Mixing pottery patterns is a good idea for all sorts of reasons. Apart from brightening up your dinner table with the different patterns, it also means that you can add a new pattern to an older, perhaps discontinued, design. If any breakages occur over the decades, you can mix and match with a new pattern which co-ordinates with your older dinner set. We often have customers telling us that they received Nicholas Mosse pieces as wedding gifts ten, twenty and thirty years ago and they are adding to their collection with newer designs as their family increases in size.
The trick with adding new collections is working out which patterns co-ordinate well and bring out the best in each other. Here are some ideas:
- Festive
If you would like to add a festive touch to your Christmas dining table, yet don’t have the space to store a Christmassy design for the other eleven months of the year, you could co-ordinate the Reindeer design with Green Lawn or the Winter Robin design with Red Lawn. We also love to mix in our Fuchsia pattern as well. In the Christmas Collection on our website - you can see more patterns to mix together.
Above: For the Christmas Season we mixed a Green Lawn Presentation Platter with and Old Rose Everyday Plate and a Medium Heart Plate in Winter Robin.
What items of crockery should you buy in the festive pattern? We would suggest purchasing pieces that will be used in the centre of the table. Jugs can be used to display flowers or can take centre stage in the middle of the table to serve milk, water or juice. Serving dishes and teapots will also work well. I also like the custard cups for serving desserts like crème caramel and our double dippers are great for serving dips.
Items like mugs can be used at mealtimes and if having a cuppa in the evenings or the middle of the day so will add a festive atmosphere throughout the day. Don’t forget to display them on your dresser too from mid November to the 6th of January.
- Seasonal Patterns
You don’t have to limit yourself to interchanging your pottery at Christmas. By having most of your crockery in one design, you can inject an autumnal or spring atmosphere by adding a few pieces. For example, your main design may be Wild Flower Meadow or Forget Me Not and then you can mix in the Light Blue Lawn or Dark Blue Lawn depending on the season.
Wild Flower Meadow
- Truly Original
Your choices in mixing and matching tableware means that your dinner table is truly original as it’s all based on your own choices. All you have to do is choose your favourite designs and decide how eclectic you want to be. If you wish to be more traditional, use two patterns. If you wish to be eclectic, use more patterns.
- Favourite Colours
Decide on your favourite colours and use that as your starting point in selecting the patterns. Blues look lovely with silver cutlery so choose from Forget Me Not, Sheep (with its blue background) and Clover (or mix and match all three designs). If you prefer reds, wines and purples, there’s a great selection amongst our other floral patterns. All of our Lawn patterns come in primary colours (red, green, dark blue and light blue) as well as white so once you pick your favourite colour, you can mix with so many of the floral and fruit patterns. Pale Blue Lawn is beautiful with Landscape (this pattern features an assortment of animals with pale blue as a background colour in many of the designs), Dark Blue is lovely with clematis and Red Lawn is wonderful with Fuchsia and Apple.
We hope you found these tips useful. We would love to know which patterns are your favourites and which patterns would you like to mix and match for your own dining table? Do tell us in the comments.
