Reading My Way Around the World

Friday 18 April 2014

P is for Pottery


A song for today about Places  
The Old Maid in the Garrett

I grew up in a Pottery village ... Belleek China is world famous for collectors - and my father worked in the Pottery all his life - he started at 13 sweeping floors and was General Manager when he retired at 70.



The Pottery pretty much ruled life in the village when I was growing up ...  The hooter would go at 1 for dinner break and again at 5 when the workers were finishing up - so whoever was at home would have the meal ready by the time they got back to the house.

The Pottery had and still has a policy of 'no seconds', so anything that didn't reach the standard was destroyed ... And moulds were broken after the allotted number of pieces were made there .... A real treat for my brother and me was getting some old moulds to play with.  And my father loved to experiment with different soils in the area to see if something else would work instead of having to import the kaolin from Cornwall, and further afield in later years.    So we made many little dogs and pigs and other ornaments from clay out of our garden or out of the field and then it would be taken in to the kilns to be fired along with the real stuff!

I've always adored the fragility of parian ware and collect a few pieces.    Here are some of my treasures.








Today is the 16th day of the A to Z Blogging challenge for April.  Letter P.

Do you collect anything?
Is your home town famous for anything?


4 comments:

  1. Absolutely fascinating! Glad I found your blog--it's on the list with blogs with fewer than 100 followers. I do collect Blue Willow. No single pottery, though. I have it from many countries, and many takes on the "Willow" design. Some of my pieces are valuable, most aren't. But I do have a couple thousand pieces of it. It just happened. lol. People found out I liked it and then the gifts began. Birthdays, Christmas, people cleaning out an attic... And so it goes when someone starts collecting something.

    Thanks for sharing this neat story! Am following you now. :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sounds brilliant Teresa - I love "willow" … we visited the Meissen factory in Germany a few years ago … beautiful.

      Delete
  2. Hi Fil, Thanks for visiting my blog today! You asked a question about leaving your link on a Wordpress Blog. I checked their forums and read that lins are automatically converted to active links when you leave a url in a comment. So, since I do my blogging on a Blogger blog, but do have a WP blog, I went to my WP blg and tested it by leaving the link for my Blogger blog in a comment. It automatically highlighted in blue and is active. If you want to test it, you can leave any comments on my WP blog you want (I haven't posted anything new since 2011). I'll delete them for you after you're done experimenting. My WP blog is @ Country Meanderings and Reflections <--- I hope that link is live. :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for that Teresa - I will try that … One of the good things about this challenge has been learning stuff like this.

      Delete

Do drop me a line ... I love to read your comments :)