We welcomed a new member of the family at the weekend. His name is francisfrancis! and we already love him to bits and stroke him lots.

Please ignore yellow wall 

Since moving to Seattle the Husband has developed a serious coffee addiction, and it was such a pleasure to get him a birthday present that didn’t involve X-Boxes. 

I, on the other hand, am *this* close to developing a serious Illy coffee cup addiction. I’ve always loved using Illy coffee cups on my trips to Italy – my cousin has several Illy Collection boxed sets which are brought out on special occasions – but without a machine had no excuse to buy them.  But now…

For our everyday cups I found some Biennale di Venezia 2005 cups.  These aren’t a signed and numbered Illy Collection set and were just made for use in bars all over Italy.  I think they’re gorgeous and they have that very satisfying Illy heaviness and feel in the hand. There are lots on eBay if you want to indulge as they’re not particularly rare.

For our special occasion cups (see what I mean about an addiction?) I’m in the process of acquiring a signed and numbered Illy Collection set of the Tazzine Ballerine.  These ones aren’t particularly rare either as they only came out in 1999 but I do like the design.

Now I need to start working on cappucino cups. If anyone fancies selling me a complete set of Dream cappucino cups you know where to find me.  I’m indebted (in every sense of the word) to this site for feeding my growing fascination. Look on eBay and specialist sites for the cups themselves.  Some of the rarer editions are already fetching crazy money, since they’re no longer just cups, but signed and numbered art works by top artists.

I’m sort of wishing that we’d got it in one of the more iconic francisfrancis! colours, such as red, orange or sky blue, but we want to keep him for life and I’m not sure I’m going to be wanting an orange kitchen when I’m ninety.  And this way he matches my KitchenAid and we get to paint the kitchen any colour we want.