I love having a bit of a challenge, and when I saw that this weekend’s hash tag project on Instagram was teatime, I thought it would be a good opportunity to play with my tea cups…

( …nothing much has changed I suppose, since I was given my first tea set when I was about 6! )

These were my first tea cups of my collection…

I was staying in theatrical digs in Sheffield when I had just turned 20, and my landlady had an amazing collection of art deco plates on her wall.

She said she’d started collecting them years ago when no-one wanted them and they were really cheap…

Her advice to me as a young, wannabe collector was to collect something out of fashion, cheap, but always something which I genuinely liked…

So these quite rare, but chipped, Portmeirion ‘Gold Signs’ cups ( without saucers ) were my first purchases at 50p each from a charity shop in Sheffield in 1993…and they are still my most coveted cups, particularly as I’ve never found any others from the set.

( Poole, early Kathy Winkle and Susie Cooper )

I have far too many china cups now, so it was really lovely to get them out and show them off in the manner in which they were made for!