Under a Blue Moon

White Christmas

The decorating is done!

And I only broke one ornament this year (so far, knock on wood and all that…).

If you have been decorating yourself I bet you anything that if you hopped up right this second and looked in the mirror you will have glitter stuck somewhere on your face. Probably several places.

The glitter and occasional broken ornament is worth it though, isn’t it? We are at that magical stage where it makes your heart swell a little bit when you drive up to the house and see your Christmas tree all lit up, sparkling in the window.

Dickens Faire

We attended the Dickens Faire in San Francisco on Sunday. Rick and I drove down and met up with assorted family members for a day of Victorian shopping, eating and general revelry. That’s Nicki, Sara and Ryan on the right above. This was before Nicki bought her hat from the Bosphorus that she wore for the remainder of the day and well into the evening. Ryan looks like some random dude wearing a suit but he had a bowler hat on most of the time, fitting in with the whole Victorian vibe.

Sara even had a newsboy cap, going for the Oliver Twist look.

There are a whole host of characters that roam the venue. We saw Charles Dickens (of course. It was his faire, after all), Jacob Marley, the Cratchits, various chimney sweeps (if you see a chimney sweep, give him a kiss on the cheek and you’ll have good luck), Mad Sal and her Ladies’ Oratorical and Recreational Society (with an emphasis on the recreational, wink wink).

We saw shops selling magic wands, jewelry, books, pottery and Victorian Clothing. The picture above and below are from The Dark Garden, a shop that specializes in corsetry. The windows had live mannequins and if you were missing one of the men in your party you could generally find them loitering outside this shop. They claimed to be most interested in the engineering of the undergarments and how they made certain aspects of a ladies anatomy look like it was defying gravity.

The very first thing we did was stop for tea at Cuthbert’s Tea Shoppe. We sat ourselves down and had a nice cuppa and some scones and crumpets to fortify ourselves for the day’s activities. Which was mostly more eating.

There were meat pies, fish and chips, roasted chestnuts, bangers and mash. I had falafel with tzatziki sauce because nothing quite says Victorian Christmas like Greek food. Hey Sara had dolmas, so I wasn’t the only one. I did have hot buttered rum to make up for it (prompting Ryan to tell a joke about cider that I can’t repeat here…).

It was a fun, fun day and if you are in the California Bay Area it’s worth the $22 to get in.

One last picture of a teeny flower stand tucked into an alley. It’s kind of dark but it looked so real it really did transport us back in time, if just for a few hours.

Ephemera

One of the many odds and ends I’ve amassed over the years are these microscope slide mailers. I’ve seen some amazing miniature pieces of art created using these functional bits of cardboard.

In the back of my mind I pictured doing an Alice in Wonderland kind of montage but never had the images that would fit in the slide holder slots.

Today I was at our local art stamp shop and I found a sheet of Victorian angel photographs that were sized just perfectly for the mailers so I plopped them into my shopping basket.

When I got home I started googling examples of pieces done using the slide mailers. One of the images that caught my eye was on the Artchix website. This is my homage to their Divine Advent calendar.

As always when I am working on something I think of a million ways I would do it differently the next time. For example – I tend to be impatient to see the end result and start putting together the big bang elements when I should work out the small details first. The next time I’ll to my gold edging (around the little window openings) before I glue in the images. Same with doing any imbossing. I did practice my handwriting before trying it on the finished piece and my practice writing was way better then what I did here. Ah well.

The past couple of days have me daydreaming about my dream studio. I need a big old space with acres of counter and storage. I know I have metal crown embellishments somewhere and if I had my nice organized studio I’m sure I could have found them easily.

Santa’s Workshop

Actually I’m not certain I’d be allowed in Santa’s workshop. I’m sure he has stringent rules about tidying as you go. Something I am not a fan of, as you can clearly see.

I’m making Christmas cards this year – very similar to my Halloween Party invitations. I just love that scallopy circle cut out.

Cook’s Illustrated The New Best Recipe is excellent for pressing glued together bits, kind of like pressing flowers.

I made two prototypes to see what color scheme I wanted to go with. I’m not really a red and green Christmas kind of girl. I like creams, whites, silver, sagey greens.

But I’m thinking definitely the red on this one. You can’t tell in the pictures but there is sparkly ‘snow’ on the rooftops.

Okay – now to go tidy up.

Fall has finally arrived

We are a little slow around here. This picture was taken this morning, looking out the dining room window at my Dad’s house. This tree is a brilliant red and glowy orange and when the light is just so the entire livingroom is infused with a golden glow from the reflection.

And yes, those are roses still blooming under that Maple tree. Gotta love living in California. The land of no seasons.

After

Finished! I did say my goal was to get it completed before Thanksgiving and that didn’t quite happen but close enough.

Basically we started off with one free cabinet, four free bun feet, two stained pine bookcases, a clever husband and lots of paint.

There are a few ugly, yet needed things on the shelves – like the wireless router and telephone. I’m also thinking a 42" flat screen television would look much better than our circa 1987 big tube monstrosity.

Here’s the Before if you want to refresh your memory on how things were:

The 80’s oak cabinet found a new home. And thank goodness for Bins primer to cover all the knot holes on the pine bookcases.

I still have one last finishing touch I want to do – I want to put decorative wooden appliques on the cabinet doors – I need to either order them or find a local lumberyard that carries them. I figure when I find them I can paint them and then apply them. So there may be an after after post.

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