Hawken School, Gates Mills, Ohio – Part II

…continued

Ralph collects cufflinks, and a dealer who specializes in sewing items and pottery told us he had a new batch of costume jewelry, including cufflinks. So he put all the links in a bag and sold them to Ralph for a very low price. Now Ralph likes to wear a pair and then takes them off and gives them to anyone who admires them. Jewelry in another booth was made from broken china pieces. The flowers or marks from an old bowl were cut out and mounted in silver.

Our upstairs hall is filled with pictures made from unusual materials, including coal, tinfoil, sand, feathers or cork. We have six cork pictures, some from China, some from England or Germany. They all date from the 19th century. At the show, we bought the first cork picture box we had ever seen. It has a framed, carved, cork castle on top of a wicker box lined with blue silk. Wish we knew more about cork carvings. They are still sold to tourists in China.

Our biggest buy was a carved wooden bear (19 inches tall) and a carved wooden crescent man-in-the-moon (16 inches tall). They were in a booth filled with wood carvings from the Philippines that are handmade molds for papier-mâché toys, candy containers and even full-size folk-art figures called taka. Although the making of molds and papier-mâché in the Philippines dates from the 1920s, these carvings were from the 1960s. The largest wooden figure, a full-size man, was marked $1,800; others were as low as $100.