tea (or coffee) time!

My current museum project is now a large collection of cups and saucers which happen to be from ship companies that made their way through the Panama Canal about 25 to 35 years ago.

These housewares were given as gifts or souvenirs to a captain that had piloted large cargo boats through the canal, and (as it tends to go) were donated to the museum by his wife.

  The cups and saucers are mostly "hotelware" or "restaurantware", so they're sturdy ceramic and many look similar to this, which came from the company of the boat pictured above, N.Y.K Line in Japan:

Most of the logos do not have writing though, so it's my job to figure out where they come from. So far, I've found cups & saucers from Japan, Norway, the Peruvian Navy, England, Chile, and Russia. And I'm only halfway through the collection! Even with so much helpful information on the internet, it sometimes still takes a lot of effort to find what I'm looking for, and sometimes I never do. Other times I have to take a chance with Googling a description such as "red moose head with a B", and then I get lucky and find that it's a Russian ceramic company. And then at times I get sidetracked with other finds, such as these adorable ceramics from Norwegian companies, Porsgrund and Figgjo, that also produced the shipping company cups & saucers, although these are much more fun:

(I have a skirt that is nearly identical to this pattern)