Me old china!

I love old china, but in our little house with its tiny kitchen - so small that we couldn't have proper, deep, 'bottom' cupboards on both sides and had to have shallower 'top' cupboards at floor level on one side of the room - we've had to be practical about pottery. No collecting lovely vintage china for me, even though I do hanker after it whenever I see an expecially nice piece in a charity shop.



However, since Mr Robot and I started our food blog, Greedybots, we've had more of a need for pottery. Not every foodstuff suits every plate, and if we're going to take lots of nice photos, we're going to need lots of nice plates. Suddenly odd bits of vintage china aren't a pointless indulgence, they're jolly useful photo props and so we can justify them. (Finding room for them is still tricky, mind you, and I still can't justify a tea set.)

We don't use things for their original purposes. The green sandwich plate has already been used for a dish of Ants Climbing Trees from MiMi Aye's book Noodle! (we went to the launch; you can see Pete's photo of Ants Climbing Trees as part of his writeup of the Noodle! book launch here).

I don't know what purpose the soup bowls will serve. I took a quick hunt around the web to get a date for them; they're Crown Ducal in the 'Bristol' pattern, which was made from the 1920s to the 1960s, but the back stamp makes it likely they're 30s, 40s or possibly early 50s. Judging from the filth I had to scrub off them, they've been sat on a shelf since 1933... A couple are chipped too, but the set was still worth the fiver we paid for them.

I just thought you'd like to see the dishes. Would you like me to share more in future?