I Fell in Love with a Yellow Teapot

The yellow teapot technique

In the Conservatory Café in Cynet, Tasmania, falling in love with the yellow teapot - and a piece of carrot cake with cream! Photo by Rob.

When Rob and I flew to Tasmania to celebrate my retirement, I fell in love with a yellow teapot.

As we drove around the triangular island’s winding roads for two weeks I saw lakes, dams, seahorses, mountain streams, verdant valleys, lighthouses and devils, but the only thing that caught my heart and wouldn’t let go was that yellow teapot.

Back home, I tried to recall the moment love began.

I didn’t see it across a crowded room. Nor did it wink at me or sidle up to try to surreptitiously hold my hand. It just sat, bold and voluptuous, on the table at the Conservatory Café in Cygnet, beside a yellow teacup and saucer, giving off a mesmerising, golden glow.

While stuffing my face with divine forkfuls of carrot cake and whipped cream, I considered stuffing the teapot in my capacious shoulder bag. It could be done. But not by me. My mother’s strictures about the difference between mine and thine echoed, loud and insistent, in my ears.

Regretfully, I left it there on the ironwork table, to be taken to the kitchen to be refreshed and refilled for someone else’s delight.

Back home, although 4,117 km lay between me and that teapot, I felt a daily tug from it. In desperation, I decided that if I couldn’t have that teapot, I’d find one similar. After scouring gift shops, kitchen shops and secondhand shops for more than a year, I gave up and attempted to bury my sorrow by purchasing a glass one with a green lid from a T2 Tea shop in Perth.

Rob wasn’t fooled by my apparent recovery from a bad case of YTS (Yellow Teapot Syndrome). He knew from my mournful face that I was pretending to be happy as I tipped the see-through T2 teapot at the correct angle and poured forth its liquid bounty into the flowery cup I use for my early morning cuppa.

Not liking to see me unhappy, he went to his favourite store. Well, it’s not a store, exactly. It’s the Denmark Rubbish Tip Shop. And there, on a wooden shelf, he found a white ceramic teapot, about the same size and shape of the one I’d left behind. Then he went to Icky Finks to buy a bottle of ceramic paint called Citrine Yellow, selected a small paintbrush from the collection in his studio, and presented these three things to me with a flourish.

Now it was up to me to satisfy the hole in my heart.

I’m not arty or crafty so I approached this task with trepidation. What if I messed it up? My nervousness made me put off doing it for a couple of years. But recently I plucked up the courage, covered the coffee table with butcher’s paper and settled to the task.

As a sort of practice run, I started with the lid. Thankfully, the paint and brush worked well together, smoothing out my many amateur runs and streaks, so I moved on confidently to the curving belly of the teapot, its endearing handle and cheeky spout.

The lid, looking a bit patchy, but it'll get a second coat.

The cheeky yellow teapot emerging with many strokes from my brush.

After 24 hours I gave it another coat, and 24 hours after that I baked it in the oven at 150° for 35 minutes.

Now it was ready for use.

But my yellow teapot didn’t look happy. It wanted a yellow cup and saucer to match it. So I found a white cup and saucer in the Red Cross Shop in Denmark, paint them bright yellow, and now the teapot is really happy, and so am I.

Sitting outside sipping tea by the winter lake at Evergreen with my bright yellow teapot and cup and saucer. But, oh! how I long for a piece of carrot cake with cream to accompany them! Photo by Rob.

What I have come to think of as the YTT (Yellow Teapot Technique) is now an integral part of my life. If I want something and can’t find it anywhere, I make it myself.

And if I want more peace in the world and can’t find it, I make some of that myself, too.

With love, Marlane