My great-grandmother used to collect teacups, and I have one of hers. It's beautiful, black on the outside of the cup and white with a black rose on the inside. The saucer is white with black roses. It was always my favorite of her cups when I was little, so when she passed away and my sister and I were allowed to each choose one of her teacups for our own, I picked that one.
I've taken to collecting my own in the last few years, and since I'm fortunate enough to have a father who's a pilot, I get them from various places around the world. I love getting these as gifts. They're so beautiful and stately-looking. Even the ones that are very dramatic, like the peacock teacup I bought for myself a few years ago at Market Spice, a tea shop in Pike Place Market.
The latest gift was a teacup from Luxembourg, originally designed sometime in the 18th century. My darling father managed to talk the mostly French-speaking shoplady into selling him one teacup and saucer out of a set of 8 (I didn't really need 8 of the same cup, as he correctly intuited), and it's lovely. In fact, I had chamomile in it just this morning.
Either last year or the year before, I can't remember which, I received a teacup from Dubai. I don't really think of Dubai as a place where you would want to drink tea, since it's sort of a broiling desert, but apparently they do! I consider this the manliest of my teacups, and so I generally serve Patrick using this one. ;)
My wonderful great-aunts also got in on the teacup-gifting, and some time ago they gave me a lovely cup and saucer from England. Whenever I use those flowery treasures, I pretend I'm sipping tea in my ancient English estate whilst watching horses gallop around and ghosts bang on things in the abandoned wings. Hey, I have a very active imagination!
I also have several teapots, most of which are fairly uninteresting. One is a traditional English Brown Betty, which is basically a really big, brown teapot. No frills, just practicality. I have another at work, which is made of Pfaltzgraff stoneware, and it holds the heat in really well. Yes, I do occasionally drink entire pots of tea at work. Not very often, though, as my schedule has been quite full. The other two teapots I own are kind of interesting. One is small and completely see-through, intended for those expanding tea "flowers" you can get in stores. The other is designed after a phoenix, and it's quite elaborate, if a bit aggravating to wash.
I need to get some sort of actual display cabinet for all of this stuff. Right now it's crammed into cupboards wherever I could find room for it. As well as being less pleasurably visible, it's also not really that safe. The cabinets aren't secured in the event of an earthquake, and I would hate to lose all my delicate tea implements. Maybe I'll try to come up with something. Anyway, there are still some tea things that I covet. One of these is a gorgeous canna lily teapot from something called the Franz collection. It's the same collection where my firebird teapot and peacock teacup came from. This teapot is designed to look like it's entirely made out of leaves and flowers. I will leave it to you to imagine how much such a creation makes my plant-loving heart swoon.
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