⁠Here in Britain we were just starting to despair about the notion of different seasons as the spring seemed to have been passed over this year; but just as the first mildly warm days are reaching our shores, I am showing you some very special seasons. These four framed plates were made by Minton in 1882 and the images were painted by the famous painter Antonin Boullemier. The plates are framed in beautiful Italianate Rococo frames, and they make a wonderful quartet. Antonin

⁠As I’ve shown some bold pink designs lately, I thought to share my ruminations on Pink Power with you…⁠ Pink is often thought of as a feminine colour. I love pink, but personally, as a woman, I sometimes feel persecuted by a pink cloud of fluffy cuteness that is by some considered to be the definition of my gender… Did you know that this has not always been the case? In the 18th and 19th Century pink was equally popular among men. In fact pink used to be seen as a colour for

⁠Today I will focus on the first major porcelain factory in Britain: the Chelsea factory in London. The Chelsea factory was founded in the mid 1740s by Nicholas Sprimont, a Huguenot immigrant from Belgium. He was originally a silversmith among many other Huguenot silversmiths who fled or travelled to London from France and Belgium. Sprimont quickly realised that he could make a bigger mark by starting a factory producing something that was still very new in England: porcelain

It's a dark rainy spring morning here, and when picking a little cup for my morning coffee I was enamoured by the variously printed Spode cups from the first two decades of the 19th Century. Here, you see my favourite little coffee can with whippets ready to start the day, surrounded by two other sets. They are incredibly finely printed and today I will explain a bit about how these treasures were made. Bat printing The beautiful whippets and the set with the cute rabbits in