The Budget Collector

Perhaps you, like me, have fallen in love with the beautiful blue-and-white loveliness that is Spode dishes. (Or perhaps their red, brown, or green dishes are the object of your affection.) And perhaps, like me, you can't afford to go to Spode.com and order twelve place settings and all the serving dishes you could ever want.

Well, if you're like me, this post is just for you!

As I've mentioned, I'm a Spode collector, but I'm also working with a rather small dish budget. It's actually rather amazing the different places I've ended up finding Spode, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite venues for the ever-so-exciting Spode-collecting treasure hunts.

• Antique Shops: (especially those lovely cluttered ones that let lots of people put their items on consignment... sometimes they have cheaper prices than snooty, well-organized ones.) These can still be a bit pricey, but if you're looking for something specific like the spice jars I recently posted about, it can work out great! 
• Thrift Stores: These can have great bargains, especially if your Spode find is the 50% off tag! However, thrift Spode can be few and far between. I rarely actually find Spode in the thrift stores here in Oregon. That having  been said, I did find these lovely candlesticks in the Ionian pattern just last Thursday!
  
  (So it's possible... just be patient!) --This is probably the cheapest way to buy Spode.
• New in Stores: (On clearance if it lasts that long!) The first Spode dishes I ever bought were new from Tuesday Morning. I've also found Spode at the Marshall's family of stores (Home Goods and T J Maxx are part of that "family", but all three tend to stock different pieces of Spode). The prevalent Staffordshire wares in stock this year seem to be mostly Churchill and Johnson Bros. (Good stuff, but not quite as lovely as Spode in my opinion.) As far as price goes, brand new dishes tend to be more expensive, but if you can wait long enough (and they don't sell out), the clearance prices are usually much better.
• eBay: This is the way I have found most of my Spode pieces. One of my prized possessions is a soup tureen in the Tower pattern. I ended up winning it with a dramatic last-second bid, and paid only $51 plus shipping for a tureen which I knew was an actual antique (more on that later!). You can also sometimes get things for $0.99 plus shipping if you are the only bidder. The one drawback to eBay is that you have to pay shipping, which usually means that your actual output for an item is roughly what you would have paid at an antique shop. (unless you find a steal or the seller offers free shipping). 
• Clearance: One other way I have purchased Spode is from Spode.com. They sometimes have clearance items (I think they might now call their clearance section the "Great Deals" section or something like that), which is where I found the mug and tin which was featured in my recent post about the Lucano pattern.

These are all the best places I've found so far. I've heard that garage sales can be great sources, too, and I'm looking forward to using some of my time off this summer to go garage sale-ing in search of Spode.

--A quick question to any readers out there: What's your favorite way to find bargain Spode? Comment and share your answer! :)