Victorian Dinner Party #16

This lovely two-volume set of  Le Marchand d'antiquites, the French version of Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop was published in Paris in 1942. It was a hostess gift given to me by friend R. at my Victorian dinner party. How wonderfully appropriate was that, and I pressed into service as part of the decor immediately.

A stamp on the title page reveals that it was part of  the "Location de livres francais et anglais" in Paris at one time...

with its location on the shelf marked by the consecutive nos. 523 and 524 on labels affixed to the spine.

There are lovely marbled covers clearly showing a well worn patina...

as do the covers' edges and wavy pages. All of these signs of its age come together to make a beautiful artifact, which exudes the feeling a past time. 

Escape into a Good Story

Reading can be a wonderful pastime at any time of the year, but in the winter it can provide a much-needed escape. When you're feeling stuck in a season filled with cold dull days, books can transport you to another place. Whether that place is new to you or somewhere you've been before, the choice is as simple as the book you reach for.

Movies, too, can help you feel like you've been away, enabling you to "travel" somewhere exotic for a short time.

A good story (in a book or movie) that's set in some far-off destination is an affordable and easy way to get away. Don't overlook your local library as a free source for some armchair travelling. Bon voyage!

The Gift of Reading

One of the most treasured Christmas moments this year was undoubtedly the half hour or so one evening when my teenager sat and read a Dr. Seuss book to me. I was reading in the living room and he settled in a nearby chair to read the Dr. Seuss book he had come across after cleaning out his bookshelves. He started to read to himself, but then something made him chuckle and in the next instant he was reading aloud to me and turning the book to show me the illustrations every now and then. It was a lovely interlude, bringing back memories of so many evenings when sharing a book together was the only way to end the day.

In the Element

Do you ever feel like you don't quite fit into the group around you? Or perhaps you stand out because you do things a little differently than others? It turns out that may not be a bad thing. It could be a signal that you have not discovered what it is that places you in your "element".

I'm presently reading a wonderful book about finding your element by Ken Robinson, entitled The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. I only wish I had found it years ago... but it hadn't been written yet!

According to the inside of the book cover, the element "is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion." When this happens, people "feel most themselves, most inspired, and achieve their highest levels". I guess it's what is meant by someone "being in their element". How odd that just days before I came across this book, I had snapped this photo because something about this wee stone seemed to ask the same questions, "What am I doing here? Why do I feel different?"

Teapot Cookies #2

I had another occasion to use my teapot cookie cutter not too long after my last post of October 1st. When I bought the cutter I knew that it would be perfect for making cookies for a tea party. What I didn’t envision at the time was using it for cookies for a class, let alone a class on tea. This latest batch of cookies was made to take to a course on Asian teas that I was taking at a local university, being given by none other than Jeff Fuchs: explorer, rock climber, photographer and author of The Ancient Tea Horse Road. Since we were covering the topic of teapots at our last class, I had the idea of trying to emulate the natural bisque of Chinese teapots as cookies. I used a gingersnap recipe for the dough, piped the details in chocolate royal icing, then stamped the cookies with food colouring using stamps with the Chinese characters for either “water” or “earth”. When you stop to think about it all four elements are needed for tea: water for growing and for making the tea, earth for growing the tea plants and for making the teapot, fire for boiling the water, and air for both growing and drying the tea leaves.

For more on Jeff, read the National Post article: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2008/06/21/q-amp-a-with-jeff-fuchs-travelling-the-ancient-tea-horse-road.aspx

Apples Every Day

When I was a teenager, I read a junior fiction novel called Apples Every Day. The title was alluding to the fact that the school children in the story were served apples every day in the months that followed the October apple harvest. Something our family, with three apple trees in our garden, knew about first-hand. Those trees produced more apples than we could possibly use despite daily offerings of apple sauce, apple betty, apples in our school lunches... and despite my father giving box after box away to his city colleagues. Author Grace Richardson set the novel in St. Hilaire, where I grew up, and the action taking place in a private progressive school was modeled after an abandoned manor that we thought was haunted. Fast forward thirty-something years and the haunted manor house has been turned into a four-star hotel. Just look at it. Charming, and the gardens are scrumptious! I definitely want to stay there sometime!

The Manoir Rouville-Campbell, as it is now called, was built in 1832 by René-Hertel de Rouville. The house was remodeled in 1850 by Major Thomas Edmund Campbell, having purchased it from the bankrupt Rouville in 1844.

A Gift of Serenity #2

Yesterday I posted about this gift I put together for my sis. Well, it all started with the book pictured here. And inside there was a photo of a sachet filled with dried scented flowers. I decided to make a replica to enclose with the gift, filling mine with dried lavender fom my garden and some rose petals. I was surprised how much it looked like the original. I enclosed all sorts of wee things and marked the corresponding pages where they were featured with post-it notes. I think it's a great way to incorporate other little gifts when you give a book.

A Gift of Serenity

I love giving themed gifts. This one, for my sister, started with a book called Your Home as a Sanctuary. The book is filled with ideas to bring nature into the house to create a serene environment. I was inspired by some of the photos in the book to create a gift for my sister. The natural elements and the beige and aqua colour scheme all played a part, but it all came together when I remembered the spring-like wallpaper I'd found in a thrift shop (which I used as gift wrap).

Pixie Home

Doesn’t this spot look like the perfect place for the entrance to a pixie home? When my son was younger, he and I would go looking for such entrance ways. He, like me, has a fascination for the world of elves, and fairies and other wee folk. It is such a fine thing to have an imagination that allows for the possibility of such creatures and their abodes.

When I was a little girl I was drawn to all those lovely English illustrations of worlds in miniature. Whether it was Cicely Mary Barker’s charming watercolour illustrations of flower fairies from one of her “Flower Fairy” books (the first was published in 1923), or children’s books with depictions of the interiors of mice homes with their match-box beds and sewing spool tables, I loved the sweet images and the imaginative minds that could conceive of such an anthropomorphic world in miniature.

Morning Pages

For something close to 8 or 9 years, I’ve lost track exactly, I have been writing morning pages as Julia Cameron suggests in her hugely popular book, The Artist’s Way. She urges people to write three pages a day, every day, first thing in the morning in order to empty themselves of all the issues that can hang around and cloud their day. First thing in the morning was never ideal for me — the household was just too busy getting ready for school and work. So for a time I wrote them upon arriving at work. After a few years, my morning pages became lunch pages. I would bring my notebook with me to a café on my lunch hour and write them then, with a coffee or in the winter a hot chocolate at the side.

At first I used regular school notebooks but gradually chose a fancier journal type to write in. When I brought a digital camera, a photo was glued in each day to accompany my entry. I noticed that my morning pages were becoming less stream of consciousness and more blog-like. Without realizing it I was heading towards blogging. And now that I am blogging I am finding that my morning pages have become very irregular. Probably because blogging is too similar to what my morning pages had become.

It might be time for me to get back to the real purpose of morning pages, to write without editing myself, to get onto the page all the issues that I’m facing at any particular time, to create a place once again where I can puzzle things out, or at least free my mind to get on with other things and hopefully, as Julia Cameron intended, to encourage my creativity in ways which may have become blocked.