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July has been a busy month fine tuning our website. We are thrilled to become founder members of the new Lapada website which will be launched in the Autumn.

We have also joined NO1 Mayfair’s Website which is exciting.

We spent a day in Oxford visiting The Ashmolean Museum. Mayflower has a special connection to the museum:

Michael Wellby a very serious collector of early pieces, on his death donated a great part of his collection to the museum. In fact his donation is so great that they are dedicating a room to him, presently while waiting for the room to be finished, they have a large glass cabinet holding some of his unique pieces.

Michael was a personal friend of Christopher Hamlyn – partner with Susan Harrington-James of Mayflower Antiques.

In fact it was Michael that ignited Christopher’s passion in early pieces to become a dealer. The collection is certainly worth a visit if you are in Oxford.

HIS PIECES ARE TRULY MAGNIFICENT.

Two visits to Amsterdam where we found two beautiful early pieces of glass. One engraved wine glass 17 century from the Engels-Lange Collection. One wine glass – 2nd half of the 16th century. A broad shallow bowl and a hollow cigar shaped stem. Illustrated in a painting by Veronese in the late 16th century. Red wine was drunk in these glasses. Images are soon to be uploaded to our website.

From our trip to Maastricht in March we purchased two Mother of Pearl pieces. A Mother of Pearl Casket – Mexico 17th century and a Mother of Pearl Holy Communion Box – Spanish, Colonial 17th century. Both pieces will be on our website soon.

Work on our new website has been an on-going project, Zara at Social Me has been working closely with our new web developer. We now have a fully responsive Mobile website which is optimised for SEO and ease of use for our customers. We continue to grow our presence on Social Media and sharing are pieces with the public.

We also visited two of the big London Fairs Olympia and Masterpiece. Although not exhibiting we enjoyed having the time to appreciate the fairs and visit many of our friends in the trade. Both fairs had a wonderful vibe to them and we will be sure to visit again.

Our visit to Tefaf Maastricht was not only interesting but a huge learning curve for us. The stands and the way that dealers exhibited were superb. When we next exhibit at an Art and Antiques Fair, the knowledge we acquired from Maastricht will certainly influence us. From our trip to Maastricht we purchased two beautiful early pieces of Mother of Pearl. From Amsterdam, an exquisite early piece of Venetian glass. All three pieces will be shown on our website in due course. We have been contacted by a PR company to provide text and images for an article to be written about us, we are not sure of the timing. We are very please that the path we have taken for 2015 will result in Mayflower Antiques becoming internationally well known through our websites, social media and LinkedIn.

We are delighted to announce that Zara Rowe has joined Laura Spelt in forming an extremely strong force in the social media world, for antiques.

They now both represent Mayflower Antiques in developing our presence and at the same time keeping on top of our websites.

More photography has been carried our by Claire Cleaver, this time enhancing our furniture images.

March could not pass us by without a visit to Maastricht and Tefaf. While in that part of the world we shall spend a few days in Amsterdam looking for pieces of early glass.

We have been working closely with Laura Spelt of “SOCIAL ME” who heads the connection between Mayflower Antiques‘ websites, online galleries and 1stdibs.

Laura has also been active on our behalf with social media; Laura has increased our presence on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. The activity has been very good, Christopher Hamlyn and myself are extremely pleased with the results.

More photography has been carried out by Claire Cleaver, Claire heads the new branch of Fellows Photographic Services part of Fellows Auction House, Birmingham.

Exhibiting at fairs will be out aim later on in the year. LAPADA in September, Berkeley Square will always remain our ‘flag ship’.

We are attending the LAPADA conference later on this month. Also, we shall be making a trip to the Corning Museum, USA, establishing ourselves with some of our very special early pieces of glass.