About 6 years ago, I went to Canada to visit my Aunt Dorothy. Aunt Dorothy is a collector of many things. I would say her most prevelant collection is Ironstone Dinnerware. She has LOADS of it. She is so passionate about Ironstone that she attends conventions and meets with other folks that collect it. Among some of her other collections are Fortune Telling Tea Cups. They are definately a curiousty and fascinating. I liked them so much that I started a collection of my own. My Aunt has several of these cups. In fact, more then several of them. I only have 9 and my collection is slowly growing. The only places it seems that you can locate them are antique stores and on ebay. They are fairly hard to find. Even when I ask antique stores if they know of any in their inventory, I get a blank look. And lately when I see them on ebay, the prices have increased, so I get the feeling that they are defniately getting even harder to find.
The practice of tea leaf reading originated independently in Asia and the Middle East. English potteries have crafted many beautiful tea cup sets specially designed and decorated to aid in fortune-telling.
Although many people prefer a simple white cup for tea leaf reading, there are also traditions concerning the positional placement of the leaves in the cup, and some find it easier to work with marked cups. Beginning in the late 19th century and continuing to the present, English and American potteries have produced specially decorated cup and saucer sets for the use of tea-leaf readers. Many of these designs are patented and come with instructions explaining their mode of use. Some of the most common were those that were given away with purchases of bulk tea.
There are dozens of individual designs of fortune tellers' cups, but the three most common types are zodiac cups, playing card cups, and symbol cups.
Zodiac cups - These sets contain zodiacal and planetary symbols. Typically the interior of the cup contains the planetary symbols, while the saucer has the astrological sign symbols, but there are many variations and exceptions to this common pattern.
Playing card cups - These cups carry within their interiors tiny images of a deck of scattered cards, either 52 cards plus a joker, as in a poker deck, or 32 cards, as in a euchre deck. Some sets also have a few cards imprinted on the saucers, or the saucers may contain brief written card interpretations.
Symbol cups - These sets are decorated with between a dozen and fifty of the most common visual cues that can be found in tea leaves, often numbered for easy reference and supplied with an explanatory booklet. The symbols are generally displayed inside the cups, but there are also sets in which they decorate the outside or appear in the cups and on the saucers.
I currently own 1 Zodiac Cup, 5 of the Playing Card Cups and 3 of the Symbol Cups.
If you are ever bored and you want to have some fun, I do have loose tea leaves. Come on over for a cup of tea and your fortune! Next I will blog about my Cards. Those are fun at parties!
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