The Museum of Fortune Telling Tea Cups and Saucers

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Welcome to the Museum of Fortune Telling Tea Cups and Saucers!

This online museum is an extension of a real, physical museum that houses hundreds of fortune telling cups from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. More than just a colourful gallery of detailed images of dozens of fortune teller's tea cups and saucers, this museum also houses factual information about tea leaf reading cups, including patent drawings for a divination cups, instructional pamphlets that accompanied divination cup and saucer sets, books about tasseomancy, and historical overviews of the designers and manufacturers of tea leaf readers' cups.

Please begin your visit to my tea cup museum visit with this disclaimer: The divination cups and saucers you will see here may -- or may not -- be for sale at this or any other time, so please do not contact me with inquiries about buying or selling fortune teller's tea cups. As a museum, this a place in which to enjoy some beautiful things and learn about their history. It is a virtual tour of my own personal collection, accumulated over the course of 55 years ... and still on-growing.

SITE NAVIGATION

  • To help navigate this site, you may click on links via the Directory that appears at top left of every page.
  • Right below the Directory is a link to the Main Page -- the home or top page of the entire site.
  • Right below the Main Page link is the Community Portal, which may help put you in touch with others who read tea leaves.

TEA CUP TERMINOLOGY

In order to understand what you are looking at, here are some common terms used in the manufacture of tea sets.

  • Shape:A shape is the form of a cup, saucer, bowl, creamer, tea pot, plate, or dish. Generally speaking, most potteries have names for each of their shapes, although sometimes they only use numbers.
  • Pattern>: A pattern is a decorative design that is applied across a line of goods in one or more shapes. The same pattern may be applied to a number of shapes.
  • Transfer Pattern: A pattern applied by means of a decal before the final glaze is called a transfer. The generic term for a line of goods decorated in this way is "transferware."
  • Airbrush Pattern: A pattern applied by means of a airbrush and stencils is called "airbrushed."
  • Hand-Painted: A "hand-painted" design is one that is applied by an artist using glazing paints.
  • Pottery: Articles made of clay that have been fired in a kilm are called "pottery." The word pottery is used to refer to a company that makes ceramics for sale to the public. It may be called a pottery "company" or "factory" if it is large.
  • China: China and "china aware" are old-fashioned terms for porcelain, vitrified ware or semi-vitreous articles.
  • Earthenware A low-fired form of pottery.
  • Bone China A type of porcelain developed in England in which calcined cattle boes were added to raw clay to create a more delicate and translucent type of ceramics.


catherine yronwode

The Mystic Tea Room

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