These cups are the fun thing I wanted to share last week. At new year I found a little jug and sugar bowl in this design in a charity shop. I bought them for Graham and he loved them so much he decided we should try to collect a set and started browsing the net for matching items. I could see thirty years or so of ebay browsing stretching out in front of us... but few weeks later I was nosing around flickr thinking how terrible it was that I hadn't got any ideas of what to get Graham for his birthday when I came across this photo and it was in Claire's photostream! Claire! The same Claire who was my best friend's teenage penpal and who now sells some of my goodies on my behalf! She had found these beauties in a charity shop and was planning to sell them in sets of two. I nearly shrieked for Graham to come and look, when my calculating little mind started ticking over and I sent a high speed secret email to Claire instead, asking her to please sell all six cups to me for a fair price. However, it turns out Claire doesn't do fair prices... and she gave them to me instead! We finally settled on a trade off of a mermaid embroidery. How lovely was that? Well, I don't have time to make a mermaid embroidery right now so I prepared a little gift package as a surprise deposit of sorts and went to meet Claire for the exchange when Graham was out at work. It was most espionage like and I felt like I was going to see a man about a dog!
This is what I gave Claire in the meantime.
The Big Daddy lino print is what I had made for Graham's birthday but I printed lots of them. Most of them (including this one) I printed on the patterned insides of recycled envelopes. I like them and had forgotten how satisfying printing was, even with the hideous finger injuries and various bloodstains! Graham seemed to like the one he got for his birthday too. I might try to get a proper photo of one of the lino prints over the weekend. The other handmade elements in Claire's parcel were one each of my
collaged Dot and Pat postcards, a French pop compilation cd and a jar of
Apes in Capes apple and tomato chutney. The little plastic camera shows pictures of famous holiday destinations and I had to buy one for myself too because it was so much fun. And, of course, there's the obligatory fortune teller fish. No package from me would be complete without one, although they have literally doubled in price in the last six months. Twenty pence now! Ha!
This whole coincidence made me so cheery. It was just too perfect! I found it so hard to keep it a secret from Graham. I'm sure he must have been made suspicious by how excited I was by his birthday. Still, I managed to mess up the day's entertainment for tradition's sake. Ever since the time I took Graham all the way to Arran just to eat a picnic in the rain in a grey concrete car park, his birthdays have never quite gone according to plan.... This year I blew his mind (literally) with an unexpectedly hot curry and then failed to take him to see a film because the only seats left were at opposite sides of the cinema. Thank goodness I had the top gifts to redeem myself with!
Posts
