collecting — Page 32

Pottery: Intact and Not-So-Intact

December 12, 2015 at 8:35 am by Claudia

Yesterday I spoke of a surprise gift and today I’m sharing some more gifts.

My goodness, I am blessed by sweet and generous people in my life. And I’m very, very grateful.

Cathy, a longtime friend of this blog, wrote me to ask if she could send me a few pieces of pottery that had belonged to her mother. She and her sister have many pieces from their mother – all of them with a story that is meaningful to the sisters – but these three pieces didn’t have any particular sentiment attached to them, so Cathy generously sent them to me.

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Oh my!

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On the left is a piece of Catalina Island Pottery – a candlestick. This pottery was made on Catalina Island off the coast of California, sometime between 1927 and 1947. It’s very collectible.

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One of the marks – there are other, fainter marks on the bottom as well.

12-12 bittersweet candleholder

This is Roseville Pottery – a candleholder in the Bleeding Heart pattern. Sigh. It’s beautiful.

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And this little pitcher is Hull Pottery. I have one other piece of Hull that is lovely, though it has a broken handle. Now, I’ve got two!

Thank you, dear Cathy! What a delight it was to open this package. As I told Cathy in my email, Don stood there and oohed and aahed right along with me. I will treasure these pieces and give them a good home.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: I seem to have a problem with receiving damaged items in the mail. First up was the broken glass on the Maxfield Parrish (the seller has sent me a check to cover the glass replacement, by the way.) Yesterday, I got a box in the mail containing a piece of Roseville that I won on eBay. This is what I found when I opened it:

12-12 the mess

I’m not kidding. I wanted to cry. I immediately contacted the seller, of course. It had been packed in a box that I think was too small. It did have bubble wrap around it but there wasn’t enough space in the box for any extra padding.It seems to me that there should be a lot of padding around fragile items. The seller contacted me and was clearly very sorry that it had happened and said the same thing the other seller said – that she never has problems with breakage. Well, now you do, and I seem to be the lucky recipient. I took photos and sent them to her so she could see the damage for herself. She is going to refund my money. So in both cases, the resolution has been a positive one.

Nevertheless….

So, I grabbed the glue I use for miniatures and I put it back together as best I could. It doesn’t look all that good, certainly not at all good if you look closely, but if I put it in the back of the china cabinet it should be okay until the day I can find a replacement.

12-12 glued together piece

There are chips missing – especially near the handle – but this is the best I could do.

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This shot really shows the patchwork of glued pieces. You can see why I loved this piece. It’s the Zephyr Lily pattern in a blue/green and it’s a planter/window box.

Hey, at least I was able to patch it back together, right?

Waaah.

The ankle is much better, though I was on it way too much yesterday because Don had to go into the city for an audition, so I was on Scout duty. Next week: IKEA! It doesn’t take much to get me excited these days.

Happy Saturday.

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Thursday Thoughts: On Scout. (And a Pretty Piece of Pottery.)

December 10, 2015 at 9:17 am by Claudia

12-10 scoutiebest

I took this photo with my iPhone and posted it to Instagram yesterday. My little girl, just about to fall asleep. I really like it, so here it is for those of you who don’t do Instagram.

She sleeps a lot nowadays. She has good days and bad days and is very much like Riley was in that her limbs are unsteady and she falls a lot. We support her when she’s eating. We help her in and out of the house. She’s declining, but she’s still a strong minded girl who loves to eat and be near us, who on a good day will walk around the corral and sniff everything in her path, who loves to watch her dad cook dinner, and who can sometimes still clear the two steps from the den to the living room in one jump, so we will do what we did with Riley. We’ll love her and hold her and tell her we’re taking care of her and not to worry and that we’ll watch over her. She is our priority, plain and simple.

She doesn’t bark anymore. But interestingly, the other morning while we were still in bed, we heard her barking repeatedly for a minute or so. She was dreaming. That’s when she barks. We welcome the sound.

Every day, we are worrying about her, watching her, gauging the state of her health. We’re never far from her. She is our girl – our almost seventeen year old girl – and the fact that she is still with us is a miracle. So we treasure every moment with her.

She’s been with us almost as long as we have been married. She’s outlived her brothers. She’s lived on the West Coast. She’s lived on the East Coast. She’s traveled across the country in a Honda CR-V. She’s charmed absolutely everyone she has ever met. She is an angel.

You see, this is why I don’t write about her these days – except briefly. I’m crying. It’s always right below the surface of every moment. This knowledge that we will have to say goodbye in the not-so-distant future.

So let’s move on to something frivolous. A new piece of Roseville arrived yesterday.

12-10 magnoliawindowbox1

In the Magnolia pattern, a little window box. I fell in love with the color and the design. It’s about 3½ inches tall and 8 inches wide. This is, I think, the front.

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This is the back. But then again, maybe not….

Whatever way I’m looking at this piece, I love it. I had to gimp my way down to the mailbox yesterday to get it. Our postperson always toots her horn when she attaches a package to the mailbox, so I knew I had to get down there and get it.

Isn’t it pretty? Can’t you see it sitting on a windowsill in some home in the forties or fifties? Maybe planted with ivy or african violets or a succulent or two?

Yesterday’s scarf sold overnight. I’m working on a few orders at the moment, but I do have one other skein in shades of green that I will offer in the shop as soon as I can get to it.

Happy Thursday.

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At The Controls Of My Starship

December 9, 2015 at 9:55 am by Claudia

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on yesterday’s post. I read every comment (well, I always do) but this time, I found myself reading them more than once. It helps to know that others feel the same way, that the free-floating anxiety and worry and, in some cases, outrage that we feel is shared by others. We need to draw strength from each other. And we need to take action.

As I sit here, sprained ankle on a pillow on top of an ottoman, cup of coffee to my right, iPhone next to the coffee, Kindle next to the iPhone, camera just a bit beyond the Kindle, laptop on my lap, I laugh out loud at the image I have of my “Command Center.” Oh, and now we’ll add coffee cake to my left, because Don just brought in a piece for me.

Gone are the days of being laid up and only connected to the world via a landline and the television set.

I feel like I’m behind the controls on the Starship Enterprise.

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I’m sharing two more of my Roseville Pottery pieces with you today. (I have a couple more Roseville scores on their way to me in the mail.)

The green basket is in the Apple Blossom pattern. As you can see, I am sometimes quite willing to buy a damaged piece. The third curve from the left has been broken off and there is a hairline crack that travels downward from there. I saw this in a local antique shop, priced at $25.00. I hesitated because of the damage and Don said I should buy it anyway because “It’s been loved and used. Besides, cracks let the light in.” An homage to Leonard Cohen.

So I bought it, and I’m happy I did. It would be three times, maybe four times the price I paid if it was flawless. But it isn’t, so I adopted it and now it has a home at the cottage.

The smaller brown piece is in the Bushberry pattern. This is the very first piece of Roseville I ever purchased. I found it in San Diego. At the time, Roseville prices were through the roof, so this remained my one and only piece for several years. It was living in the kitchen china cabinet, but I just moved it to the den, where, when the other pieces arrive and I rearrange the den china cabinet, it will live with its Roseville brothers and sisters.

Or, it just might stay on this music cabinet. We’ll see.

There’s a new scarf in the shop.

12-9 scarf in pompidoublog

This is the Obsession Scarf in Pompidou. Gosh, it’s so hard to capture the colors. It makes me crazy. The link to the shop is here.

A couple of blog housekeeping items:

• For some reason the email version of my post went out very late in the day yesterday. It should go out between 11 am and 1 pm. I suppose it was a Feedburner glitch. I’ll do my best to keep an eye on that today.

• WordPress has just had an update and there’s a chance that my comment reply plugin might not work. Can you let me know if you receive my replies to your comments? If you aren’t – and you know I reply to every comment – I need to know that and find an alternative plugin.

Thank you!

Happy Wednesday.

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Pottery: Intact and Not-So-Intact

Thursday Thoughts: On Scout. (And a Pretty Piece of Pottery.)

At The Controls Of My Starship

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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