mary, those are beautiful, are they something you have had in your family for awhile? I love the little details of a table, and knife rests are one of them. As I understand it, it was the Victorians that introduced that look. I love everything about the Victorian table, they beleived in "over-kill" for sure, I would have been quite contented to have "had meals" during those times.

If you have the movie "The Age of Innocence" it's a good story, but they concentrate alot on the details of the era, they do a lot of shots of the dining room table, I always put it on "pause". LOL

OK, Mary, you have to show us all the rest of your "goodies".

Mary, Your silver knife rest is simply beautiful. It is so ornate. I bet it's a bear to polish, but definitely worth it. I would polish with joy if I had some that pretty.

Thank you both. Yes, they are hard to polish and REALLY need it now, I haven't used them in quite a while. I bought some cleaner that is supposed to be all natural ingredients...no chemicals in it, but I haven't tryed it yet.

The silver grape design ones I bought several years ago from a catalog. I'm trying to remember which one! lol. I have 8 of these.

Judith, I wrote the name down for that movie and I'll look for it. I love the way the Victorians dress up their table too.

Mary

Mary, that's a nice knife rest. Have you used Maas polish? They used it and sold it at the little antiques and collectibles store where I worked. We used it on all the silver and silver plate. It works great and is not expensive.

I love the look of the knife rests, but afraid they will have to go one the bottom of my list for now. At least I can enjoy other people's pretties on here.

Luvs

A little about the etiquette of knife rests. As you know they were part of the Victorian convention of one more thing add to the table setting, along with fish knives and lettuce forks and individual asparagus tongs. They came in 2 sizes, individual, which would properly be placed at each person's place above the dinner knife, and the master knife holder which was larger and heavier to hold the carving knife. The individual knife holders were about 4 inches long, and the master knife rests about 6 inches long. The purpose of the knife rests was to keep the table linen clean, of course. but the knives were only placed on the rests when dirty. You would never begin a meal with the knives on a knife rest. And during the meal, the dinner knife was properly placed on your plate between bites. Only when the plate was removed between courses was the knife placed on the knife rest, or when the carving was finished in the case of the master knife rest.
Knife rests were sometimes made to match individual salts. A very elegant table was set with matching cut glass knife rests and salts each with their own salt spoon.
And, as for elegant, the Victorians often used individual epergns and figural napkin rings.
There are many many lovely little Victorian conventions that can add a lot of elegance to your table. Individual butter pats for example, can be collected in many different patterns. I love to set a table with molded butter placed on individual butter pats.
Linda C