Amy Spedden is ready to confess. “I’ve never talked to anybody about it before, so this interview has forced me to sit down and think about why I have all of these prayer hands,” she says.
Her congregation of prayer hands — ceramic figurines of two human hands clasped in prayer — is a testament to her obsession with the obscure.
Prayer hands would traditionally sit on a mantel or a side table next to a person’s Bible to remind them to say their prayers at night. They are most often associated with Bible stories, but under Amy’s care they aren’t exclusively spiritual objects. Amy was raised Baptist and attends church occasionally when she visits her hometown, but her interest in prayer hands is more about collecting than communion.
“I love kooky religious symbols. I’m not very religious myself, but I guess that’s how I’m expressing it: through the power of prayer hands.”
Amy and her husband Pete Spedden are avid collectors. He loves old signs and seeks out vintage advertising at swap meets and auction houses. She goes for quirkier small items at flea markets and yard sales, always keeping an eye out for prayer hands in particular. Together they search for old-fashioned and unusual objects, with a special emphasis on religious oddities and vintage signs.
Pete and Amy have encouraged each other’s penchant for old things since the beginning of their relationship. Some of their early dates were at Penland Auction House at its former location on Craven Street. They got to know each other over the din of the bidders. “We found each other and then got comfortable and started nesting — but we were nesting by collecting all these crazy signs and knick knack-y items and antique stuff,” Amy recalls.
She cultivated her collection of hands as she and Pete transitioned from dating to marriage and then parenthood (their son Henry turns 3 in October). Amy guesses she has between 35 and 40 prayer hands in her collection, although some are in boxes following the family’s recent move from Asheville to Fairview.
Nearly two-dozen are displayed in a glass case in their garage. Amy hopes to move them someplace more scenic in the future, perhaps outside to create a prayer-hand garden. Some are pure white and others are painted in various skin tones. A tambourine painted with the image of a prayer hand sits in the middle of the case. It’s an arresting image, all of these disembodied hands joined in prayer.
“They’re so dramatic,” she says with a laugh. “I love the fact that they’re just these dismembered floating hands and they look so real.” Amy seeks out the ones with especially thick veins, as well as tiny ones that double as salt-and-pepper shakers. She enjoys the sense of discovery and the idea of hunting down the most unusual pair.
Pete has a similar zeal for finding vintage signs. He likes the bargaining process and revels in his ongoing quest for particular brands. One of his most prized possessions is a mint-condition Gulf Oil sign. On more than one occasion, Amy has found him waxing it in the garage.
Pete seeks out signs with vivid colors, like the red-and-white Wayne Feeds sign that hangs on their barn. He has about 100 vintage signs, ranging from a small PET Ice Cream sign to a large railroad-crossing sign that watches over the yard where the family’s ducks and chickens roam. “It looks very nostalgic out here with the old signs,” Amy says.
Although she is always on the lookout for a set of prayer hands when she goes to yard sales, Amy doesn’t take her collection too seriously. The goal isn’t to fulfill a lifelong dream or turn a profit. She describes it more as a “random little hobby” that has piqued her interest.
“The signs seem more self-explanatory because everybody likes old signs and you see them everywhere,” she says. Amy doesn’t envision herself finishing her collection anytime soon, but if she ever does, she knows how they’ll be displayed.
A couple of spotlights would shine on the hands, which would be framed, she says, by “really heavy, long, purple velvet curtains.” Like any zealous collector, she exhibits a knack for details: “There would be a really huge pipe organ behind it all, with somebody playing music.”