September Gold Part 2

Outstanding smalls include numerous pieces of chalk ware.

See the stone fruit used as bookends on the middle shelf.

Many of the redware pieces used as lamps were wired by Jack and I think this is one of hundreds of lampshades I made years ago. 

These pictures only suggest the collection of samplers which is on view everywhere in the house.

Portraits everywhere.

A classic early butterfly table hides here in a too dark picture. I am always happy to see pieces we have sold in the past, now in good collections.. I still have three of these in my living room.

 

Chalk again.

The china head doll with a covered wagon hair style was found in a local estate sale.  This type of doll is one of my favorites. Think of the children she has helped to raise!

 

We are all waiting for a turn in the weather to signal cooler times.  There is just a touch of color in the foliage so it will be pretty soon.  This lovely party ushers in the season for my friends and me.

 

There is a nice complex of hill country houses furnished in a more primitive style coming here soon I hope.  Best, e

A Little Red House, my Mother's miniatures

Aside: The table from the 1600's was one of Jack's very favorite finds ever. It is safe with friend Jean now. 

My mother's dream was to have a salt box house. She raised me to think one should have a dry sink and a pewter collection and a pencil post bed and such to keep house rightly.  Her guide in everything was The American Home magazine, as we lived in the south far from the style of house mama wished for.   She crocheted rag rugs and made ruffled curtains and watched for old ironstone or crocks to turn up at Goodwill where she was a faithful customer for years. 

The time came when she knew she would never have her dream and so she turned to miniatures and much of the rest of her life lived in a doll house when not taking care of real life needs for her family.   Mama made the salt box doll house herself, calling upon my stepfather sometimes to saw something. The chimney was quite a project.  I remember helping hold it as we scored it with a screw driver to make "bricks".  The floor was laid of a narrow old wooden blind.  The shingles were cut of cork and put on one at a time.

She made many of the furnishings herself, using old drawer bottoms for thin wood.  The tiny quilts were a marvel of handwork and eyesight! She saw everything in a different scale from the rest of us.  Do you see the lamp shades of toothpaste lids? Tiny pea gravel became potatoes.

There were several dolls in the house, one a blond German china head doll named "Resurrection".  Resurrection was a little head found in the Comanche city dump, picked up by a junk dealer back in the time when dealers in old iron and bottles and such picked through the dump for merchandise.  I found her in a rusty tin coffee can in the dirt floor of a garage where his grandchildren had played with her. I surely left no stone unturned in my quest for antiques. I was in my 20's and living in west central Texas at that time.   I purchased the little head for  75 cents and made a body for her and dressed her, then Mama claimed her for the doll house a few months later.  From spring in the dump grounds to fall at the Texas State fair with a blue ribbon was a remarkable journey for Resurrection!  Mama entered her little house in the fair in Dallas that October and of course it won all hearts.

At first the little salt box house was not as full as it was in later years, as Mama saw other things to add.  The knickknacks were about half and half, commercial doll house findings and home made things. My stepfather carved a duck decoy to go on the mantel  My brother and I made two ladder back chairs and I wove seats in them.   I made the clay stoneware crocks for the salt box house years later and she added them.  She made quite a number of room boxes, several complete houses and at least two country stores.

We have not kept all of them, they are cumbersome to care for.  But my daughter Beth has three of the nicest ones including the red saltbox.  A small closet is devoted to them and there is lighting and Plexiglas for them.
Sometimes the closet door is opened and my mother's great great grandchildren get to gaze in wonder.    My mother, called Nanny to her grandchildren, is still much in our hearts and minds as many of the family sayings which we banter back and forth are hers.

 

 

 

 e

Dressing Old Beds for My Red Cape

That was the title of a book I was working on when we had a house fire ten years back which was a life changer.  At the time, I knew a number of collectors with great early beds dressed with fine old textiles. I am thinking of Betsy with wonderful homespun and Trish and Helen with bedrugs they had hooked themselves, and Jeanie who loved best the bed coverings we called patch work linsey woolseys.  Now the term is frowned upon and whole cloth quilt is in, but these were pieced ones, not whole cloth at all and very very few and far between. Any that Jack and I found on our trips always went to Jeanie. In addition to the bedrug, Trish had an outstanding collection of early coverlets.   It was my plan to gather pictures of beds dressed by these collector/decorators extraordinaire and also include for extra interest a few old doll beds well turned out.
 I had part of the text and a number of the photos in hand.  In our cape I had an exceptional set of bed hangings of red toile from the estate of Clark Garrett, prominent collector and dealer, of Fairhaven, Ohio. I had also several thickly quilted whole cloth quilts in home woven and home dyed indigo and rust and butternut.  All went up in smoke.  The  project was  abandoned.  I think it would have made a colorful and interesting book for collectors of early Americana.

My own bedroom in the red cape with a rust colored linsey woolsey or whole cloth quilt. Early chintz quilt at the foot. Other times I changed the rust colored linsey for an indigo below. These blue print bed hangings were not old, but I made then on my fingers, with endless French seams.

Rich textiles made the old house sing.

 

Period Toile hangings.  They were bound in hand woven tape made on a tape loom. The fabric had a 72 inch repeat as I remember, and as fabric was so dear, no thought to matching the pattern was made when piecing it together

Early beds were not standard sizes and some were oversized and many were smaller than we use today.  Coverlets and hand woven ticks and blankets came in all sizes.  In addition, some pieces have been cut down because of wear.  A common issue for today's collector is how to use these often shorter textiles  in attractive ways to give a coordinated whole.   Bolsters covered in a different textile offer one solution.  I love to layer these pieces to show off several on a bed.  

Now some of the few early textiles I have acquired in spite of my self since moving into a modern home really need to be resettled in the hands of younger collectors better able to care for them. I was packing some today to send a friend and had to spread them out to enjoy again first. So I will share them here. 

Here is a patchwork linsey woolsey, in bars of indigo and tan. The back is very deep brown.

What a folky woven bird!  A beautiful full size coverlet in strong condition.

This one is huge, both long and wide enough for a queen bed, in great condition and having a lot of the original fringe on the bottom almost 5 inches long. Look at the close up of the indigo bar on the underlying linsey woolsey.  Glorious!  e

 

Post script, 6 am:     I go outside in the night sometimes to look at moons and meteors and such, this morning the Perseids Meteor shower is beautiful! I stayed out long enough to count eleven of what we called shooting stars as children. Can you remember laying out on a quilt on a summer night watching the sky? e

 

Gardening and ungardening

The last 10 days have been very hard for me, I am sore and limping and exhausted and grinning anyway.  Looking back at changes in my yard two years ago, here is how it was as I had a perfect front lawn dug out completely.

 

When laying out big curves in a yard for planting beds or such, I use a garden hose, pushing it back and forth till I get a shape I like. Then the hose makes an outline for laying the edging.

 

 

Now the front yard is like this with a shady glider, two little tables and three metal chairs. The mostly native Texas plants are blooming with very little else out there but a crepe myrtle and some phlox both of which were already established when I started this in 2013.

 

In 2014 I had planting done on the side yard and a large brick patio built with space left open for a kitchen garden.  This had also been nice grass.  I was working against a drought of historic proportions. 

 

With many aches and so little success, I have decided my farming days are over. Vegies will have to come from the market except a few cherry tomatoes in pots.

I called my workers back and have had more brick laid, as well as major brush trimming behind a back fence.

This modern little house is an ugly duckling to me, made more pleasant by having a lot of greenery around it at all seasons. So digging up the lawn might sound counter productive.

 

The bare bricks look a little stark right now but pot plants and pretty yard furniture plus growing some size on a few large shrubs will make it more appealing.  The back of the lot is shady and the small trees planted there are doing very well.   There is still plenty of garden on my tiny lot.  I hand water and weed it myself more or less continuously, and have good helpers in to do trimming and pickup about once a month.  No lawn to mow and edge.  It is a yard made for relaxing. Sounds good if I can just overcome the mosquitos.  e