Autumn Cottage Diarist

Is There a Restorer in the House?

I had a 'running away' moment (two hours) this afternoon - to the Antiques Arcade, of course. While I was there, I indulged a bad failing of mine - that of my tendency to rescue broken china. This was an exceptionally pretty piece though...about 12 inches long - 19th century German/Austrian, I suspect. Sitzendorf? Rudolstadt? Elbogen? I don't know yet. Not of the finest quality, as can be seen from the rather poor modelling of the foliage and somewhat harsh gilding, but the challenge appealed - and the price (£6.00 uk pounds/ $10.00) doubly so!  Well painted, though, by hand - no transfer work.

The main repairs needed, as you can see below, are two torsos which need to be re-attached to pairs of legs...oh, and then there is the small matter of a missing head :-). Nothing major there, then!

I did train to restore porcelain and pottery in the early 1980's and still have all my restoration materials, and the challenge is not as difficult as it seems. There are only a few breaks - all of which are clean - and there are heads still present from which I can take a mould for the missing one. So now that I have all this spare time to myself (ho, ho!) I thought it would be fun to take on the challenge - and perhaps post some of the results here as I go along.. What do you think??

I-Spy Treasure at the Bottom of The Garden!

 

Hello everyone! Many weeks since I have posted here, I know. Spring has sprung at Autumn Cottage and I have been busy living life rather than writing about it - I hope you have been enjoying doing so as well! All of my days at the moment are spent in catching up with all the things that I did not do last year - a large part of which effort is consumed with attempting to conquer the dishevelled garden.

I had help there this past week - (which I will update you about soon over at Autumn Cottage Garden Safaris) from my younger son Tim, part of which entailed his clearing of the ditch at the bottom of the garden. You can see in the photographs above where the bank has been cleared of weeds.

Praise and thanks had already been given to him for the work done there (I hope to plant the boggy ditch soon with springtime bog-garden flowers such as primulas) - but while I was further admiring his work today, something buried, looking 'un-plant-y' caught my eye...

'X' marks the spot in the image above where I espied some sort of rim in the ground...('Y' indicates my trowel handle, stuck in the ground, for size comparison). As you can imagine, the trowel got busy once I saw what might be buried there! The soil was loose and came away easily, revealing this lovely pot-sherd: made in soft terracotta, wheel thrown and decorated with a hand-scratched pattern below the rim. As you can also see, it is quite a size - about nine inches long against the one-foot ruler.

The glazed inside of the pot

The curve on the sherd shows just how big it must have been when intact - I matched it to the manhole cover on a drain in the garden - it was almost of the same curvature - and the manhole cover is 30 inches in diameter - quite some pot!

I suspect the pot to have been a shallow dough mixing/proving bowl from a Victorian kitchen here at the cottage, but cannot be sure. Any archaeologists reading this? Your opinion would be more than welcome - but I think I need to to take a visit to a museum to get this properly identified.