Your Mother Should Know

[mme_hardy]

When my husband and I moved into our first house, my mother helped me unpack the kitchen. She insisted that we line the drawers and cabinet shelves with wax paper. I went along with this, because what did I know about housekeeping? The stated purpose was that when the cabinets became dirty, you could whisk out the wax paper and put in a new set, thus avoiding having to scrub the shelves. (Clean out the cabinets. Ahahahahaha.) Eventually the wax paper became tattered and we ripped it out, then put the glasses and dishes flat on the shelves like the sluttish housekeepers we are. That was the end of that. Three moves later, the dishes shamelessly flaunt their unsafe intimacy with the vinyl.

That’s the point. If your shelves are covered in vinyl, two things will never happen: the dishes won’t sink into the paint, and you won’t ever have to scrub painted (or otherwise) wood. Because of this, you won’t find shelf paper at -- I nearly said your five and dime -- Bed, Board, and Basket. (There are scented drawer liners, but they’re a feminine frippery rather than a necessity.)
I just bought an early 20th century music cabinet with slide-out shelves. I’m going to be using it to store fabric, so I decided to look up drawer liners on Ebay. While I was refining my search phrases,I stumbled into a world of wonderment: shelf edging.

Back when most kitchens had rows of open shelves, the shelf edges were a long blank space, and therefore an ideal canvas for decoration. At first ladies embroidered edgings (the first is German, the second French.)

The ingenious makers of paper lace saw a market and filled it (German again).

At some point, the American Royledge company stepped in. Their innovation was shelf paper with an integrated edging. You put the paper in, then folded the edge down, killing two frills with one stone. ClickAmerica has more reproductions of Royledge ads. My suspicion is that shelf edgings were killed off by the ubiquity (at least in the U.S.) of kitchen cabinets.

 

I expect several of you to tell me that of course you line your shelves. However, how many of you clothe their edges?

In case, as usually happens, I have utterly messed up embedding, an imgur album (with bonus pictures!) follows. Edit: Ironically, Dreamwidth is breaking the imgur embed.