Wow, the days are flying by and it’s time for another blog post. I’ve been enjoying preparing my next few posts because they’re about some of my favourite china: Colclough and Royal Vale!

This is one of the many cake stands that I’ve created with Colclough vintage china – the Colclough lemons are mixed with a complementary flower pattern plate in the middle.

Colclough and the Vale (later Royal Vale) potteries feature strongly in the story of my shop. These were some of the first tea sets I bought and sold. They were spotted by an eagle-eyed customer in Australia who opened my eyes to the beauty and enduring appeal of this simple, stylish china. I will be forever grateful to her for sharing with me her enthusiasm for these tea sets, which sparked my interest in them and led to my continuing search of more!

I love the simplicity of some of the sets and they are very versatile pieces, particularly the ones with plain block colours. In later posts, I’ll be telling you a bit about Herbert Colclough and his Vale pottery and also share with you some of my favourite Colclough and Vale china, how it has been used in a variety of ways and some of the far flung places it’s gone to.

I love the contrast of the bright blue and yellow pieces. Sugar bowls don’t have to just contain sugar – they’re perfect for sweets too! The blue acorn cake stand is still available in my shop.

But today, I thought I’d start this series with some Colclough collages that I created recently using Pic Monkey, which is my new favourite online photo-editing and collage-creating software. It’s so easy to use and so instant! My mum and I were hooked on it for a whole evening – sending each other new collages back and forth across email!

If you’ve used Pic Monkey, I’d love to see any collages you’ve created. I’m sure it’s possible to do cleverer things that what I’ve done with mine!

As well as producing classic plain pastel china (which I’ll be talking about in a forthcoming post) Colclough also made various patterns which complement the simpler pieces perfectly!