This year at the Grimsby swap meet, we’re adding an award, but the finished products emerged in a roundabout way.
Don Goodfellow had a few steel toppers made with the name “Grimsby” laser-cut along the top. One of these toppers first appeared last year as the traditional “long distance” award, given to the collector who has travelled the furthest to be with us. It was painted white and mated to a replica 1911 Ontario porcelain plate, with a legend applied with stick-on vinyl letters.
This year, Don decided we’d use a 1924 plate. He picked up ‘24 passenger plate at the ALPCA Convention in Lansing. That plate gave me the idea of decorating one of the toppers to match, so Don shipped me one to tinker with. We were mating the topper with a century-old plate, so I wanted any further adornments to be in keeping with the same era. I chose not to use custom vinyl lettering, and wanted to paint the whole thing by hand.
I coated the topper in golden yellow, like a 1924 plate, but I wasn't sure I wanted the "Grimsby" letters to be yellow as well. I soon found a bit of inspiration in an old Ontario Hydro road sign in an antique shop. It was painted mostly cautionary gold, but the corners were painted red for extra visibility. So I borrowed from that idea, and I used a bright red-orange for the letters in “Grimsby,” which gave the topper some extra "pop."
The late Bill Thoman had gifted me his lettering quills that he used for decades as a professional sign maker. I had the tools to paint the legends, but I certainly didn’t have the skills. Lettering or pinstriping by hand takes dedicated training and practice. While I’ve retained the muscle memory from my years of restoring plates, that skill doesn’t translate to freehand lettering. I practiced on some scraps to see if I could get the hang of it, but of course I couldn’t. So I had to cheat a little. I had some vinyl decals custom-made, in the form of a stick-on, peel-off stencil that I could use to apply the lettering neatly. That would add to the cost of making the award, but that kind of attention to detail matters to me.
The stencil arrived. It took some patience to stick it on the topper in the right spots, and it held firm. I used Bill’s quills to do the lettering in the hope that someone will look at it, see the brush strokes, and realize that it was painted by hand.
I was really stoked with the result. It looked great! But when I posed it with the 1924 plate that Don picked up, there was too much of a contrast between the clean topper and the age-worn plate. We’d be better off using a cleaner 1924 plate.
The display award topper posed against the rougher 1924 plate for comparison. We needed the plates to be more in tune with fresh paint of the toppers.
I sourced a clean pair of 1924 plates from my former YOM business stock, which gave me the thought that we should do two awards. After all, the Long Distance award would go to someone out west, down south, or overseas, and probably never be seen in Ontario again. So why not make a second award for best display? That way, an Ontario collector could have a shot at winning.
Don liked the idea and sent me a second topper. A couple of weeks later, I had it finished with the legend “Display Award” across the middle. When I posed them with the cleaner 1924 pair, there was still a difference in brightness. The golden yellow paint on the toppers would always be brighter than the plates, unless I either repainted the plates, or distressed the toppers. I chose the latter option, and it was a bit of a gamble.
I gave the face of the topper a light grazing with a fine sanding sponge. Then, I took some walnut-coloured wood stain and smothered it haphazardly on one of the toppers. I let it sit on the topper for about 15 minutes before wiping it away with a dry towel. It worked! The yellow paint was porous enough to absorb a bit of the stain, which darkened the colour just slightly enough that it was an almost perfect match to the 1924 plates. I was able to polish away the rest of the stain to make the effect subtle– so it didn’t just look like some moron sanded it and tried to paint it brown. Whew.
The last step was to mate the toppers to the plates. After all the effort I’d made to hand-paint them, I didn’t want to go using stainless steel bolts. Luckily, I had squirrelled away some patina-laden slot screws with matching square nuts that I had found in my years of finding old plates. They sure looked like they could be a hundred years old.
The result is an award made of 100% painted steel. Each of these awards cost us about $60 in materials, divided between the toppers, plates, and stencils. But I’m really happy with how they look. If $120 for two awards squeezes the meet’s bottom line, maybe we’ll just drop the Long Distance award and go with the Display Award only, which anyone can win. But we’ll see.
The winner of the Display Award will be decided by ballot at the meet. I may bring a display myself to spice things up, but it won't be eligible for voting. I'd feel weird about presenting myself with an award that I myself painted.