gifts — Page 15

They’re Taking Over The Bookshelves

April 29, 2015 at 9:13 am by Claudia

bookshelves10

Remember when Don and I installed these bookshelves and this little wooden egg cup (a gift from Don and Scout) held center stage?

Well…now that I’ve got the bug again, but mostly because of the generosity of my readers, this is what it looks like:

4-29 eggcups on the diagonal

The entire shelf is full of egg cups.

4-29 eggcups in a row

There are the set of four wooden egg cups (3 are on the shelf below) and the yellow ‘man’ egg cup from reader Barb in Canada. The blue chick egg cup from fellow blogger Linda, the rooster egg cup from fellow blogger Susie. Recently, I bought the little boy and these two egg cups:

4-29 man&woman egg cup

I don’t know anything about them save for the fact that I really like them. Marked Japan.

And on Monday, a package arrived from reader Judy, who lives in Washington. Imagine my delight as I unwrapped these:

4-29 egg cups from Judy

4-29 hankscraft egg cup

This is a vintage Hankscraft stoneware double egg cup. I’ve always wanted one of these. Is it just me or is the design vaguely Art Deco?

4-29 chick egg cup

I love this sweet and sunny egg cup with a little chick. The inside of the cup is a lovely sky blue. Marked Japan.

4-29 blue egg cup

Lovely. No mark, but it’s definitely stoneware.

4-29 green-blue egg cup

And isn’t this the prettiest color combination? Marked Japan.

Judy, thank you. I love these additions to my collection.

Boy, have I been blessed. I don’t take it for granted, believe me. Thank you, one and all.

• By the way, another round of emails went out the other day purporting to be from me. All of this is from the email hack that happened a few months back. Ignore them. They are not from me. One of my readers thought they might be tied in to the WP issue I referenced yesterday. Nope. Just more crap from the hackers. I always receive a copy of your post comments via email, so if you’ve ever left a comment, you’re in that list of email addresses. I’m sorry about that. But we are all familiar enough with these emails that we do ignore them, right?

Never click on anything in any email, unless you are absolutely sure it is to be trusted. If you look at these emails, you can immediately see that they are a sham and not anything that I would write. I get them all the time from friends who have also been hacked. They usually go to spam, which is where they belong.

I hope I never have to write this warning again. I am well and truly tired of the whole thing.

• I’m under the weather today. I’ve been feeling extremely sinusy and/or allergy-ridden, as has Don, but in the last two days it has morphed into something that is almost like a cold. But it isn’t. Last night I barely slept, and I’m congested and coughing and, more than anything, annoyed. I want to work outside, and I did yesterday, but now I’m paying for it. Don made my coffee for me this morning and I’m sitting in my blogging chair feeling sorry for myself.

Waaah. Enough already.

Happy Wednesday.

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In the Mail & A Trip to Hartford

April 21, 2015 at 9:09 am by Claudia

This is supposed to be a McCoy-free post, as the series continues tomorrow, but I had to share something with you.

My godparents lived on the next block over from us when I was growing up. I called them by their first names: Edith and Nick. You might remember that they gave me my very first egg cup, the second one from the left in the picture below.

3-26 egg cups fig 1

Luckily, I held onto that egg cup for years and eventually it sparked the desire to start a collection.

Edith and Nick had three children and all of us grew up together. Kay, their daughter, was just a few years younger than me. We played together all the time. I call her my godsister – is there such a word? She’s also my friend.

Kay and her husband lived in Maine for many years but when Edith and Nick, now living in Florida, grew ill, they moved down there to watch over them. Sadly, Edith and Nick are gone now, as is my mom. Kay reads this blog, much to my delight. When I started the McCoy series, Kay sent me an email with a photo of a piece of McCoy pottery – a pitcher – attached. Did I want the pitcher? It had been her mother’s and Kay remembered it being around for years. Of course, I said yes. Having something of Edith’s here at the cottage, something sent to me by Kay, would be a wonderful thing indeed. It arrived yesterday.

4-21 kay mccoy

This pitcher is from the 1940s and its simple lines are lovely. The design reminds me of the Strap Vase I showed you in an earlier post.

4-21 kay mccoy 2

Thank you, Kay (and Edith)! Kay wrote me a few days later to say that she saw the basketweave jardiniere pictured in a post and recognized it as an aqua pot she had stowed away in her shed. She ran out to the shed to retrieve it. Needless to say, it’s all cleaned up now and Kay has a beautiful piece of McCoy.

I’m headed to Hartford this afternoon to spend the night. I am working a few days here and there on their new production of Kiss Me Kate, directed by my pal Darko Tresnjak, the Tony Award-winning director of the musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Kiss Me Kate is based on The Taming of the Shrew, so it includes text from Shakespeare, which is where I come in. I’m supposed to put in a total of five days work on the show, so I imagine that will include a few rehearsals and a Preview performance. I’m excited, because musical theater is my first love and Darko knows how to stage and direct a musical like nobody’s business.

Since the rehearsal day is 8 hours long and the drive there is 2 hours, the result would be a 12 or 13 hour day, so the theater is putting me up for the night. That makes things much easier!

But I have to leave these two.

4-21 family

And I have to take our only car. Don will be hanging out at the cottage with his little girl, no doubt playing his guitar and watching the Red Sox.

I’ll be back here tomorrow night. In the meantime, I’m writing the next McCoy post ahead of time so that I have access to all my reference books.

The winner of a copy of Threshold, by G.M. Ford, is Debbie Price. Congratulations, Debbie. I’ll send you an email right away.

Happy Tuesday.

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Clues

April 11, 2015 at 9:42 am by Claudia

I see sun.

I also hear a lot of wind, but I’m not going to be too picky.

Sunshine is good.

I’ve said it before and you know I’m going to say it again. And again. I am blessed with the loveliest readers; scratch readers…friends. One of those friends is Barb, who lives in Canada. She sent me a package and it just arrived yesterday.

4-11 egg cups wooden

I unwrapped these beautiful wooden egg cups.

I really love them. Let’s get a closeup of that wood grain:

4-11 egg cups wooden closeup

Beautiful.

Also included in this lovely package was this guy:

4-11 egg cups man

A little spooky in the most wonderful way. Something about the style of this one struck of chord in the recesses of my memory. I’d seen egg cups that were done in this same style.

4-11 egg cups man 2

When I flipped him over, the stamped maker’s mark was so faint that I could only make out two words:

4-11 egg cups man mark

“Royal” and “Made.”

Don joined in and eventually we found we could barely make out “…ong” and C in the center.

Okay, I thought. There’s a challenge. And you know I love mysteries and crossword puzzles and solving things.

So, I started searching egg cups online. Using the words ‘egg cup’ and ‘royal’ narrowed it down a bit. However, there are lots of pottery makers that use the word ‘royal’ in their trademark. Finally, I saw a blue egg cup in the shape of a dog that was very much like this one. Then I saw another. And finally, after looking at even more egg cups, I was able to see a listing that also showed the stamped mark on the bottom.

Bingo.

Royal Art Pottery
Longton
C
Made in England

Aha!

Don was great, by the way, looking at the mark, examining it closely, suggesting what search words to use. We were like the Hardy Boys, except we were the Hardy Boy and Girl.

Barb, thank you, thank you! My collection has grown quite a bit in the last week or so. I have two more finds I’ll share with you soon and even better, the story of an amazing score on eBay. The kind of score that happens very rarely and which sent my adrenaline levels through the roof as I watched the clock count down on the auction yesterday.

It took me a while to recover.

But that will have to wait until it arrives in my mailbox. I can’t wait.

Happy Saturday.

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They’re Taking Over The Bookshelves

In the Mail & A Trip to Hartford

Clues

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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