Odd Vessels

Being a lover of potions means you end up collecting glass or ceramic containers of all sorts, not all of them practical. After all, there's a large creative aspect to this craft. Here's a few of my latest encounters.

Potion nerd! I'm not ashamed to be seen with fingers full of phials. Though it's true I need a more efficient way to store them, because they're piling up!

I found this beautiful dispenser bottle with a metal tap on Nov. 1. It turned out to be actual vintage; I would've nabbed it, but it was out of my price range.

On Nov. 2, Kathleen and I went to friend Amie's home to plan an upcoming ritual. I noticed this out in a trash bucket in her backyard. Thrown there by her husband by mistake, it's one half a set of brass scales given her by her grandmother! The shape is perfect and lovely: I found it hard to quit playing with it.

How can someone like me pass up a whole passel of tiny vials . . . even if they're stuck together? (Why? I don't know either.) Before moving, I got these from Scrap the second after she placed them on the shelf, reasoning there must be a way to unstick them all and remove the glue. On Nov. 8, I carefully broke them all apart.

They looked quite amusing before I managed it, though!

What about vessels you make? I can't work glass (yet), but I can work ceramics, and rather well. I plan to make a cauldron with some extra clay I have, but I just may have to make one of these naughty, greed-punishing cups. More artistic, of course, with the trick better disguised along the sides. Pythagoras was quite the clever fellow!

Last but not least, how many can spot this on a Goodwill shelf and know what it is? It looks like a strange piece of alchemy equipment, but what makes a "Klein bottle" or Klein flask special isn't merely its odd shape, but principles of mathematics. This structure has but a single surface, and, in the same manner as the Moebius Strip, it toys with your mind's efforts to comprehend the unique property of its shape.

Whether or not I can incorporate it into some weird distillation experiment, I had to have it for my future lab . . . for sheer nerdy appeal alone. After all, I recall one movie-still of Snape in his classroom lab, and one of the glass vessels on the table is a dining-table oil and vinegar dispenser combo! (I know, because I have the same type.) We simply can't rule out a Potions Master's ability to find function in the most unlikely of vessels.