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I've blogged about broken-pottery mosaic before but I've taken some new pictures, including one of our umbrella stand, a mosaic-ed drainpipe. It's so heavy you have to wheel it along to move it! Also a necklace and a bracelet that use found shards -- I love them.

Aunty Winnie's heirloom table -- mine for £50!

Scraping the barrel now? Trying to make it to 50 collections...

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seaside postcards

 This is actually a 'real' collection in the sense that I've gone out looking for very specific postcards to add to it and have invested time and (a small amount of) money in it.

     They are postcards on a seaside theme, carefully chosen with art projects in mind, so a lot of them have people in the foreground:

I especially love these washed out looking ones with many people wandering around:

There are subsets of Butlins cards, shading into 'seaside structures' and 'bright lights', also Blackpool. I love both the popular culture of the seaside and the idea of people captured unawares, so these cards are a very rich source of imagery for me.

structures

Butlins

Ooh, makes me want to head for the edge of the land... Here are a couple of my (big -- A1-size) pictures based on postcards:

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Some advertising cards and assorted packaging

The cable car on this Tobler box slides up the lid

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oldish pop-up books

Camp cowboys

In this version of The Wizard of Oz you view the Emerald City through magic glasses and secret messages appear

Pinocchio

Alice falling down the rabbit hole

Mini collection 41 -- My treasures

This is the first collection I ever made. It's my 'treasures' from when I was a very small child. I've kept them all this time, but mostly without looking at them, and now if I find them again (which I did by chance yesterday evening), I wonder at the strangeness of these ill-assorted objects. They meant everything to me from when I was about six or seven onwards. I would obsessively sort through them and scrutinise them, particularly any 'jewels' which I would hold up to the light and look through for hours. Honestly, it was very strange. I specially loved anything with iridescence.
     So this is really the birth of me as a collector.

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some celluloid friends

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just a few nice buckles. Sorry one's out of focus!

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Here are some old patchwork quilts, which I love. The two bigger ones in the picture above we use on our bed in winter.

 The quilt with triangular pieces was (we were told) made by sailors on board ships on long journeys. The fabric is their old shirts. This could of course have been dealer's hokum but it pleased me immensely to think of hoary old sea salts sitting on deck sewing the quilt that was now on my bed. It is embroidered with the name of a ward in a hospital where I guess it had been donated. The old flannel cloth is very soft.

The other large quilt seems very old and is in quite bad condition. The cloth has 'ripened' and is falling away from the backing. I mend it every so often but it's getting very fragile now.

Some nice fabrics in the smaller quilt too, mostly satins and silks.

This one is hard to photograph because we had it framed so it's behind glass. It's a cushion cover made of cigarette silks. The back is great too -- it's crazy patchwork. I thought we'd had it framed so that you could display either side, but when I took it down you could only see this side. It hangs in our loo.

Finally, this last quilt isn't old, or not very. In fact it's 15 years old as I made it for my son when he was born. The only interesting thing to say about it is that the pattern is one I glimpsed on a TV news bulletin -- it was on a quilt hanging up on the wall in Colonel Gaddafi's desert tent!
     I hope you like my quilts -- I feel quite passionate about them.

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three old chocolate boxes -- wish I had more of them

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Japanese sweets and biscuits (mostly)

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my life in badges -- almost: the many found badges skew the picture somewhat!

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1970s gift-tags (saved since childhood)

Never one to back down before a challenge. The collections will go on...

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Just a very few small elephants. Oh no, are the little collections running out of steam? I'll have to focus my mind...

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some rather sombre magic lantern slides

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radios -- and a rogue toy tv

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Seaside souvenirs and fun

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Some heads (not all) including some clowns (still not quite all) and a few stray deer from the herd to the left

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some beloved clowns -- not all

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old cardboard eggs plus a wooden one with a strange 'surprise'

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cracker toy ships and a boat