the change I had to make to the convertJsonToJsonObject() method in the Item class.

convertJson

private JsonObject convertJsonToJsonObject(String json) {
	// parse json string in to JsonElement
	try {
		JsonElement toObject = new JsonParser().parse(json);
		return toObject.getAsJsonObject();
	}catch(JsonSyntaxException mfe){
		return null;
		
	// This was screwing me up a lot
	}catch(IllegalStateException ise){
		return null;
	}
}