EKRA | Emily Kircher Recycling Artist
200 pounds of china.
Posted at 11:14 PM on January 5, 2013

Right.  So, on my quest to find materials to make mosaics with, I remembered that one time I saw a china replacement store that sold their chipped china by the pound.  I couldn’t remember their name except that it had a bird name in it.  I googled and googled, and finally found it again: Robbin’s Nest.  They have a page on their site that says 75 cents a pound for chipped china.  Okay, I plugged in 1 pound and went to the check out page to see what the shipping would be like.  On that page it said, all orders over $150 ship for free!  Whoo-hoo! I typed in 200 pounds, sent my credit card number, and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Ugh, for 9 days I didn’t hear anything, so I e-mailed to say, “Hey, where’s my chipped china?!”  The response was, “Oh, I e-mailed you, but I guess I typed it in wrong and you didn’t get it.  Chipped china doesn’t ship for free so I wanted to see if you wanted to pay about $100 to have this shipped to you.”  Grrrr. I went back to the site and yes, on the chipped china page, it says no discounts apply to it.  The owner gave me a few shipping quotes for different amounts of china, and I went with 100 pounds instead, I’m used to paying for shipping, and the amount she quoted me sounded good.  I must admit, I took a minute to Google map it, the place is in Kentucky and I thought maybe I could drive there, but it is 4 hours away.  The shipping cost was a lot less in 8 hours of driving in time and gas and road meals.  Okay, 100 pounds ordered.  And I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally, I e-mailed again to say, “Where’s my chipped china?!?!” except what I really wrote was “Hi! Just checking in to see if this order has shipped yet.”  I got the reply that yes, part of it had shipped and that I should get it in two days.  But, about an hour later, I got an e-mail from UPS saying my package was just accepted for delivery.  Hmmmm….  Anyways, I received the first 50 pounds of my 100 pounds that I ordered yesterday.

I had no idea was to expect.  I was expecting a box all jumbled up, and that is exactly what I got.  The first thing I had to do was separate it all out to see exactly what I had to work with.  I was thinking there would be a lot of diversity among the china, but I was wrong.  Here’s what I got:

About 20 pounds of this blue and white pattern.  I was really pleased with this because there is a lot of usable material here, not a lot of white, but there is so much of it!

A few pounds of this pastel floral, pretty, but  a lot of white.

A handful of gold printed edges.

That was all the first box (I got two 25 pound boxes delivered).  In the second box I got quite a bit of this gray border with pink rose and gray leaf middle.

 

This silver lined wheat print.  Blah, a lot of white!

A couple of gold rimmed plates, that somehow survived the trip without breaking – these boxes were packed with one sheet of bubble wrap on the bottom, and one on the top, with the middle being a free for all!  There were notes all over the outside of the box to the UPS man that these boxes would rattle, there was broken china in it for mosaics, and to not return it to the sender!

And this one plate that also survived.

And I had a such a lot of good stuff in the craft room, that I had a forest friend come to the window to take a peek!

 

So, I know what you are going to ask me:  How many frames can you make with this?  I don’t know.  Would you order from them again?  I’m not sure.  It is pretty difficult to find plates to work with here, so having supplies, even if it is a lot of one kind of pattern, is better than having no supplies!  Plus, I was working with that blue and white pattern this morning, and I already cut it so that it will make at least 4 different types of mosaic frames, even though all of them will be blue and white, they will have different visual textures to them based on what parts of the pattern I use for each mosaic.  So, overall, I’m pleased.

Oh, and remember last time I wrote about how I crocheted some and it didn’t hurt and how I didn’t want to jinx it? I totally jinxed it.  I haven’t been able to crochet since.  I think I need to put myself on a strict schedule of maybe 5 minutes a day to rebuild and retrain my muscles.  We’ll see how that goes.

  • Jennie

    Thanks for the info, Emily! I had wondered about the china. It’s quite a risk when you have no idea what you’ll be getting, huh? If you run out, let me know. I can do as well as that or better, I think. I’ve never hunted for china for mosaics, but if you tell me what to look for, I’d be happy to do it :)

  • Emily

    Thanks Jennie!