The way these pea-soup green walls set off many of my mugs almost resigns me to them. The mug on the left is one I picked up in a thrift store fifteen to twenty years ago. I rarely use it now, because the one in the middle is one of several Bybee pottery mugs I own. Bybee is a very tiny town in eastern Kentucky where many generations of a family have been making pottery for a long time. http://www.bybeepottery.com
We went there once or twice when I was a child, and watched the potters at work, and bought seconds. Nowadays they're so fashionable that seconds are snapped up as they come out of the kiln, more or less, and they have a store (in what was the grocery until I was in school) in the town I grew up in (now surrounded by Louisville, grrrr) where I bought several more pieces a few years after I moved back to Kentucky.
The mug on the right is especially appropriate for May, Kentucky Derby month.
It commemorates the 100th Kentucky Derby in 1977. Louisville Stoneware is also an old pottery.
(I really need a macro lens.)
I don't remember who gave it to my parents, but I remember my father trying it out for drinking coffee. He seldom drank coffee at home, because of my mother's coffee allergy. Since they were both great coffee lovers, he felt her pain. It sat in the back of the cabinet for years, and I took it home with me and also found it unsatisfactory for coffee. Something about the size and shape: the coffee gets cold too soon if you fill it up, and drinking the last drops is awkward. However, I have found it very useful for drinking gazpacho from; just the right size. I won't be doing that again until I acquire another blender: the one my aunt and uncle gave us in 1968 having finally died last year. But hanging it on the wall reminds me that I have it, and might use it. I use the Bybee mug at least three times a week year round.
