The Keeping Room: Pottery

Showing posts with label Pottery. Show all posts

Monday, June 22, 2009

Mugs on Monday

This was a Mother's Day gift this year from my older son and his wife. It is so full of whimsey! I am always saying , "Now when I have my sheep farm in the Dales...." I have been having my tea in it every morning this summer!

Let's just say I miss the tots who once drank from these!

Can you name some of the characters featured here?

These Lord & Lady Celtic mugs are the work of Pamela Kohler-Camp.

I discovered her several years ago at the Alabama Highland Games in Montgomery. Her studio, AND SARAH LAUGHED, is located at Stone Mountain Georgia. I really love her work.

Click on images to enlarge!

This is mug I use quite regularly. This series of mugs featured the names of the three Shakespeare plays of the repertory season. Turn the mug and you will see Love's Labour's Lost and The Merchant of Venice were the other two plays .

During the first twelve years of the ASF productions, a single mug was commissioned for each play. I did not get one for every play, but I think I may have a dozen of these. I regret that these do not include the year.
Can you name the plays?

I was fortunate enough to visit the Globe in London during the summer of 2000. I was always sorry I did not get a mug. Several years later, my younger son was there and knew exactly what to bring home to his English teacher mom. Study the image? Can you name the play?

During the summer of 1989, I participated in an NEH seminar taught at Oxford. As part of the course we would travel to significant locations related to the writer and his works which we had studied during the week.
I purchased two of these: one for me and one for a dear friend and colleague who had done his doctoral dissertation on this writer.
This mug had been designed and produced for a big event which had been held in the town during the previous summer.
Can you guess the purpose of the event? Or can you name the chapel and town featured on the other side of the mug?

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I am not sure I understand this meme business for Mug Monday. Am I to feature another mug next Monday? Or was this a one week event? Willow? Acorn Moon, or Weaver of Grass? Help me out.

Here is what I often call Crumbly Gingerbread

I found the recipe on a postcard I sent home to a friend when I visited Grasmere in 1986. This is very close to the gingerbread sold at St. Oswald's church there in Grasmere. This is marvelous with your hot tea. The real secret is adding the sugar at the very last-not blending it with the margerine. I use either a fork or pastry blender to "rub" in the margarine with flour and oats. I have copied it as it appeared on the postcard and added my American interpretation of measurements for certain ingredients.

9 oz brown wheatmeal flour
(1 rounded cup wholewheat flour)
3 oz porridge oats
(1/2 cup Three Minute Quaker oats)
3/4 level tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/2 level tsp cream of tartar
3 level teaspoons ground ginger
9 oz hard margarine
(1 to 1 1/2 sticks od Parkay-the less you use, the more crumbly the texture)
9 oz soft brown sugar
(1 rounded cup)

Set oven to 325 degrees or Mark 3. Well grease a shallow tin 14" by 9". Put flour, oats, bicarbonate of soda, cream of tartar, and ginger in a bowl. Add the margarine cut into small pieces. Rub in well with fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in sugar. Put into tin and press down firmly with a floured fork. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until pale brown. Cut into squares whilst warm and leave in tin until completely cold. Keeps well in airtight tin.

The Secret Heart

Here is my Valentine to every parent who remembers looking on a sleeping child...and lingering in the moment....
Enjoy & linger,
Firelight

by Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Across the years he could recall
His father one way best of all.
In the stillest hour of night
The boy awakened to a light.

Half in dreams, he saw his sire
With his great hands full of fire.
The man had struck a match to see
If his son slept peacefully.

He held his palms each side the spark
His love had kindled in the dark.
His two hands were curved apart
In the semblance of a heart.

He wore, it seemed to his small son,
A bare heart on his hidden one,
A heart that gave out such a glow
No son awake could bear to know.

It showed a look upon a face
Too tender for the day to trace.
One instant, it lit all about,
And then the secret heart went out.

But it shone long enough for one
To know that hands held up the sun.

May 20th is the 400th Anniversary of the Publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! It is an ever fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare

Monday, June 22, 2009

Mugs on Monday

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