Picnic Blanket (2012/01/17)
   This summer, you might be surprised by the faces staring back from the picnic blanket. The British company Whitbread Wilkinson has created a line of melamine plates featuring portraits from the National Gallery in London among them, a platter depicting a detail from The Emperor Napoleon I ,by Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet ,a dinner plate with Portrait of a Man by Antonello da Messina ,and a side plate with one of the pair shown in The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger . And more faces are coming soon.
   “I think it’s great they’re still partying, 500 years later,” said Jackie Piper, one of the company’s owners. But “we’ve got to grow the gang.” Diane Keaton still maintains a busy schedule as an actress, but in recent years the Oscar-winner has devoted considerable time to another area of interest: architecture and design. A serial house flipper, Ms. Keaton, 65, has bought several homes in her native Southern California and painstakingly renovated them before getting the itch to move on and repeat the process. The actress is also actively involved in architectural preservation (she is on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy), and in 2007, she co-wrote “California Romantica” (Rizzoli), a book celebrating the Spanish and Mission-style architecture she loves.
   Now Ms. Keaton is getting into the design game herself, with a tabletop collection called K by Keaton that she created for Bed, Bath & Beyond. The stoneware cups, bowls and plates, which are available online and in some stores now, have her trademark whimsy (some are stamped with the words “eat” or “bite”) and lack of pretension . But they also reflect Ms. Keaton’s latest obsession: the heartland. The “farm-y, landscape colors” she used, she told a reporter, were inspired by wheat, grass and bark.
   What’s come of all this is I like sturdy. I want something I feel will last and has some weight to it and is very simple. Like, for example, I don’t understand why we don’t eat more food out of bowls. I could eat all of my meals out of bowls.
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