Bowls in Late Afternoon Sun

My food gets served up in a bowl.  Nothing special, stainless steel with a wide base so that I can't tip it over, and it won't get broken.

It smells of stainless steel.  There are days when I wish someone would put my food in a nice glass or ceramic bowl.  My humans always eat off ceramics, and there is no shortage of bowls to choose from. F has travelled around a bit over the years but long ago decided against buying labelled souvenirs, choosing instead (where she could find them) to buy a handmade ceramic bowl, and preferably purchased directly from the person who made it.  So ours is the table of the mismatched bowls; every one with a story.

There's the yellow coffee bowl bought in Wellington after her first ever cafe latte, served in a bowl in an artist's cafe upstairs in an old wooden warehouse somewhere in the centre of Wellington. She had just finished university and was travelling for training in her first law firm job - and this cafe felt all hip and trendy, and F felt all professional and 'with it'. And their coffee bowls were for sale. That little yellow bowl started it.

This might get messy - F is fighting blogger for the right to put her photos wherever she wants them in the story....

Maybe the photos have to be inserted first and the text wrapped onto them as step 2.... not write first and illustrate later.

The blue glass bowl is the only one that is truly part of a set.  It too dates from that Wellington trip and F doesn't believe they are handmade despite being bought  from an artist's gallery; but... does anyone else out there have a 'thing' for blue glass?

This one was a gift from the people she worked for all the way through university when she graduated and resigned her job as a cook in their restaurant.  It was labelled an 'olive bowl'.  It looks like a flat tile held down in the middle and pulled up a bit round the edges.  We live in the right place now for it to get more use than it does.  Perhaps pulling all this stuff out has reminded her...

Cyprus December 1994. F was there to join a tanker ship which carried oil from Novorossiysk to a power station in Cyprus.  She had a few days in a ship-management company in Limassol waiting for the ship to arrive and did one round trip over Christmas and New Year - spending New Year in Russia. There is no bowl from Russia, there wasn't much of anything other than vodka (and beetroot) available in Novorossiysk on that trip.

Latvia, specifically Riga, June 1995.  F was living in UK by then, at university studying maritime law.  She went to visit the family of someone she met at sea last December.  It involved a crash course in Russian (which was not particularly welcome in post-USSR Latvia but the family were mixed Latvian/Ukrainian and interestingly Russian was the language they all had in common).  This bowl is called Valentina.

This is one of F's favourite little bowls and she can't remember where it came from.  Oops!

It is probably UK.  There was an interval here filled by some coffee mugs purchased from a very interesting 'potter' in Alderney.

This 'pair' are by Eddi Leet and were bought from his workshop in Parnu (Estonia) in 1999 when F spent a summer sailing around the Baltic, the blue crystal glazing represents cornflowers that grow wild in Eddi's summertime countryside.

There are loads of ceramic artists in NZ, and our cupboards are also stuffed with salad bowls punch bowls, plates and ashets from there, but NZ is represented in this collection by something unique to NZ - kauri.  A wooden bowl of kauri.

Hayling Island Sailing Club had a craft sale just before Christmas in quite a few years while we lived in Havant .  That was the club F and Mr B did most of their sailing from.  This one is the HISC bowl.

Mr B's daughters live in Louth.  This delicate porcelain bowl came from a Louth Christmas Fair.

These kuksa, F made herself at a woodland camp in Herefordshire in UK.  I've posted a couple of times about her wooden spoons and these were an experiment in big spoonmaking really, but are a souvenir of that holiday.

 
These are the Welsh bowls.  F's niece Mati came to visit us (all the way from NZ) and F took her on a little tour to North Wales to take the mountain train up Snowden, and on the way back stopped at a little pottery where she couldn't choose between 3 bowls so bought them all.  

The colours are earth and sea.

And here we are in Greece.  The fish bowls probably aren't handmade.  They came from a gift shop in Piraeus, but the fish seemed appropriate. 

The bowl with the jewel-like green interior glaze is from Polytimi Biliona's pottery in Nafplio.  It has only been with us since F went to the play at Epidavros. (you can see its interesting exterior in the NZ Kauri bowl photo above.)

So there we have it. Not a bowl from everywhere (fortunately), but not because she hasn't looked for them everywhere she goes, and no doubt will continue to do so.

So you would think she could spare one, just one, to jazz up my mealtimes.