Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Plastic copies of metal copies of...

Sometimes basketry, carved wood, pottery or glass items came to be made in metal for a while. Then plastic copied that. In the U.S./Europe, that happend with drinking cups, dishes, baskets themselves (those bypassed metal, generally), wheelbarrows (some are still metal, but only decorative wheelbarrows are wooden), and different kinds of chairs.

In India, there are plastic chairs that are suggestive of carved ivory.
plastic chair in India


American-designed chairs, originally wooden, some made in steel and aluminum, before plastics came along:

plastic Adirondack chairs on a porch in New Mexico
Written in 2015 and saved at Following Trails:
In India, they make plastic versions of the clay water pots they made for a long time. Before plastic, they were metal.



Where I live (and I don't know whether it's all of my ancestry's neighborhoods, too), we have plastic buckets that are like the metal buckets we had before that were the same shape as the wooden buckets that were made way before my time. I have seen wooden buckets in England and in the northeastern U.S., but not in New Mexico. Wood dries out and shrinks, in the desert. The metal bands will just fall off of an old bucket or barrel here, if it's not full of something. People use half-barrels as planters. In my front yard, now that I think of it, I have two half barrels made of plastic!

We also have plastic jugs, like for milk and for maple syrup, that are like things that were made of glass before, that were like things made of pottery before that.

https://thinkingsticks.blogspot.com/2008/10/hand-pumps-siphons-water-containers.html


This topic has sat unfinished for a while. I'll post it and bring photos back to it as I come to them.

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