Delft, The Hague and Madurodam

After a relaxing morning, we went on a tour to see the Delft China Factory in Delft, Holland.  This is the famous blue pottery/china that is handpainted.

In the pictures above, you see two artists working on painting pieces.  The bottom two pictures show the display of Christmas plates and the plate created for my birth year.  There was not a plate for mom's birth year because of it being during WWII.

Our tour took us through the workshop where our guide showed us the steps for creating a thimble. In these pictures you see the area with all the molds, the kilns, and an employee sanding a plate.  Our guide showed us how they pour the clay into a mold, wait, and pull out a thimble.  Then it is put into the kiln for 20 hours. Afterwards, once it has been sanded of irregularities, the painters begin their work.  The piece is fired in the kiln a second time.  There are also pieces created using a pattern transfer and are not painted by hand.

Hand painted designs will have markings on the bottom similar to the poster.  It includes the initials of the artist. Our guide held up two plates and asked if we could determine which was hand painted and which was transfer work?  Do you know?

The plate on the left in the picture is hand painted.

After leaving Delft, we drove through the political seat of Holland called The Hague.  Our tour guide pointed out all the  embassies of the different countries, the Yugoslavian Tribunal (where a war criminal killed himself in front of the judge), and all the other UN buildings.  This picture shows the Peace Palace.  Money for this building was donated by Carnegie and each country provided something as well.

Then we traveled to see Madurodam.  This depicts a version of Holland that is 25x smaller.  Since we have not been all over Holland some of it was unrecognizable to us.  So we sought out those places we could recognize.

In these pictures, you will see canal cruise boats actually floating through the water, the monument from Dam Square, Anne Frank's house, and Westerkerk.

Here we see a tulip farm, windmills, a beach on the North Sea (we did not visit ), beautiful flowers, and mom's new friend.

These things made for an interesting day.