{Identifying Silver Grape Scissors from Sweden}

Yesterday I did show in my post the tiny, sweet Champagne grapes with silver Grape Scissors in a Rose Pattern. They also are often called Grape Shears.  

Mind you, they are actually not THAT large.

Do you see to the left where a space is cut out for placing the grapes' stem?

That way you easily can snip off a section of a larger bunch of grapes.

One person in her comment asked: 'How do you know the Scissor is meant for grapes?' This was Marianne from the blog: BiebKriebels or Library Jitters, if I translate this from Dutch. So as promised I will get back to the subject.

I learned that I made a spelling error myself, as scissor should be written in plural as scissors.

On my blog post, I've corrected that but in the URL it still shows as scissor.

English is NOT my mother tongue and overall, I guess that my English will be better than your Dutch...

Now let's look at the meaning of this silver TABLE SERVING or DESSERT SERVING piece.

In my book: FORKS KNIVES & SPOONS by Peri Wolfman and Charles Gold I found a nice mention of the silver grape shears. Read more about this Manhattan Design Guru below post...

At the bottom left you can read: One of life's little niceties -- sterling silver grape shears.

From one of Christie's auctions you can find above: A VICTORIAN SILVER-GILT DESSERT SERVICE

Just click the above hyperlink to go to the actual page.

 It shows dessert pieces like forks, knives, spoons, cheese knives, and one pair of grape scissors.

Again from Christie's: A GEORGE III SILVER-GILT DESSERT-SERVICE

just click on above hyperlink

Now, how did I identify my silver grape scissors as being from Sweden?

You can read here: the Maker's Mark:GRWR - City Stamp: M - 3 crowns and an S for Silver and Date Letter: R9

So what does this tell us?

On page 142, of The Book: Rosen-Bestecke (Rose Flatware) by Johanna Gehrlein from Silber-und-Rosen-Shop I found the marking from Sweden in the form of 3 crowns (seen in Abb. 2).

Johanna is a dear friend and her hardcover book with excellent photographs has proven to be invaluable!

Sure enough the Swedish Mark with 3 crowns and the S for silver is still being used.

Just click and scroll from link above.

The letter M I found here: Swedish Hallmarks and City Stamps and it stands for the city of Malmö in Sweden.

And my Silver Grape Scissors from Malmö in Sweden were made in 1967 according to the R9 hallmark...

This table you find from the very same link in the above City Stamps, just scroll down.

Hope this did answer Marianne's question!

Related links:
{Table Setting versus Table Scape} | previous post by me
{Silver Grape Scissors with Roses and Champagne Grapes} | previous post by me
Organizing Secrets from a Manhattan Design Guru Peri Wolfman | Peri is the writer of the book Forks Knives & Spoons and is now tableware designer for Restoration Hardware after she had been vice president for product development at Williams-Sonoma.
Less to Mess | interview with Design Guru Peri Wolfman from The New York Times, May 2013