Pots of Gold

Yesterday I joined a party of U3A members visiting The Crown Derby pottery factory, in Derby as you may have guessed.

I discovered quite a lot during our tour of the factory. Only a quarter of the china is made up of clay, half is bone ash and the remainder some sort of powdered mineral.

Designs are put on as transfers, moistened with water and eased into place by hand.  Pots go into the kiln five times, twice to bake colours in place.

The last and shortest baking is to fix the gold - almost all Crown Derby wares are gilded somewhere or other. The annual consumption of 16 kg of gold costs them about 2 million pounds, a figure reflected in the prices of goods in the shop.