Happy New Year!  Hope 2018 is going to be a good one for everyone.

Thought I’d share a picture of something we made for ourselves just before Christmas – it was a prototype for a Christmas present that I think turned out quite well.   These are some Victorian/early 20th C bottles that we found last year when we were mudlarking along the Thames in England.  There are medicine bottles, soft drink bottles (including a Cobb bottle stopped by a glass marble), a beer bottle, liquor bottles, an ink bottle and  a couple of meat paste jars.  Our friend, for whom we made the Christmas present, has many more of these types of bottle (and better) as he spent a year in England and got into mudlarking in a big way.  Apparently, the Thames has something like 22 feet of mud that contains stuff that goes back to the Romans and before, and objects are routinely found lying on the mud as the tide churns up what’s buried.  Amazing!