Small but enthusiastic

More or less on a whim, Nick and i decided to have a little Christmas concert this year, but since the whole thing was a bit seat-of-the-pants (and at such a busy time), we had just a handful of folks out at the meetinghouse last night. Still, everybody had a good time, and we raised a few bucks for Hungry for Music (and at least one attendee left with a flyer, muttering about the electric bass her son never actually played...), so i'm putting it generally in the success column, even though i have lots of cookies and cider left over.

We ended up playing what was - for us - a fairly modest collection of instruments: soprano, alto, and tenor recorders, galoubet and tambourin, Nick's curious mbira that's set up like a hammered dulcimer, and bagpipes. The bagpipes are small bellows-blown ones in the French style, actually quite demure for bagpipes.

Peer pressure

My sister paints these swell boxes.  They've been appearing as holiday and birthday gifts for several years now.  She keeps muttering about making them for sale, and in fact sold a few through a friend's craft collective.  She talked about sending some down here for one of the shops where i consign prints, and they were interested in having them.  So i'm hoping to nudge her again, because i think they'd do really well if she wanted to put them out there...

The little square box was the first one i got, and i think it's still my favorite.  (And in case you're wondering, yes, there are four-and-twenty of them.)

What do you think? Maybe we can convince her.

Scratch and dent sale

I was trolling through the flea market a few weeks back - late in the day for that sort of thing, so the vendors were a little thin, but i was going past and thought i'd breeze through and see if anything caught my eye.  The flea markets here are by and large no use at all for finding patterns, but sometimes you can get notions or books or other related sewing things, and there are useful household items to be had.

Transferware is one of the things i watch for - it's started to get expensive in some of the local thrift shops, so i haven't had much luck building my oddball collection of mismatched dishes there.  So when i walked by, this piece caught my eye:

I was almost past the table when the brain pointed out to the body that was already cruising onward, "hey, that one's seriously old."  I checked myself and went to take a closer look.  I remember thinking, "i'll eat my hat if that's not a nineteenth century piece."  

When i turned it over to look for a maker's mark, the vendor said since the plate was chipped, he'd take a dollar for it.  The chip is mostly on the underside, but does show on the front at the rim, about one o'clock.  I decided that even with the chip, it was worth a buck for a bread plate with an interesting pattern and some age.  If nothing else, i'd get my money's worth in the amusement value of a pleasant little research project.

If a quick online search is to be relied upon (which it's not, but it's somewhere to start), the mark on the back was in use for about a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century. 

The shot at left is lousy with glare, but does give a better representation of the color.  The scene in the center of the plate is pretty typical, but i really love the border on this one...

Out of the attic

Grammy had a wonderful attic.  For most of my childhood, it was unfinished, dimly lit, a bit spooky, but filled with fascinating things in the drawers of massive old dressers and on the shelves of a glass-fronted bookcase.  There was a copy of The Old Curiosity Shop which was inscribed Christmas, 1890 - which seemed positively ancient to me, and was probably the oldest thing i'd been allowed to handle without adult supervision.  I remember sitting on the floor in front of the bookcase with one slim blue volume from a set of "The World's 1000 Best Poems" and reaching the sucker punch at the end of "The Highwayman" - which leaves quite an impression when you're 10 or so.

Over a number of years, old volumes made their way to my own shelves, as gifts or on loan, or now and again even rescued out of boxes destined for garage sales (got a 1909 Hammond's World Atlas that way... that was in 1989 or 1990, and i remember being amused that the maps for swaths of Eastern Europe were almost current again).  By the time Grammy died, the collection was considerably smaller, and the bookcase - to my dismay - gone to a cousin.  But there were a few old books left, a bit of an odd selection, but i took several home because no one else wanted them.  One of those books seems seasonally appropriate, now that we're into October:

 This little book has a copyright date of 1912, and it's full of games that lean largely toward magical prediction, usually regarding selection of mates, rather than toward anything spooky or diabolical.  I rather suspect that it was aimed at young ladies.

A few of the suggested games, for inspiration in your own festivities:

SNAPDRAGON

1. The dragon consists of half a pint of ignited brandy or alcohol in a dish.  As soon as brandy is aflame, all lights are extinguished, and salt is freely sprinkled in dish, imparting a corpse-like pallor to every face.  Candied fruits, figs, raisins, sugared almonds, etc., are thrown in, and guests snap for them with their fingers; person securing most prizes from flames will meet his true love within the year.

2. Or, slips of paper on which verses are written are tightly wrapped in tin-foil and placed in dish.  Brandy is poured on and ignited.  The verse each person gets is supposed to tell his fortune.

     Place burning dish in middle of a bare table, for drops of burning spirits are often splashed about.

[Don't try this at home, kids...]

APPLES AND FLOUR

     Suspend horizontally from ceiling a stick three feet long.  On one end stick an apple, upon the other tie a small bag of flour.  Set stick whirling.  Each guest takes turn in trying to bite apple-end of stick.  It is amusing to see guests receive dabs of flour on face.  Guest who first succeeds in biting apple gets prize.

RING AND GOBLET

     Tie wedding-ring or key to silken thread or horsehair, and hold it suspended within a glass; then say the alphabet slowly; whenever ring strikes glass, begin over again and in this way spell the name of future mate.

The book helpfully gives examples for suitable invitations, too:

Going to pieces

The auction listing had the magic words: several sewing machines.

This is a good indicator of the potential for finding patterns.  Many, if not most, estate sales will have a sewing machine, i think because people just felt it was one of those things a woman ought to have in her household.  But a sewing machine may prove to be unloved and unused, gummed up and dusty.  Not necessarily a bad thing, if you're after the machine and can clean it up, but if you're after patterns, you won't find 'em there.

But someone with several sewing machines?  Ah, they're hard-core (or an optimistic hoarder of craft stuff, which can be just as good).  And whether or not you want the machines, you're likely to run across notions and sewing supplies in the box lots.

So after seeing this listing, i hied myself to Boonsboro that afternoon for the auction.  Bit of a hike to get out there, but it's a pretty drive.

There was not a single pattern, alas - this had been a quilter, not a sewer-of-garments.  But amongst the boxes of tacky plastic canvas, fabric i couldn't quite justify, and heaps and heaps of Tupperware i haven't room for, there were a few interesting things.  I missed out on the Gingher pinking shears and the cutting mats and the vintage cookbooks, but i got one batch of boxes, because it included this:

Okay, it's a swell old box, but i didn't buy it for the box, of course.  Inside, there were lots (72, to be exact) of these:

...along with a whole pile of plain muslin squares, presumably intended to be alternated with the pieced squares - it's enough to make a twin quilt top, by my quick-and-dirty estimates.  Many of the fabrics are plainly 1930s, and the quilt squares are all pieced by hand.  (This represents an insane quantity of work: the tiny checkerboard squares, when finished, are hardly bigger than a dime...)

I laid out a few squares, so you can get an idea what it might look like once assembled:

Coming attractions

A quick peek at a few highlights from the batch of patterns i'm getting ready to list at Fripperie:

Sometimes the art is half the fun - e.g., the ubiquitous tobacco use on the men's pattern - and sometimes it's pure retro fashion fabulousness.  Are those not just about the cutest maternity tops you've ever seen?  The 1942 housecoat from Advance makes housework seem oh-so-glamorous!  And that '60s dress with the raglan sleeves... i can imagine my mother having sewn that one (the lines are similar to dresses she made that eventually ended up in my closet).

[Don't ask me why Blogger is doing random things with the spacing of the photos... i fought with it for hours, and this was the best i could get it to do.  Guess i need to learn to be more comfortable with editing the HTML; maybe then i can bend it to my will...]

Coming attractions...

Just a few of the patterns that i'll be listing soon at Fripperie - stop by to see what's new (er, old, but new...)!

The Requisite Snow Post

I think everyone in the Mid-Atlantic is required to do one today, so here 'tis. We've got somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half feet of snow here, in a region that doesn't deal well with more than, say, four inches...


That's the chicken coop. There are no actual fowl visible, because they're all in the doorway of the chickenhouse, making disparaging comments about the weather. My chickens are not fans of snow.
The cats, on the other hand, are. As long as they can come in and sleep by the woodstove, after...