Welcome to My Red Cape. Long ago in another time my husband Jack and I lived in a little old red house. It was the stuff of dreams to us for the few years that we were there. I live there still a number of hours every day in imagination, with old dolls and paintings and fabrics and feather trees. I draw inspiration and happiness from the memories of that space in time and share some of it here with friends who remember how to step with Alice through the looking glass and take delight in whimsies and antiquities. ~Edyth O’Neill

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Projects, hearts heads and ??eggs?



How do all of these go together?  It has been almost ten years since our house fire. It has been a hard and full ten years, with three moves, much to restore and pack and unpack and downsize and my sweet husband was fighting a battle he could not win.  Jack wove fresh seats in 20 chairs, and I restored a great many dolls. We redid two houses lightly during that time. We managed some very good times in among all of that.  

The garage of my present house holds anything but my old lady minivan, Vanessa.  Instead there are rows of high shelves piled high with boxes and boxes in front of boxes holding yarn or bits of leather and scraps of old coverlets and dozens of things I think I might get to or work on again.  There are skeins of flax (old ones) for doll hair in case I ever make a queen Ann style doll. You get the idea. I am still in a way trying to find my way back to the page where I was when it all fell apart.  Some projects long waiting do get resurrected a bit at a time or discarded to never never land.

I had wanted to make some heart shaped pin cushions for Valentine's day last month. The makings did not come to hand. Today I decided to get the old hen out for Easter, she always sits on the kitchen table or a sideboard. Once she was surrounded by a nice clutch of hand painted eggs to which I added a few every spring or so. I painted them mostly in Quimper designs. All were smoked badly and thrown away except two large ones inside the hen covered dish itself.  Barb Carroll has a couple I gave her long back, she loves that pottery.  I have not painted another in ten years!  Now seems like the right time to remedy that so I went digging  in the cold garage for a long time and gave up, then had one more go at it and wow! there was the box marked eggs and hearts!  How did that happen to be combined? But more exciting for me was a box marked wig heads!  I thought they were long lost!  instead here they are , two nice large reproduction ones ready for me to repaint as I like. I am thrilled to find them after years of thinking them lost.   How does anyone ever get bored?  E, who is in a happy messy house right now.

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