Little Painted Teapot

Well, my goal to write a blog post every week isn't turning out very well.

Things are quite slow here at the moment. I have lots of projects in the pipeline but little energy to do them. I do have something to show you today though. A few weeks ago a group of us ladies visited a pottery painting studio and had a go at decorating some ceramics. It was quite fun to sit and natter and do a bit of painting.

There were quite a few different ceramic pieces to choose from. Mugs and cups of different sizes, plates and bowls, decorations and ornaments. I wanted to make something practical that I could use. I didn't fancy making something to sit on a shelf and gather dust, so I chose to paint a teapot.

I love the shape of this teapot.

My plan, before seeing this, was to paint a mug in a grid with wildflowers filling each grid. That idea flew out the window when I found the teapot. 😊

As you can see, I stuck with the wildflowers. At least, I hope you can see I stuck with the wildflowers. It's a bit abstract. The purple thingies are lavender and the blue is cornflower. I don't know if you can see, but if you look carefully, there are little yellow dots too. They were going to be flowers but I decided to leave them floating. I made a mistake when painting the centre flowers. There were supposed to be 3 lavender heads, but I ran out of space. Too much nattering I think.

I've just realised while I'm typing this, that the lavender-cornflower-yellow flower combo mirrors a little patch in my mum's garden. It's a little spot I love to investigate in the summer. Each of the plants is visited by a different type of bee which are fascinating to watch. Bee-watching along with the heady scent of lavender makes for a very enjoyable and sleepy summers afternoon. Painting my mum's garden was totally Freudian though, I was thinking 'meadow' at the time.

My husband brought me some tea in bed one morning, bringing the tea in this funky teapot. (I married a sweetie) It was the first time we used it and I'm really glad I had the forethought to get up and take the tea into the living room because the pot dribbled the tea all over the tray, the coffee table (tea table?) and the floor! I'm so glad I didn't pour it in bed! So it turns out I have a lovely new teapot that is really unusable that will look pretty sitting on a shelf, gathering dust after all. Oh well. I love the colours so it will look nice on that shelf 😉

The pottery painting day was meant for the ladies and children but my husband decided he would stick around after seeing this:

This mug holds more tea than my teapot! He says he's going to put a cactus in it

Not a bad paint job, eh? He's a sweetie and a big kid!

                                                                  *B*

Tea Dishes and a Marvellous Afternoon Tea

As I write this the sky is a hazy grey and people are walking around clutching their umbrellas. Dull weather but not a dull day. My view from the window is of the River Esk in Whitby where I'm spending a restful week after the fuss and exhaustion of a wedding party.

I want to show you what I made using the tutorial for the little dishes mentioned in my last post. As I explained in that post my brother and his wife have had a second wedding reception in Britain as most of his family and friends couldn't attend the actual wedding which was held in Italy.

My brothers Italian wife wanted afternoon tea which is quite a novel dining experience for non-Britons, I've learned.

We had a selection of tea on each table for people to help themselves to so I made dishes to display them in. They needed to be a different size and shape than the square dishes I made to accommodate enough tea bags for all 8 guests at each table but the principle is the same.

Originally, my mum who was the party organiser, gave me some plastic tubs and asked me to cover them in fabric to be used as tea trays. But I thought sewing some trays would be much nicer so I decided used the tubs as a rough size guide instead.

 I measured the tubs and compared their size to different brands of tea, I've never noticed how varied in size they are before. The sides of the tub are too high and the bottom needs to be a bit wider. So I quickly calculated/guessed at an alternative size and got cutting.

If you would like to make tea trays like mine the dimensions I used are 17.5 cm x 20.5 cm, the inner rectangle that forms the base is about 4cm in from the edges. I'm not going to write a tutorial here as these are made in exactly the same way as the original which I found on a Spoonful of Sugar. 

The fabric I used was given to me by my mum and is quite stiff but not heavy and I have no idea what it is. It's stiffness worked well with these trays though. I decided to use a polyester wadding this time instead of the fleece interfacing I used last time which may have been a mistake as the trays were a bit more floppy than I would have liked. To counter the floppiness I experimented with quilting them but I had a lot of trouble with the marker I was using. I used an air erasable pen to mark out circles to quilt but they disappeared too quickly so I went over the circles a few times with the pen which then took a long time to disappear and reappeared with real vigour upon being pressed with my iron. Argh.. This is the pen I use to make pattern markings when I sew bags and is clearly the wrong tool for quilting. I've never made a quilt (as you could guess) so all of this is new to me. If you are a quilter, what marking tools do you use?

In the end I found sewing a second row of topstitch about 5mm away from the first gave enough structure to the trays. All in all I was happy with them and they served their purpose very well. 

I love this yellow teapot

They looked very vintage and sweet sitting on the prepared tables in amongst the china, sandwiches and cake. Most importantly, my sister-in-law was very happy with the whole event and loved the afternoon tea. Mission accomplished.

                                                                         *B*