A trip around Spode's

While I get inoculated this week, I thought we'd go back a bit really to something that is very much "in the family" which is ceramics and a trip to the museum of a major player, Spode.

Some exhibits were in glass cases, probably as well as a few years ago a car plowed into the front of the museum and damaged a number of Willow Pattern plates.

A number of these pieces show gold banding which was applied by hand after an apprenticeship and being approved to use the very expensive gold gilding  which was something my late nan did for a good many years.

When people think of pottery, thoughts tend to run to cups, saucers and plates  but they need not and here is a fox which could of been bought for a cool £150.

Ware comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes as can be seen in this frame filling picture.

That plate design is "Chocolate Berry" sat by two willow pattern cups and saucers that before the guided tour we consumed with hand poured tea from leaves with biscuits.

My Junior inspired art

Most of us encountered art either around us on maybe on the things people bought us such as books, packaging of toys and so on.

As you slowly and for some of us definitely slowly developed your fine motor skills  you may of started to doodle on pieces of paper, done some colouring before doing art in the nursery or infants class usually around the things you know starting say with faces of siblings and so on.

Later on in juniors you'd of had lessons where you might be given a subject to interpret and draw which in my case included drawing things like branches, pussy willow, acorns and flowers that we'd seen in nature study. In my case we went outside to draw them too!

A while ago I did draw some Canada Geese in pencil as I'm a bit of a techophobe when it comes to using tablet and computer software and here is the picture.

Yes that's a Hello Kitty pencil I used to draw it with!

Soccer's World Cup 2010

Well the World Cup in South Africa is over for England as this girl clearly shows blowing the final note!