The internet: where one thing leads to another

[shewhomust]

I loved this photo by ceramics artist Paul Scott:

To judge from the tags, it shows sprig moulds in the Spode archive. But what are sprig moulds? Ah, here's a video in which a potter shows how he molds sprigs to decorate Wedgewood Jasperware - I'd embed it, but LJ seems not to want to do that this evening... - the sprigs being the white decorations on the coloured body of the vase or dish or whatever it's going to be (whose colour comes from minerals added to the clay. The little sprigs are lined up on a slab of clay which is "cheese hard" - much firmer but still with some residual moisture. So that's another technical term...

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

aha, they be fur mouldin' yer sprigs, me duck.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

And indeed they are!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love the art of craft.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Just so.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The designs are lovely, and actually, what I thought of when I saw them was of the backside of Japanese 100-yen coins:

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

This is so pretty - and sent me off in search of a picture of a thruppeny bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armeria_maritima) with the thrift design on the reverse!

The little moulds, of course, are designed to be components in a larger design: but it's their simplicity that is so appealing...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

How pretty the coin is--and isn't it interesting the wildflowers that we choose to honor on coins. There's probably a story to it, or at least history behind it.

What I like about the molds--it's more true of them than of the Japanese coin, which is more static than I remembered it--is the flowingness of them, the way the design curls. It makes sense that they're part of a larger pattern.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

There's probably a story to it, or at least history behind it.

Why they chose that flower for the thruppeny bit is easy enough: the sea pink is also known as thrift, and that theme of frugality, eaconomy, seemed suitable for a small denomination coin.

But why the sea pink is also known as thrift is another question entirely - ah, here we are: Geoffrey Grigson says it is 16th century, and means something that thrives (in this case, is evergreen).