Thrift Store treasures and Armenian pottery

I confess. I LOVE thrift stores. It is probably because I am cheap, coupled with having been a starving grad student for so long, but there are few things that please me more than finding a good deal at a thrift store. Like my solid wood bookshelf that was $25. Or my solid wood wine rack with two shelves, one of which has glass doors, for $40.

One find I am particularly pleased with is a butcher-block kitchen cart I found a few years back for $10. We use it all the time...it holds the cookbooks underneath and the papertowel holder on top. So when I went to a friend's house last year for Thanksgiving and saw she had a similar cart with hand-painted tiles inlaid on the top, it gave me an idea.

There is a sizable Armenian community in Jerusalem, and one thing they are known for is their pottery. Each of us, when we leave the Consulate, gets an Armenian tile "tombstone" with our name and the dates of our service in Jerusalem on it. So I thought it would be cool to get some Armenian pottery tiles inlaid into my thrift store kitchen cart.

M and I went to Sandrouni's in the Old City today (George Sandrouni is one of the best known of the Armenian potters) and picked out a design for the cart. The design is one from an Armenian mosaic located just inside Damascus Gate (the gate in my userpic) of a variety of birds, including an eagle representing Christ in the center. The design below is what it will look like, though the colors will be different (lots of dark blue). Of course, I am spending far more on the tiles than the table cost, but when it is finished, we will have something really unique from our time here.