Reproduction Stoneware String Holder Advertising Thread Spool Farmhouse Deco For Sale

A String Holder That Knows Exactly What It's Doing

Cream stoneware, a crisp black transfer, a spool of thread and some Victorian flourishes, and a hole in the front for your twine to come through. Hang it on the wall by the kitchen door with a ball of jute inside and you've got the thing every farmhouse-kitchen photograph is trying to sell you. It's a genuinely good-looking object and it does a genuinely useful job.

Now the part I'd want to know if I were buying: this is a decorative reproduction, not an antique. The transfer reads "J. & P. Combs' Best Six Cord," and the real firm was J. & P. Coats — the Scottish thread company whose "Best Six Cord" spool cotton was advertised on trade cards from the 1870s onward, with the same "for hand and machine, white, black and colors" copy you see here. Repro makers change a letter to stay clear of the trademark. The glaze has no crazing, the transfer shows no wear where string would have rubbed for decades, and the hanging slots are cleanly machine-formed. It's new, made to look old, and made well.

I'd rather tell you that than have you find out. Priced accordingly.

Put it beside the back door with garden twine running out of it. Hang it in a craft room over the ribbon drawer. Or skip the string altogether and stand it on a shelf as a piece of graphic design — that spool illustration is a nice bit of Victorian pastiche and it holds its own next to real old things.

Size: 5" in diameter × 2¼" deep. Two hanging slots on the back, string hole in the front face.

Condition: Excellent. No chips, no cracks, no crazing. The transfer is complete and sharp. Light manufacturing speckling in the clay body throughout, which is part of the finish rather than a flaw. Please look at every photo.

Handpicked because a good-looking useful object earns its place whether or not it's old — as long as somebody tells you which it is. Carefully packed with love and sent on its way to you.