Blue and Green.........................by Gay S

Today in honor of Blue Monday hosted by the ever gracious Smiling Sally I’m showing you some of the Blue items from my collection…..

The first is the Cockerel barber bowl which I found in a village not far from Quimper: Rosporden.

The brocante there was a regular stop for us and over the years we have found some good pieces. We used to drive off the ferry, breakfast in St Malo then head for Rosporden for lunch.

Refreshed we’d make our way to the brocante just in time for the owner to open. Perfect!
This piece is marked HB Quimper and shows every sign of being genuine, but this form is much reproduced, if you buy one of these be careful - one tell tale sign of a reproduction is a kind of crackle in the glaze, but when you examine it carefully the lines are quite even and grey….beware…

The next piece is also a bird, but it couldn’t be more different –it’s rather a comical duck – this cute little plate was probably part of a child’s tea set. I found this piece in Concorde, MA. and its humour just appealed to me.

The little dishes below were sold to me as salts, but if they are indeed salts they are very shallow, I just like their shabby chic look.




The jug was a buy from a local fair in a village called Benson. (Benson has an RAF base and a weather station, when you hear that temperatures in the UK have plummeted, the data has often been gathered at Benson… recently temperatures there dropped to minus 18 which for the UK was remarkable.)
I’m not sure if the jug was ever intended to be quite so blue, perhaps it had something to do with the firing which would have been in a kiln fired by wood, rather than today’s far more controllable electricity.

So what about Green?
One of the great things about purchasing these items or similar antiques, is that they are pre-owned; they don’t have to be manufactured and shipped thousands of miles, no more of the earth’s resources are used, no further material extracted…no carbon foot print!
With care these items will last hundreds of years. The cockerel and the duck have probably had a couple of owners before me, the little plates and jug even more, (they are already ‘old age pensioners’ or ‘seniors’) hopefully they’ll go on to have owners after me……we are being ‘Green’; we are recycling treasures and I for one couldn’t be happier about it !