Sunday 29 July 2007

Pink china and green enamel

It's been a week since I last posted and it feels like forever. Back to work this week and life has returned to "normal", i.e. not enough hours in the day.

On my day off on Friday we visited Church Stretton, a gorgeous place and made even more attractive to me as there is a large antiques centre. David (husband) and I spent a very pleasurable couple of hours browsing and of course made a few purchases. Unfortunately I didn't take the camera, I will try and remember for next time. Church Stretton is stunningly beautiful and for once the sun shone. After completing our purchases we had a restoring cuppa at the tea room and returned home satisfied with our few hours out. The pink china in the first picture was spotted by David so of course I felt obliged to give it a home, soooo pretty. The old chemists bottle is now on top of my bathroom cabinet.
The little collection of pretties in the second picture are just some bits and pieces collected from various places recently. The little basket is a childs sewing box from the 1950's and is so cute and I just love the colour of the enamel bucket. The blue glass item is a candle holder and it's really heavy. I had to have the glittery balls as they were only £1.00 and will be used at Christmas. The assorted linen was all found in one of my local charity shops.
Back to the things we got from Church Stretton. This lot is slightly more, erm, useful. O.K. the nutmeg grater is the only really useful thing here. The item in the box is a French sugar tong, I haven't seen one before. It works like a spring-loaded grab. The two glass things are also sugar related. Apparently they are sugar crushers. In all my years of browsing I have never seen one of these so as they were both on the same stand I thought I may as well buy them both. Now where are my sugar lumps?
This last little lot is just SOME of the china that I bought at auction the other week. I was born in the "Potteries", (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire) and when I lived there china and pottery held no interest for me. My only excuse is that I was too young to appreciate it. Now when I look at the name stamps on the back of all of these pieces I feel sad. Most of the "Pot Banks" have closed and all those famous names are history, so when I see a beautiful piece of old china I appreciate the skill that went into producing it and feel proud of my heritage. I feel pleased that I am also preserving a little piece of history by collecting this lovely old ware and of course recycling, so important these days. Ah, I feel all nostalgic for home now.... sigh.
Ah well, domesticity beckons so enough of my rambling for today. Enjoy the rest of your weekend whatever you may be doing. Bye for now and I look forward to catching up on some favourite blogs.