It started in the bathroom.
I had bought some delicious musicians in Oaxaca in 2005 & George had an armadillo that he had gotten in Mexico before we met.
The musicians got situated on a parquet backgammon board I found in Maine. I came to think of that zone as my "doll house". The characters were added to (mostly from my bird collection) & moved around to create simple scenarios.
Parades kept on happening. The marching band helped!
One of the standard ones was the armadillo, the odd pitcher from (I thought) Iran (wrong) & the hand lotion pumper.
Well one thing led to another & finally it occurred to me that a pitcher parade on a grander scale was wanting to happen. So Sunday afternoon the parade was assembled! More or less in size order.
I love it that the Snow Goose by the Inuit artist Elisapee Ishululaq is also headed in the right direction & watching over the whole event!Members of the parade introduced.
I've rarely seen this kind of silver work around glass. There was a bowl to match, but it broke. It came from my grandmother Garrison's home.
The covered pitcher was in my childhood home. We put maple syrup in it.
I found this small pitcher in a ceramics-do-it-yourself business. I painted & stamped the threes, sixes, & nines onto the surface & it was fired in a kiln. All this in honor of Joslyn's 30th & my 60th birth year.
She got a much larger pitcher than this one.
The Himalayan yak butter tea server was purchased by George in 1958 when he went around the world in celebration of his graduation from the Naval Academy. I polished it. I didn't know it was brass & copper.
When I was growing up my mother would occasionally put on a "high tea"on early winter evenings. She made us hard boiled eggs, toast with cinnamon sugar & butter, & tea with cream. On the tea tray was a now-long-gone silver teapot with an ebony handle, a hot water pot (to dilute too-strong tea), a strainer, & creamer & sugar vessels. All very elegant & much loved. I have the water pot, now used as a vase.
The crystal water pitcher comes from George's parents.
The copper & brass pitcher my mother bought on our way to Vermont for a Harvest Festival gathering in Putney. She bought it from a craftsman on the way there. I have always associated it with her red hair & the colors she wore. Its grace also reminds me of her.
The silver water pitcher was a wedding gift to my grandmother Harwood in 1901. The monogram on it ABR for Annie Bowland Reed is on the bow-belly of the pitcher (bow as in the front of a boat).
Nancy Walker, a US/Canadian ceramicist, made this pitcher that I use as a vase.
The decanter was purchased by George's parents in the 1950s when George's father was posted in the US foreign service in Johannesburg.
The art deco porcelain pitcher I found in an antique store in Vancouver. It developed a serious crack, so I had it mended by a Japanese craftsperson skilled in kintsugi.
The didn't-make-the-cut collection (not in the parade)....
That was fun to do! That's it for now.
