In love with retro Hornsea pottery

The love of things retro has blossomed in the last 10 years, which is hard to get your head around if you grew up in the 1970s. My generation have craved to break free from the brown and tired designs, large floral prints, oranges, purples and lime greens but now we are learning to love it again…

Perception is a very interesting and powerful human skill. You can be trundling along with your perception going steadily along then suddenly, flip. You see things in a completely different way. This has happened to me in the way I look at pottery, kitchenalia, fabric and decor generally in the last two or three years – I’ve started to see  through the eyes of my twenty-something daughter.

Going to antique and vintage markets and car boot sales, charity shops and sharing pinterest boards and seeing her enthusiasm for stuff I thought had been and gone and wasn’t worth a second look has turned into a love affair with all things retro.

One of the little projects I did last bank holiday was to create a quiet corner for sitting and drinking tea and thinking, or perhaps doing a bit of yarn therapy, just outside my home office in the corridor room where I store my stationary and other bits.

Its not very light in there because this is a room with no window… It was created from a longer corridor room by dividing it into two – my son’s man cave is the other part and he has the window. Funnily enough he objected to the idea of having a glass door so I could get some more light into my ‘girl cave’ but then the price of glass doors put the kibosh on that idea anyhow…

I get some light through the glass doors into my office and I’ve since added an Ikea reading lamp behind the chair. I love the duck egg blue walls, the vintage drawer shelves I made last year, the 1950s coffee table and the 1960s leather armchair, all of which belonged to my parents, who bought them when they were first married in 1962. The stripy cushion, chair fabric, rug and stool are from Ikea, which has a load of yummy retro inspired goodies at the moment.

It feels good to sit in that chair, knowing it was the one my mum held me in when I was a tiny baby. She took great care of her treasured furniture and would never update or change it – and am I happy about that now! Its still in fabulous condition apart form the wear and tear of our family life, which adds to its value for me.

Revisiting retro Hornsea pottery

Visiting car boot sales, such as the big one on York Racecourse most Saturday mornings in the summer, I’ve started to see more Hornsea pottery appearing. We had this when I was growing up too and would visit Hornsea, the pottery and the pottery shop. My parents often bought things and I am now sad that some of the items I recognise were actually still in the pantry in my mum’s house. Faced with the big job of clearing the house, I did work through things carefully but even then some of these treasures went off to the charity shop.

The trouble is, if you kept everything that might later become more desirable, you would be in danger of falling down the slippery slope towards hoarding. Stuff takes up a large amount of space and sometimes it just has to go.

I know we had jars, plates, cups and beakers like these when I was little but I don’t have any of the originals now but at least I’ve managed to find some similar…

I love the designs and I love all the colours – even the rich dark  browns are really lovely. I’ll be doing more hunting around this summer to see if I can build up a proper collection and I’ve decided to work on an Etsy UK shop too to sell off the excess that this little activity is bound to generate. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now anyway as a new way to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care. Raffling off the Spring Flower Blanket raised such an enormous amount of money but they still need more and I enjoy doing it so much.

My shopping trip on Saturday also included a quick stop off at a small Sainsburys to buy some essential supplies and I thought I would have a quick look for some of those elusive Orla Kiely special edition coffee jars by Douwe Egberts. Everyone on Instagram seems to be raving about them. Here was only one, the yellow one but when I was faffing later in the day with my photographs, it struck me how similar the flower design is to the Hornsea pottery one…

The coffee that was in there fitted perfecting into my new Hornsea coffee jar too – so now I can use the glass one for….. er well… I’ll have to think about that one. But I’m sure it will be very USEFUL ha ha ha.

Enjoy the Bank Holiday – May is a fab month!!!