Chipped china? Whoever wants chipped china? Very rarely though, but I do. If it ticks certain boxes.
This rectangular Arabia dish ticked a lot of boxes and came home with me. I adore 60's era illustration, and vintage Arabia is very coveted - to be honest if this little dish was without its faults I couldn't afford to buy it. In the home country of Arabia their designs and their value is widely known so it's unlikely that I might find one in perfect condition for my budget.
And for my budget, I payed top money for chipped china - four whole euros...! Glad I did, because I love looking at this Pohjanmaa design by Raija Uosikkinen from the early sixties. What do you think, would you have bought it, chipped corners and all?
When stuff I buy shows signs of use by its previous owner, I can't help but try to guess about the details of that history.
I keep wondering about this one too... how come the top corners got chipped so badly? My theory is that maybe an old pipe smoking gentleman used it as an ashtray, to knock his pipe out in...I guess we'll never know.
As to the design, Pohjanmaa is the western part of Finland where people wear pointy boots like
these ones and wonderful linens and knitted sweaters in their folk attire.
In the little background scenery there are town houses and traditional old log houses. Those particular ones without any window look like the storage barns for grain they used to build everywhere in Finland. We have some around here too; I took this photo last spring.
Now, what's odd about this old wooden jigsaw puzzle here?
When I saw it in the junk shop, I noted to myself that it looked odd, then I walked on. Later I went back for it and bought it, so I could keep guessing about it at home.
The scene it depicts looked strange and unlikely to me. I thought, in what earthly circumstance or land would a giraffe and a small family of forest deer be seen together, grazing happily?
My theory was that the stag is there only for scale to show how big a giraffe is, an animal not many Europeans would have seen for real in olden times... My boyfriend thought that this could easily be in Africa as deer live there too.
After a bit of research I found that he was right as spotty fallow deer do indeed live in Southern parts of Africa. So does the majestic
red deer whose antlers in this puzzle are pointing towards snowy white peaks which are much in the likeness of Mount Kilimanjaro. Who'd have thought that holes in my knowledge of geographical zoology will be filled in by an old pictorial jigsaw puzzle?
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