Hand made cards

Hello my friends,

It's been quite a while since my last post here. Sometimes life takes you away from the screen. My partner has been in hospital but is now recovering well and we are catching up on all the balls we let fall...

I haven't done much creating, but I have painted our deck and stairs which were sadly in need of repair. These cards are ones I did a while ago...

 The bird's egg and nest is a serviette which I tore. I added an egg tag which fits into the front pocket, and finished with a paper flower and a netting piece of a lace doiley. Very quick and simple, it was a last minute rush.

This image of Maud Fealy is stitched onto hand-made paper layers over a scrapbooking paper, embellished with a lace scrap, daisies and pink butterfly.

The cardboard frame was perfect for this beautiful baby, layered over hand made paper, an embossed texture, stamped script and a snippet of lace, and finished with a satin ribbon.

Next, a baby card suitable for a boy. Over a grey-blue scrapbook paper background I added a leafy wreath, white butterfly wings, a tiny flower and seam binding bow, an embossed gold crown and some buttons.

I like this cheeky boy's smile.

I have been doing some photography when I can, and I edited this image of Willow in photoshop. She has the most beautiful eye colour.

Here's Willow again...

Here are pictures of our deck before and after I painted it... what a huge job! It took about two weeks to do three sets of stairs, two small decks and the main deck.

I think I'm just in time - a couple of boards will need to be replaced, but when T is quite recovered...

What a sucker for punishment I am - no sooner did I finish painting the deck, I started the next garden project - putting in rocks to hold back the soil and mulch... luckily I just finished these projects before the cold change hit us. Now I can be cosy and do indoor stuff.

Despite the lack of rain since January, my roses are still blooming in June, along with hibiscuses...

I wish you a happy Summer if that's where you are. We are now in Winter, having our first rain in months and our first cold weather. Here, we are cold when it gets down to below 15 degrees Celcius during the day. I love the cosiness of being indoors during wind and cold rain. No excuses for creative output now! And time to catch up and be inspired by my blogging friends too.

Pastel Roses and Lace

Hello Friends,

It's the 50th Simply Neutral Party at Wen's blog, AppleApricot, so I'm celebrating with a bumper post and a special giveaway for you all below. Thank you, Wen for being such a warm and welcoming host, and also the community of artful women who have gathered to share their works and encourage each other in their various artistic pursuits. I've appreciated the inspiration, ideas, and friendships that have grown here.

I've chosen a mauve theme today - along with some other pastel roses, since my garden is overflowing with rose beauty at the moment. It's very challenging for me to limit myself to 'simply neutral' tones!!! I hope these choices fit the theme.

A gorgeous old print of a bunch of mauve roses in its chippy paint frame called to my heart. There's a signature at the bottom - 'Morgan' - but I couldn't find it on the Internet. I can't tell if it might be under copywright or not. This aged and stained mauve silk doiley I've had for years goes perfectly with it. It's from the personal collection of my friend Donna who has a wonderful vintage shop at Burrill Lake near here on the South Coast of Australia, called 'Lakeside Vintage'. Donna sells via Instagram, too, and can mail some things. 

I had fun pulling out mauve stuff to display with it. Another reason I've not produced much art this month! Too much playing! You'll see it appears further down in this post with another picture.

Apart from gardening, I have been creative too. I pulled out a pile of old clothes I've been saving to alter - things that didn't fit properly, or needed some attention, or were just not quite right. Some were from charity shops, bought for their fabric, to turn into something else. I set about altering some of them... I stitched the grey rose in chiffon by hand, and attached a piece of lace cut from a round doiley. That made it flow nicely. I then gathered some mauve seam binding to cover the seam, and added a brown ribbon accent. 

These mauve roses from my garden were perfect shades to show with it... The centre rose is called Stainless Steel, and the others are Novalis.

This beautiful top had a fully gathered bodice which looked a little like a maternity top, so I added some lace decoration (old doileys) and a pale salmon cloth rose finished with a seam binding bow to break up the line of gathers. I love it much better this way. It's hanging against David Austin's rose, Windermere.

The cloth roses are sold by the metre, on a gauze strip at a local crafty shop. I used another on this cheap sleeveless top for Summer. I added some black braid around the neck and at the bottom of the lace to protect the cut edge. 

The lace was an op shop buy, gold on black netting. I cut the frill off a synthetic blouse that was too hot to wear here, and stitched it as a layer under the last flounce. I used a scrap from that blouse under the rose as a small frill.

The top is mostly cotton, loose and cool. It's become a little more dressed up.

Since we are here in the garden... 

Gardening has taken over my life these past few months, and our garden is looking magnificent. The roses are the best they have ever been. It's raining here now as I write this...surrounded by vases of roses I just HAD to save from browning in the rain... 29 vases of them!!

I picked a whole bucket of Climbing Cinderella roses at their best, as the rain browns the edges of the petals. I painted a metal bucket with pale pink chalk paint. My kids complain that there's not enough room to sit at the table for dinner, surrounded by flowers! (I do take some away before we eat!)

Daisies are such cheerful, long-lasting hard workers in my garden... It's hard to find a 'neutral' palette when everything is so green and vibrant at the moment.

A dear friend who is staying with her daughter while her new house is being built needed a place to store her vintage typewriter - so I offered it a temporary (sadly!) home. I cleaned it up and displayed a favourite quote on it - my teenage son scoffed at me that "typewriters can't print pictures, Mum!"

Here's the quote:

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870 

Not much reading this month! The picture of sweet twins below was a garage sale find. Some more adopted children for my collection.

Now for some cards I've made -  the first three I made some time ago, but I have been doing so many other things this month that my creative output suitable for Simply Neutrals is limited! First, a birthday card...

A baby card for a friend...

A little Christmas angel...

Here's a recent gardening-themed wall hanging which I made at the same time as a garden-themed card for a dear gardening friend's 70th birthday. I made this as I reflected on how my garden has been such good therapy these past months, and its rewards are ongoing...

I love old world roses, particularly those with scent, and many petals. One of my favourite roses is David Austin's William Morris...

The old silver rotating photo display below was a cool op shop find. I enjoyed printing out my favourite cabinet cards to fill it.

This month I've been busy designing posters for one of our local Museums, the Moruya Museum.  I just want to show one poster draft here, and I will be posting the others soon. What treasures we have hidden away in museums! The top picture here is a cherub from the old baptismal font from Moruya's Catholic Church. The tintype on the left is a wonderfully preserved example of a cased ambrotype, one of the earliest examples of photographic methods from about 1860. The centre is a part of a vintage lace tablecloth, and the right picture is a framed Irish Land League propaganda-style poster depicting the 1881 trial of Charles Stewart Parnell and other leaders of The Irish Land League in Dublin, dated 1890.

We are so lucky to have museums keeping our stories and artefacts of the past. 

Visitors to my house say my place looks like a museum - I love displaying my old collections. This gorgeous picture cost a whole $1 at a vintage fair - I've continued the mauve theme as it complements the green and mauve tones in the background of the picture. These roses are fake - but pretty good, eh? Garage sale dust collectors - I just washed them and put them in the sun.

I'm enjoying taking photographs of all the beauty I see every day. It's like a gratefulness journal of appreciation.

Sorry, this 50th Simply Neutrals Give Away is finished.

These images will be available on my Etsy shop when it's up. I am currently preparing images from my own collections to sell, and I hope it will not be too long before I take the courage to open shop! 

I've tried to limit my palette for this post to neutral colours and pastels so I can join the 50th Simply Neutrals Party at Wen's blog, Apple Apricot. Please follow the link and check out the display of wonderful neutral beauty there.

 

 

See you later; I'm off to see what's on display at Wen's blog.

Vintage Baby Clothes and Lace

Hello again friends,

Vintage baby clothes have always tugged on my heart-strings - especially gentle whites and creams, even those yellowed with age. I've been collecting since I got my first job as a teenager. I could only afford charity shop prices - back then 50 cents or $1 was the norm. My Hope Chest gradually filled with little items that I hoped to see on my own babies one day. 

I had to wait at least 20 years for it to happen, so that's a lot of collecting!!! Below is a cotton petticoat on which I embroidered a pink bow and some rosebuds. 'Sugar Britches' is the model here, a porcelain ad cloth life-sized baby doll I made in my twenties.

I can't believe how people could throw out beautiful heirloom items. This pure wool blanket is light and warm and soft, tastefully embroidered with cream flowers.

And yes, I did use it, as a pram blanket in the old cream cane pram I bought from a shop called 'No Horse, No Wife, No Moustache' about 30 years ago, which served my three beautiful babies.

Here's the old pram - it was a Summer and too hot for a woolen rug...

And another Summer baby! 

Here is a detail of the flowers:

This dress below is superb - in a soft, light wool crepe, in a golden creamy tone with fine white cotton lace. What a glorious find!

Here are some lace details:

And here is my daughter Roisin wearing it years ago!

Next is a 50's or 60's synthetic and lace dress in white with a bonnet to match. I do prefer natural fibres, but it's sweet. You don't see them much any more, even in opportunity shops. 

This dress is also synthetic, but beautifully hand made, smocked and embroidered.

These baby shoes are modern leather in a vintage style. I altered them (not permanently!) by putting some lace held in by pictures of vintage babies... a fun decoration.

Below is a card I made a while ago using a stamped image, a feather and some lace pieces.

And a wedding collage...

I'm joining Wen for Simply Neutrals #49 at her blog AppleApricot. Come over and join us in celebrating neutral beauty of all kinds.

Stay well, and I'll see you soon.