying the almost endless selection of models in no mean feat, but Andrea has an excellent eye for how it should be done. “It’s almost impossible to categorise them, because you can work by style, age, subject matter, colour etc, but I try and do it to combine all these elements at the same time. I have a very visual memory, and I can walk into an antique shop or go to a garage sale and know instantly if I see one for sale that I have in the collection or not, even if it is just the salt or pepper shaker and not a pair.
“I think a museum like ours is different from a big municipal institution because it deals with things on a very personal basis. Even though there are so many shakers, you begin to recognise ones your grandmother used to have, or you saw when you went on vacation somewhere, or you gave as a gift once. People come back over and over again and think that we are adding to the displays, but we aren’t, it’s just that they didn’t see them first time around.”
About the Author
I am a freelance journalist and guide book writer living in Valencia City, Spain, although my work takes me throughout the country.
To discover more about Spain, visit http://www.derekworkman-journalist.com and http://derekworkman.wordpress.com. http://valpaparazzi.wordpress.com are random notes about life in Spain.
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