Monday, February 09, 2009
Posted by Miss Neddy at 10:39 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related Teapots

The recent Chinese New Year festivities brought several merchants from China with interesting wares to sell, such as jade sculptures, distinctive snacks, traditional embroidery and of course, tea sets. Several years ago I bought a stone tea-set. The stone is drilled into and slowly carved and polished into a teapot shape. It can be fairly hard to do since a teapot can’t be too thick, but over-polishing can easily lead to the stone cracking or a hole resulting from the stone being worn too thin.

The set I bought this time around was not as lovely as the one I bought previously, but then again, it is more than a hundred dollars cheaper. The surface is unpolished, so it looks like a murky black clay pot under certain lighting conditions. I hope to be able to nurture it into a soft velvety shine eventually. The stone used for making the teapot is reportedly high in selenium, and liquids that have be poured into the pot will be infused with trace amounts of selenium. The brochures that came with the pot extolled the virtues of selenium intake, which includes curing constipation, easing diabetes, helping with arthiritis and numerous other ailments. I would take the health claims with a pinch of…selenium, I suppose!

Pictures of the pot will be forthcoming, once I can photograph it in decent way. In my room, it looks like a vaguely teapot-shaped blotch of inkiness.