F is for Follow-up - Elephants!

We like an elephant or two here, and further to the decorative china ones we saw the other day, Brian Berke remembered some sets he got from Sri Lanka, which I think is a new tag, and it's not often we add a new country to the tag-list, so a definite feather in the cap there Brian!

 

Small wooden elephants, carved by hand and painted in bright colours, you see them around, and they are obviously a touristy thing, but the little designs on them are scaled-down representations of the actual decorative elements painted on real elephants when they are to participate in a parade or wedding ceremony.

Both sets from both sides, one wonders how many colours you need to find to have a 'full' sample!

Scaled with a Crescent figure, we can see they are about 25/30mm, but they do come in various sizes, I have vague memories of very large 15"+ ones artfully arranged in old fireplaces (as mug coasters/small coffee-tables), or smaller 6"-10" ones on mantelpieces or bookshelves.

And it just so happened that I had three teeny-tiny ones come-in recently in a mixed lot from somewhere, which we may or may not have seen already, everything's gone - if not full pear-shaped - at lets a bit 'sixes & nines', and I've lost track of where everything was in the grand plan! Note; one has a red underside instead of the black on all the others?

Seen here, you can see they are little more than about 10mm, and I've shot them with another - more realistically painted - glazed china elephant and a bisque one in a similar, but matt, finish. The bisque being solid, the shiny one, hollow, like a mini-fairing, which he probably was, part of another family of minis!

 

 

This is the TBS box (to be sorted) of elephants which have come in over the last four or five months, it's almost endless! We should have seen the biggie ('soft play' is, I believe, the term for these huge rubberised animals or dinosaurs) before, a few years ago. But he turned-up again when I was clearing the attic, his plastic bag having slipped down the back of something. A bag which was reminding me he came from Tiger Stores (now Flying Tiger), the bag is beginning to crumble, so must be a biodegradable one!

Little & Large . . . "Hay-heh Syd, Climb-up!"