… penguins, penguins and more penguins!
I’m not entirely sure what these penguins are made of – some sort of crystal type thing. I think they are hand carved, and use the natural colours of the crystal to define the colours of the penguins. It needed two photos because the front and back are so different. They are utterly stunning!
One of the latest additions to the collection… Might be a “Rubiks cube for dummies”!
I saw this penguin in the window of a jewellers while out shopping one day. I couldn’t resist and bought it for Martin for Xmas. I think it is Venetian Murano Millefiori (meaning a thousand flowers) glass – or it is supposed to be! Sadly it is a bit unstable and falls easily!
We are not actually 100% sure that this is a penguin. It could be an owl… but we decided it looked enough like a penguin to be part of the collection. This one also came from the floating market in Thailand.
We got this penguin in Thailand at a floating market. It is carved into some sort of animal horn. It’s not a very cute penguin, physically of philosophically, but I guess it is original…
These little guys came in packs of ten or something like that. We got them in Thailand from the giftshop at a teak carving ‘factory’. We’re not sure that they are teak but they sure are cute!
Yes, this penguin required two photos, and yes there is a story!
We got this penguin in Tijuana, Mexico. We did a brief “day” trip across the border from San Diego. We didn’t stay long, we had lunch, checked out a few shops and then headed back. Anyway, we saw this penguin in a locked cabinet in one of the shops we looked in. We found a sales person and said we wanted it. They got it out and wrapped it up nice and carefully with bubble wrap – so we didn’t even touch it before we bought it – so we didn’t know it opened and had a fish inside! We didn’t unwrap it when we got back to the hotel and when we were repacking our bags to come home, we decided to leave it wrapped as it was wrapped so carefully, we were worried that if we undid it all, it would be much less protected.
When we got home and got around to unpacking all the penguins, we unwrapped this little guy. As we were unwrapping him, we could hear a strange noise. Once unwrapped, he still made the same noise and we figured out there was something inside him. We then figured out that he opened at the middle and looked inside and saw a neatly wrapped little package! It could have been anything! We unwrapped it and to our relief there was this little fish – not the drugs that the parcel looked like it could have been!
I guess this is one of the stranger penguins in the collection, with one of the more interesting stories!
This is a version of Tux, the Linux mascot. It came from a market stall in Portland, Oregon. The story is that the woman who runs the stall had some other penguins that weren’t quite this cute, so GCC hacker (and renowned juggler) Janis Johnson, told her that she could use use the Tux design free of charge. So she did! And we bought one!
These lovely little penguins are (hand?) carved out of wood. Each of the individual penguins slide out of the dark wooden stand. I picked this up in Hobart when I was there for work – I couldn’t resist it!
This is a fat little penguin candle from Hawaii – although it is looking a little worse for wear due to the Aussie heat! It was the first penguin we saw in Hawaii, and we were somewhat stunned to find a penguin candle in Hawaii!!