A very quick one tonight, I've been having
a 'bit of a week', boiler wise! Among the items I've inherited are two ships,
in bottles, these are they . . .
This was from a Perrier Water promotion in the 1970's, a friend of Mum's (also our friend
Guy's mum!) was a promoter who used to go round supermarkets or department stores demonstrating
things and giving out free samples (Mum did too; a while later - I became
addicted to mini frozen jam-doughnuts at one point!), and as well as the bottles
of free Perrier, there were plastic
key-ring bottles (which I should have somewhere, but can't remember seeing it
for years?), and reward bonuses, and I think this was one of those.
Google and feebleBay reveal other Perrier ships in bottles, but they must
have been different promotions or regions, as I only remember Janet having a
few of these for her team. The ship - Loch Torridon, a four-masted
barque/clipper-ship; one of the last) is fascinating, although it's history
varies on the internet, some thinking it Norwegian when it foundered, some
Russian, Wiki's probably best for a primer!
I've also seen this exact model in a
different bottle, for a whiskey company's similar promotion, so the model must
have been commissioned from a commercial ship-in-bottle modelling company!
This is more of a tourist memento/keepsake,
and a fine example of blown-glasswork it is, one sail has fallen off, but
finding someone with the skill to mend it is going to take a few phone-calls,
as while there are craft glass-works about the place, there can't be many who
can do key-hole surgery with long molten rods through the end of a bottle!
It's a more fanciful model of a more
medieval type I think? That's it - two ships in bottles!
4 comments:
With some of these more modern ships in bottles, you find the base has been cut off and reattached- not sure if its the case here. I find newer boats have a plasticene sea, older ones use plaster.
Ha-ha! No Andy, that's cheating! You do see them in charity shops sometimes, but I wouldn't blog them (except maybe if I ended-up with a box-full!) as they have no 'craft', these are both trad'! The Perrier is pulled-up by the cable linking the masts, and the glass one seems to have been built-up in-situ, with hot rods, hence the bind finding someone who can fuse that sail back on (which is right at the back!), thankfully it was a simple weak-join and fall to the bottom without shattering any rigging lines, or breaking itself! But made from hot glass would leave it tempered?
H
And yes, you're right about the plasticicne . . . same colour (a nice sea green-blue) on the Whiskey version which is why I'm attributing them to a third-party, unknown, commercial maker!
H
Might not be commercial- we have a ship in a bottle made by a local fisherman, and it has a plasticene sea.
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