In Boleslawiec’s pottery factories come lasting beauty: polish pottery plates and platters.  Every plate is a practical gift, and the presentation is wonderful.  Polish pottery stoneware is elegant formal dinnerware perfect for entertaining.  Family gatherings, formal business dinners, or everyday use, polish pottery plates are practical and beautiful.  So many patterns are available, they even mix and match well.  Look at the wonderful selection that is offered.  Boleslawiec Polish Pottery dinnerware is dishwasher, microwave and oven safe. Polish pottery platters serve a slightly different purpose.  Perfect for serving your famous Key Lime pie, or a hot apple pie a la mode, the platters are very nice.  Boleslawiec platters are smaller than regular plates.  Look below at some sample patterns. Some pictures link to a wider selection.

 

Later I expanded my Polish pottery shopping and have been able to give entire tea sets to my mothers and sisters. I selected teacups, sugar bowls, creamers, trays, and of course teapots matching each individuals separate personality. With so many different styles to select from it was enjoyable to choose some of the more extraordinary intricate designs for one person and elegant adornments for another. Looking at each of the teapots I could appreciate the thoughtful patterns and shapes as works of art created with love. It does not take much to show classy hospitality when the Bolesławiec pottery pieces create an atmosphere of their own, emphasizing the characteristics of Polish hospitality of offering your guest the best you have. Sharing teatime with the Pottery from Poland that was crafted from the heart builds irreplaceable memories; created with love and served with love, cherished for a lifetime.

But why figurines?  Surely, humans of the time had more important things to do, such as searching for food, finding cover from Earth’s relentless elements, and fighting off those pesky sabretooth tigers!  There could be several answers to this, but two are worthy of closer consideration.

Before Jesus, before Moses, and definitely before L. Ron Hubbard, human worship consisted of many beliefs, most of which were (in some form or another) animalistic.  These roving bands of humans were confused about the workings of the world, and to help explain some of its mysteries, they created belief systems based around animals.  To pass down the traditions, some people created animal figurines to help their tribesmen (and women) envision these animal deities while stories about them were being told.

Another reason we are finding these animal figurines from thousands of years ago could simply be from the fact that humans have incredible imaginations, and some among us have a yearning to express these imaginations through art.  While many of the animal figurines found are most likely religious in nature, it would be foolish to say that they all have religious meaning, since it is very possible that some of them were spontaneous works of art.

Today, animal figurines are created from a variety of materials:  metal, stone, wood, plastic, porcelain, and clay, as is the case with pottery.  The Easter bunny is a great example of a contemporary animal figurine.  While intricately tied to Easter in the minds of most Americans, the Easter bunny makes no cameo appearances in the Bible and is separate from Christianity (being more closely related to American Capitalism).  Nevertheless, millions (if not billions) of Easter bunny figurines have been created in the recent past, a great deal of which were made of pottery.  They range from tiny to gigantic, from monochrome to intricately painted, and from cheap to Good-God-how-much?!

Thousands of years from now, our robotic descendants will excavate a pottery Easter bunny figurine and wonder what we were thinking when we created it.