Zeitgeist Toys: Gorgeous toys made from porcelain and precious metals. More pictures at Beautiful Life.

Now that DOT has fully captured our attention with their first collection, which includes a fat, whimsical, bird-shaped feeder called the cipcip, sweet, buoyant porcelain candleholders that resemble paper boats, an a cutting board they call the ovetto that allows us to chop both meat and veggies on the same surface, they give us the unvase. The decorative piece uses two separated pillars to create the illusion of a vase between them. Each of the black-and-white ceramic pieces is a vase unto itself, and not only provides the optical illusion, they’re also a nice way to show off two bouquets of flowers.

Porcelain tableware may not top many young urban dwellers wish lists, but that may change if Ink Dish has their way. It comes as no surprise that the company’s target audience said they “don’t want stuffy and formal china, and they don’t want mass-produced mainstream dinnerware.” The Le Mesa, California, company’s current line features blue and white mugs, bowls, and plates with Japanese-style fish designed by tattoo artist Paul Timman. Available through Propeller in San Francisco, a little place called Fred Segal in the L.A. area, and Gore Dean on the East Coast. Its a registry option that won’t make you balk.

When it comes to vibrators, there’s only really one thing we need: functionality. This is not to say we don’t appreciate intricate, laser-etched designs or fanciful colors — as they cater to our non-primal urges — but a personal massager should be at least able to fulfill its basic task. JimmyJane’s products do both. For Valentine’s Day, they’re releasing version 2.0 of the waterproof, phthalate-free Form 6. And for those who are looking for sensuality but a different kind of stimulation, they also offer massage candles made from natural products, the porcelain containers of which feature line drawings, each of which is unique.

I’ve had a mild obsession over piggy banks lately. Being without a car, I don’t have an unused cigarette tray to throw in my extra change, and my coins usually wind up on the dinner table or stuck to my leg when I get up from the floor. Enter Imaginarium’s Kidult designer toy-inspired coin banks (type in “Kidult” in the “Busca” box). They’re on the cute side, as befits the genre, but I’m drawn to their practicality: round like a fat pig belly to hold a lot of coins, large so there will be a guaranteed payoff at the end, and it looks good on my shelf next to my other toys and porcelain containers. As a successful businessman once told me, you gotta spend money to earn money.

Just because you want to entertain in high style doesn't mean you have to break out your Grandma's bone china. If you're feeling the urge to get a little more classic with your tableware, but aren't into the floral designs you were subjected to every Thanksgiving, then New York-based design collaborative Lovegrove & Repucci have the answer.

Their freshly released London Delft collection is a play on the 18th century tradition of Dutch Delft porcelain. Building on the success of the previously launched New York Delft collection, this time around they've mixed the timeless, high-art vibe of the famous blue glazed dishes with a little London street art edge. Each setting is made up of five pieces: a dinner plate, side plate, soup bowl, cup and saucer, and are available for $100.

If the general coolness of the collection isn't enough to impress your design-savvy dinner partygoer, then just wait until they reach the bottom of their soup bowl and find a good ‘ol lorry. (For us non-Brits, that's a truck.)

I was going to write about Domestic’s rad-times-100 vinyl wallpaper, a topic we love to talk about here, but after being getting to know their Surface 02 collection, I feel we ought to thank them for not, um, sticking to just those offerings. Porcelain plates decorated by designers at the forefront of their game — like Ich & Kar, our hero Jeremyville, Antoine+Manuel — come as an inseparable pair for the second series of the line, which is being featured until April 8 under a Domestic Spring Invasion 1 theme at the Printemps store inside Centre Pompidou in Paris. These are hot plates that will give a much longer-lasting impression for your bachelor pad than the plug-in, two-burners kind you use as a decorative piece.

These well-thought-up porcelain goodies are from the wacky imagination of Sao Paulo artist Buia, who made these when he went to spend time in Japan (he’s Japanese-Brazilian) and reflect his approach to art through organic and geometric forms. One is an ashtray that looks like a dog's head and the other is a pencil holder designed to resemble a fish. They come with gaping mouths and are also drawn on in the insides, which renders them absolutely and convincingly adorable. Buia is a mid-twentysomething Paulistano who studied advertising and marketing but soon went the way of the artist's life, a move that was worth it because he scored a coveted solo exhibition at street art gallery Choque Cultural early in his career. You can find his porcelain works through Tamarindo Concepts, a wholesaler of art lifestyle products like shot glasses and ashtrays by hot Brazilian street artists. Buia, coincidentally enough, will be one of the 12 artists to be featured in the Japan Pop Show starting this Saturday at Choque Cultural.

Dear Nameless Caffeine Addict,

I see you every morning at the local java joint, filling up on fuel before your workday begins, and just like you, I feel that if I were to break this cycle, my life might come to some hurried, apocalyptic end. The heap of paper or styrofoam cups, wide-mouthed syringes previously full of liquid promising to deliver happiness, has been mounting because of our need to put our morning crankiness at bay. I know you feel as bad about it as I do. As a gift, I’ve enclosed in the accompanying package the I Am Not A Paper Cup, a double-walled porcelain beauty with silicone lid that you can use on your next coffee run. You can even run it through the dishwasher alongside your lucky “Instant Human: Just Add Coffee” mug. Have fun with it and know I’ll be right there behind you in line with my own I Am Not A Paper Cup ready for filling. Really, we should be able to enjoy our vice with a better conscience.

Sincerely,

Fellow Nameless Caffeine Addict

P.S. Shall we try to switch to tea? Green tea apparently has the ability to give a big wallop too.

With all of our recent — and not so recent — talk about porcelain, it seems only logical to let all of our Miami-based design fiends and friends know about die gestalten verlag’s exhibition Fragiles. Fragiles is a collection of more than a hundred porcelain, glass, and ceramic pieces designed by an eclectic group of artists and meant to challenge the public’s perception of what these materials are meant for.

Some of the objects are available for viewing online on the Fragiles website. Fragiles is also taking place in conjunction with Design Miami 2007. Which makes for two great reasons to get yourself to Miami.

Porcelain seems to be all the rage these days. We’ve already talked about porcelain gun designer Charles Kraft. To compliment Krafft’s AK’s and other big guns, the guys at Complex have pointed out the work of Chinese artist Lei Xue.

Xue has created a 5-pack — yes, a 6-pack would have made more sense to me too, but whatever — of porcelain beer cans complete with crush marks and pull tabs. Xue’s cans are decorated in a traditional Chinese motif that creates a rather jarring juxtaposition between medium and subject. Either way, they’d look great next to one of Krafft’s big guns over the mantle. Now that we’ve got guns and beer, what else do we need in porcelain?

Have you ever been to Slovenia to make a black market weapons deal? No, neither have. But Charles Krafft has. As soon as I read the little blurb about him here, I was interested in learning more. Krafft is an artist of a rather unusual breed. His choice material is porcelain, but his works are far from Grandma’s china. Krafft is known for casting and then decorating, often in floral motifs, some of the most popular and dangerous weaponry of our generation. His goal is to make “life-size ceramic weaponry so gorgeous and patently functionless that it will bedazzle and confound everyone who sees it.”

Of course, not all of Krafft’s work is so quasi-dangerous. He’s also done collaborations with some popular artists such as his Oswald Mosley Rabbit with Frank Kozik. Krafft’s work is currently on display at the StolenSpace gallery in London. I’ve never been much of a gun toting kinda guy, but somehow a porcelain rifle above the fireplace might be a humorous (read: less deadly) take on the rifle that my grandfather had hanging on the wall.

Image via Dirt Gallery LA

The limits of what we define as jewelry are slipping away quickly. Bodily adornments are shifting toward the amalgous, wide-open field of “whatever you can manage to stick to yourself”. Tattoos, tiny Swarovski crystals, even porcelain-dipped fur scraps. Created by Dror Benshetrit, who also created the Pick Chair, the Urban Cast-Away line is a series of one-of-a-kind sculptural jewelry pieces created for Girbaud’s Construkt.

Each piece is made from a scrap of second-hand fur dipped in porcelain, “giving the fur a continuous life and new appearance”. Ignoring the obvious PETA moment brought to question by the use of fur, and I’m hoping that “second-hand” means the scraps were scavenged from existing sources, these pieces create a timeless moment of stillness in their liquid medium. They look a lot flowing coral, or perhaps spilled milk caught mid-fall. Either way, they definitely redefine what we tend to think of as “jewelry” today.

Whether there’s any other similarities between the two, one thing is for certain: both Fred Durst and Martin Klimas have something in common: they both feel compelled to break stuff. While Durst likes people’s faces, Klimas prefers to keep physical violence out of it and instead, drops porcelain figurines in the darkness and photographs their surface impact with a high-speed shutter. The result is a paradoxical mix of calm and calamity. Rosecrans Baldwin over at The Morning News has a fantastic interview with Klimas about the creative process behind his photography, which is definitely worth checking out — as is the rest of his body of work. If you’re going to try this at home, though, you should probably ask permission before you lay into your dead grandma’s Lladro stash.

Seeing these Park Planters on Notcot this morning was the point where I realized I need to stop buying things for an apartment that I haven’t even moved into yet — right now. How could I pass these up, though? The seemingly innocent white porcelain plant pots mould into a variety of not-so-innocent situations, featuring hookers, johns, dog walkers and hold-ups. Crafted by Science & Sons, who bought us the Phonofone I and II (which Dan totally lost his business over), I’m really loving the humor and irreverence offered in something as unassuming as a flower pot.