To San Diego & Back In One Day!!!

April 8th, 2006 was a crazy day for my friend Mike and I - We embarked on a mission that only true " Tile Nuts " would attempt. To start the adventure, I jumped in my 1967 El Camino at 4 AM to drive from Fresno to Bakersfield to meet up with Mike. My Elky gets 8 miles to the gallon at 3 dollars a gallon-- YIKES!!!  From there we drove straight to San Diego (in Mikes van!) and had to suffer through at least a few hours of crazy traffic. The spring break travelers were out in FULL FORCE to say the least. After meeting up with with my business contact there to pick up my treasures, we started back to Los Angeles to visit Scott Wells at Wells Antiques. His shop is AWESOME to say the least!! If you like tile you HAVE to visit his shop. I had a few tiles to sell, and Mike had a few items to pick up to take back with him. From there, we went to Fair Oaks Blvd in Pasadena to meet up with another friend named Eric Berg. Mike dropped off a few things there with him and then we were off to Bakersfield. It was late in the day and we arrived in Bakersfield at about 6:30 PM. After resting I drove home and arrived at about 9:30 PM. Needless to say I slept about 12 hours!!  What was this trip all for?  I had to pick up a hillside bench with 2 sets of D&M Dragon scene tile sets--each tile is 8 inches with each 6 tile set forming a Chinese stylized dragon. Mike called it Fung Shwei (?) but to me it looks like Kung Fu!!  At any rate, we went through many hours of traffic and almost got into 3 accidents - OOF!!  I can say for sure that after this crazy trip, I most surely suffer from what we call    " Tile Insanity "

The tiles are now in the process of being repaired and placed into a nice iron frame to hang on the wall - when these are all done, I will surely post the photos here for all to see. I am on a quest to collect the D&M scenic tiles and this is the hardest to come by. I was very happy to have the chance to buy these - A big thanks to Ramona!!!!

-Here are a couple items that I picked up in the last few weeks: One is a nice Tudor Tile that is set in a really cool wood frame. My friend Netta owns one of these also  :-)  The other is a set of Taylor Spanish Dancers that I purchased in a table that was ruined. I had the tiles fixed up ( by Mike & Netta ) and placed in these iron frames that I designed on scratch paper. The frames were then handcrafted by Larry Lindsey who does excellent iron work and are very well made. Looks like they are ripe for hangin on the wall!!

I received some good news today-My D&M Dragon tile set is finished being repaired!! It still needs to be placed in its frame, but that is to come in a few weeks. Here is a photo of the finished tiles:

Be sure to keep watching for the finished set in the iron frame.

Here are a few photos of some cool items that came to me recently:

A Pacific pot, a 1907-1911 Van Briggle bowl, a Taylor Dancing Lady, a Garden City pot, and a beautiful S&S tile that has never been set before. The S&S is for sale-details can be found in the "items for sale" section