Blue Satin-Glazed Pottery Baby Bootie Vase, Moulded Knit with Tasselled Cord and Beaded Cuff, Inscribed “From Otto 1935” to the Base, 1935

The Piece

A small pottery baby's bootie, modelled as a soft ankle boot and open at the top to hold flowers.

The modelling is detailed for its size. The upper carries a knitted texture — fine vertical ribs running down from the ankle, with a pebbled stitch across the toe. Around the top runs a rolled cuff edged with a band of small beaded circles, and across the instep a cord is tied in a bow with two hanging tassels, each tassel modelled separately and standing clear of the surface.

The glaze is a soft satin medium blue — matte rather than glossy, even and quiet, without a shine on it.

The base is unglazed, flat and dry, and it carries a hand-written inscription: a name and a year, From Otto — 1935.

History & Provenance

This piece tells you its own date, which is rare, and worth leading with. The inscription is on the underside, written by hand onto the porous unglazed clay rather than printed or stamped, and it gives both a giver and a year. That is not decoration. That is somebody recording the occasion on the object itself, the way people wrote in the front of a bible or the back of a photograph.

1935 is a pointed year for a baby's shoe to be turned into an ornament, because the idea was brand new. In the early 1930s a woman named Violet Shinbach saw a pair of bronzed baby shoes while shopping in Cleveland, Ohio. She had her own bronzed, showed them to friends, understood what she was looking at, and in 1934 founded the Bron-Shoe Company to sell the idea. It worked: the company has since bronzed more than fourteen million shoes.

So the keepsake baby shoe was roughly a year old as a commercial idea when this was given. Before that, a first pair of shoes was handed down, worn out or thrown out. After it, a shoe became a thing you kept on a shelf. A pottery bootie does exactly the same work as a bronzed one, at a fraction of the price, and it holds flowers besides — which is why potteries made them by the thousand for the next thirty years, and why 1935 sits at the front of that run rather than in the middle of it.

The mould was fresh. The beaded band round the cuff is crisp circle by circle, the knit ribs are sharp all the way to the toe, and the two tassels are fully modelled and undercut rather than softened into the body — all of which goes first as a mould is worked, so this came out of one early in its life.

There is no maker's mark, backstamp, impressed number or country-of-origin stamp on the base, and the piece is offered unattributed. Dated at 1935 on the inscription itself, supported by the satin glaze and the unmarked base, both of which are consistent with small-pottery production of that period.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

An object with a date written on it is a different thing from an object without one.

Almost everything on an antique shelf is dated by someone's judgement — by a mark, a method, a glaze, a construction detail. This one was dated by the person who gave it, in pencil, at the time. You are not being asked to take anyone's word for the year. You can turn it over and read it.

It is also a very good small vase, which is the harder thing to find. The opening is narrow enough to hold three or four short stems upright without a frog, and the proportions suit the flowers that come at the right scale anyway: violets, sweet peas, lily of the valley, grape hyacinth, a single rose head, a sprig of herbs off a windowsill.

Empty, it works as a catch-all. A ring dish by a sink, paper clips on a desk, stamps, a single pen, matches by a candle. The soft blue is an easy colour against white, cream, wood and brass, and the scale means it can sit on a narrow shelf, a windowsill, a bedside table or the corner of a mantel without asking for room.

And it gives well. A nursery, a christening, a first birthday, a baby shower, a grandparent — it is a ninety-year-old object about the arrival of a child, with somebody's name on the bottom, and it costs less than a bunch of flowers to give.

A note on care. The base is unglazed and porous, so it will mark a polished surface if it stands there wet. Use it with a small glass or vial inside for fresh flowers, or stand it on a felt pad or a coaster.

Do not put it in a dishwasher, and do not soak it — water goes into the unglazed base and into the chipped area and takes a long time to come back out. Wipe it with a barely damp cloth and dry it.

Handle it by the body rather than the cuff or the tassels, which are the thinnest and most exposed parts, and set it where it will not get knocked; the existing chip is stable, but a rim that has been broken once is the rim that breaks again.