A Charmed Life

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I collect so many things, and craft books are one of the genres. It's part occupational hazard, part eternal optimism: I always think I'm going to get around to making and doing so much more than I ultimately have the time and money for.

So, I've put up a few books for auction on eBay. Some are very gently used, some not used at all. They are in two lots, going cheap.

I plan to list a few other things, including some vintage fabrics, over the next week or so, so keep checking back!

Aren't They Deer?

There they were, prancing and pawing, impatient for me to pick them up from my favorite antique shop (I got them for a couple of bucks--pun fully intended).

Here's another little dear, my dog, Senghe.

Isn't he cute? He's a Lhasa apso and his name means "Lion." (My husband says: "Yeah, dandelion."

You know who else is dear? The staff at LL Bean. This morning I placed an order online. The item was a gift, but while I was ordering it I somehow missed the place where I was supposed to put in the recipient's address as the shipping address and hit the complete order button. Yikes! Now it was going to come to me--a big problem. I tried to go back and change it, but no luck, so I called customer service right away. A human picked up immediately (a miracle in itself), a lovely woman who was so polite and personable; she fixed the problem immediately and the gift is now on its way to my friend's mom.

If that were the end of the story, I would be pleased enough. But 2 minutes later the customer service woman called me back to say she noticed I had a $10 LLBean coupon that was going to expire at the end of the month, and if I'd like, she could apply it to my purchase. If I'd like? Heck yes! I had forgotten all about it. Talk about putting me in the holiday spirit. Hohoho.

Cornucopia

A long weekend like this gives me plenty of time to think and write, so here are some thoughts and pictures.

1. I told you I led a charmed life, right? How else can you explain my having a wonderful friend like Ann (remember her from a couple of posts back?) who knows me so well and cares about me so much that she spent months search antique shops and flea markets looking for these vintage tablecloths that dropped onto my doorstep via the postman earlier this week? I have a collection of them (somewhere between 60 and 100 at least, I've lost count) and still can't resist them when I see one I don't have. What a glorious, guilt-free gift she sent me. Way more fun than gilding pumkins, I assure you.

2. Fellow Good Greek Girl and amazing artist Anna Maria Horner mused in her blog today about the absence of black in current crafting, and hinted that her new line of fabric might have some not-so-basic black accents. Well, Anna, I think as usual you are on to something, as many of the holiday home dec shows I watched last night on HGTV noted that black is becoming the new green in holiday decorating. Also, this book, pictured above, with its black, red, and white cover shows many textile motifs with hints of black; black really sets off the other colors.

I recommend this book to any lover of textiles and color. It contains some wonderful historic information, but its greatest appeal is full page after full page of textiles motifs, with color combinations, designs, applications, and text that will inspire the artist and home decorator.

3. These are probably my four favorite compliments, in no particular order:

Your children are so well-behaved.

Your home looks beautiful!

This is delicious. May I have the recipe?

You look great. Have you lost weight?

Alas, I don't hear 1 or 4 as often as I'd like (both my fault, though I do hear often that our girls are creative, intelligent, well-spoken, beautiful, and personable--all good things that I guess I secretly believe are better attributes than "well-behaved"), but on Thanksgiving Day I did hear the other two raves, many times over, and it made all the cleaning, de-cluttering, polishing, cooking, planning, and general stressing worth it. When everyone else had sat down at the three tables we had set up in our great room and I came in from loading up my plate with goodies from the buffet table, I was reminded of the last scene from "Hannah and Her Sisters," where the old, bickering parents are laughing and kissing, the kids are giggling and showing kindness to each other, the criss-crossed couples are with who they're supposed to be with, and the food, music, and familial mish-mosh is all bathed in soft candlelight. For a moment, I stood in the doorway and looked around at friends, and friends of friends, at one table with my husband and some of his siblings; the girls--from 5 to 15--chirping at another table; little boys under the watchful eye of parents at the third table...three generations, people I've known for more than 25 years who began as friends and are now family, too...

I live for moments like these. And I would love to show you a picture--I kept my camera at the ready all day--but some moments you just have to experience as they come. And I could never have captured it in a photograph anyway. It was a fleeting sensation--a warm, happy, group of people enjoying themselves in our home.

And, perhaps, the best part came last night as Daughter 1 and I had one of our long, rambling, midnight talks about life. I had worried that I made everyone work too hard for the event, but Olivia spontaneously said it was a great Thanksgiving and she was proud of how everything looked and how enjoyable it all was.

And that, my friends, is the greatest compliment of all.

Thanks, and Thanks Again

When I was a girl, it was my job to put out these little pilgrim candles on the Thanksgiving table. OK, not these candles, precisely. These I bought at an antique show (pre-eBay) for some exhorbitant price (the originals cost 15 cents--it says so on the bottom) in an attempt to buy back some of my childhood. Anyway, they were just like these and we actually LIT them, which I'm sure is why I no longer have the originals. My mother saved everything, so I'm sure if they were extant, I would have found them somewhere.

Daughter No. 2, Meredith, helped me bake the pies, below.

Daughter No. 1, Olivia, is more of a free spirit, likely to draft and recite a tone poem for the occasion. Mere has learned how to roll out the dough and cut out the leaves and hearts for the edging. We do our best to space them evenly but do not require perfection (anymore). This is why we don't let Dad, with his engineer's mind, do this part. True, the points of the maple leaves would be evenly separated to the millimeter, but we don't have all day, you know, as my mother used to say. Besides, he's in charge of the turkey, gravy, and mashed potatoes, and he does a fabulous job at that.

I'm very thankful for my family, and my many good friends, who encourage me when I'm down (occasionally), and shrug and keep silent when I'm being unreasonable (often), and laugh with me, always.

The Frost is on the Pumpkin

Any day, perhaps any moment now, my friend Ann is going to call me and ask, "So, are you gilding pumpkins?" This is in reference to my attempts at making a "Martha"-style Thanksgiving each year.

I will admit that for many years I searched out edible 24-carat gold dust for my cookies, carved hearts, instead of scary faces, into pumpkins, made white-chocolate snowflakes dotted with silver dragees and scattered them on cakes, fashioned a turkey-shaped dip container out of a hollowed-out acorn squash and some red and yellow peppers, and so on. But my husband's low-key, let's-just-bring-potluck family seemed non-plussed by my efforts, and someone from my own "let's-out-Martha-Martha" family always seemed to trump me with personalized pilgrim cookies or pressed-leaf placecards.

On top of which, I eventually realized that I seemed to be going to great lengths just for the wow factor--to impress others--not out of any enjoyment on my part. And certainly not for the enjoyment of my husband and children, who endured my tears when the lemon curd curdled or my blue mood when no one noticed I had coordinated the design on the cocktail napkins with the door wreath. So, just about the time Martha went to jail, I quit trying too hard.

However, when we moved to this house, I found that both I and Martha (fresh out of her orange jumpsuit) had mellowed. Plus, I had a whole new stage on which to work, one I'd waited for my whole life. This fall, I had a blast cutting down the cornstalks my husband grew out in the lower-40 (aka our back yard) and lashing them to the pillars, then selecting white pumpkins and painting 3 and 1 on them, which not only signified Halloween but also happens to be our house number. Clever, no? OK, lucky. And easy.

So, even though right now I am surrounded by the good china, counting out the silver place settings in anticipation of having 22 to dinner Thursday, when Ann calls to ask if I am gilding the pumpkins, I will answer, "No. I'm enjoying the season."

And we'll both have a good laugh.

This gate's a keeper

I love this gate. I drive by the house it belongs to almost every day--a yellow Victorian Italianate that I've coveted for, well, for as long as I've driven by it. Now that we've got our own ooh-ah house, I don't pine for the yellow Italianate so much as appreciate it. It's like when you marry the perfect guy: you're happy with what you have, but you don't stop admiring the other "merchandise," so to speak.

The gate is another matter. For two years, I was unaware of the gate, and then one day this summer it "appeared" in the gap of the old stone wall. Hmmm, I thought, where has that been all my life? Was I not paying attention, or did it just show up one day? How could I have missed it? It's surely as old as the house. I love curlicue gingerbread on the top, and those finials! Victorian architecture meets Musovite parapets.

My husband has been considering starting a business as a custom fence builder/repairer, specializing in historical accuracy. Also, we need a new back gate. So, one day early this fall I brought my camera with me to work, and on the way home I pulled over and snapped some pictures, thinking maybe he could make a replica for me. I mean us. That's still under debate (for one thing, I'm lobbying to add a stone wall where pickets now stand). But last week I drove past and the gate had disappeared. I panicked: my beautiful gate--was it stolen? Or had I just imagined it, like a mirage? Parched for a beautiful gate, I conjured one up? But later I reasoned: the air had finally turned cold; maybe the owners had only put the gate out for the summer and took it down to keep it from weathering further in the harsh winter to come.

It's a mystery. But I took one of my photos and made it my computer background, so I can look at it every day, any time I want. And now, so can you.

Try, try again

Surprise and Delight

There are few things I like better than the color blue paired with lace. That's why I hung a lace curtain in the little window in our back stairwell and lined the sill with all the cobalt blue treasures we own--everything from an antique toothpick holder to a beer bottle that combines two of my husband's favorite things, deep blue glass and the space program (the bottle is for Apollo Lager). The first year we lived here, we were delighted to pieces when we came down the stairs to the kitchen and noticed that the bush outside the window--a Rose of Sharon--had blossomed with blueish purple flowers providing the perfect backdrop for the glass and lace. The next year, we couldn't wait for it to happen again. Such a simple thing, but every day the flowers lasted we caught each other's eye in the kitchen and smiled. A little secret joy that he and I shared about the pleasure of living in this house we pined for so long. Another reminder that yes, everything we went through to get it was worth it.

I strongly believe that the best pleasures are most enjoyable when they happen infrequently, so the fact that we had to wait a whole year before enjoying this spectacle is bittersweet. However, today when I looked up from a place where I don't normally sit at a time when I'm not normally in the kitchen, to see this other, bonus benefit of the blue glass and lace-filled window, I immediately grabbed my camera so I could save it and share. I have been thinking about painting the back stairwell a deep red, and it could surely use a fresh coat of some kind of paint, but now I'll have to think about it. I wouldn't want to paint away the pleasure of the blue glass reflected on the ivory wall.