Be still my bleeding alien heart! it's Willow Ware

At our ice cream social on Saturday afternoon, I was lured into a conversation about china patterns. Translation: Laura asked me about my plates, and I swaggered right up to an overly large answer. 

I buy my plates at flea markets. I got a whole bunch at that weird little auction in Boonton years ago. Whenever I spy willow ware, I'm sidling up to the table, trying to remember which brands are old and valuable and hoping the shop proprietor has suffered a bout of angina and left her unemployed idiot son-in-law in charge so I can dicker myself a big-ass deal.

Willow ware is appealing because it comes with an ancient Chinese story, which is probably only slightly more ancient than yoga. And yoga, it turns out, bears a suspicious similarity to turn of the century Swedish gymnastics. Don't worry about it and follow my lead.  I choose to believe the marketing when the actual facts prove tragically dull.

In the willow ware story, a princess falls in love with a lowly worker. He must have been an eyeful, this worker. Scandalously, the two lovers decide to elope and take off across the bridge outside the pagoda. 

This sneaking off to get hitched does not go well. Dad goes chasing after them and kills the both of them. 

Check out the altercation in the image above. 

But they are so in love their souls flitter from their dead bodies and become the doves hovering at the top of the scene staring lovingly into each other's beaks.

*sigh*

Here's the great part. I funded some dude's kickstarter because he made this plate:

calamityware.com - go buy a plate

It's willow ware, you see, but WITH A UFO.

The UFO. calamityware.com

There is also a cat:

A steely-eyed cat. calamityware.com

I set the table with a couple of these mixed in and no one ever notices. 

On a mostly unrelated note except that I'm still on the topic of porcelain with a tenuous nautical theme, I saw this beauty a couple years ago at the museum of art and design :

by Jessica Harrison.

Gawd. I love fine dining.

photocredit: hyperallergic, by jessica Harrison.