As I told you in yesterday's post, I didn't buy much at Sunday's antiques fair. I came home with lace though. Really gorgeous lace. I was lucky to find two antique dealers who had some lace items. These pics are of the treasures I found on the first one -
One of the lace pieces was on this card, I adore the label -
These lace motifs are the most beautiful ones I have ever come across, such incredibly fine work, they take my breath away -
They have been sewn together to form one large trim, but can be easily taken apart so that they can be used singly on special projects.
This is also a really sweet little lace motif -
Finely embroidered lingerie trim -
A piece of lace fabric, not terribly old, but very pretty -
Notice the little splatters of sunshine? Yep, it was a gorgeously sunny day yesterday when I took the photographs.
I love this next piece of lace as well, made with such incredibly fine thread -
Small pieces of Battenburg lace, handmade with such tiny ribbons -
A few pieces of small vintage lace -
And last, but not least, this very wide and quite thick lace with the prettiest rose pattern -
The lace items from the second dealer will have to wait until tomorrow, but I hope that you have enjoyed looking at these bits.
Thank you for stopping by! Toodlepip xxx
Our telephone line was dead when we arrived at the cottage last Tuesday, and it has taken all this time for an engineer to get out to us and find the problem. FINALLY, yay! Being without phone and internet is very frustrating. Weather has not been all that great either, so we haven't done much apart from visiting friends and watching the Winter Olympics, but....... we did manage to go to an antiques fair yesterday! Yikes, prices are high at a proper antiques fair! Having said that, I did buy a few things I just couldn't resist. Yep, you guessed it, lace! Gotta get it when you see it, because it is becoming more and more difficult to find antique lace. It is lovely and sunny today, so hopefully I will be able to photograph my new treasures and show you soon.
Thats all for now, I have a lot of catching up to do!
Toodlepip xxx
We are off to France tomorrow night, and I have so much to do still! I missed a couple of weeks of Tag Tuesday tags, AND, I am not taking any craft stuff with me, so I really would like to make the tags for the next couple of weeks as well. YIKES!!!! We'll see, lol.
AND....... Kimberly announced a new ATC swap yesterday ( see my sidebar ), and I love her swaps, so there was no way I was going to miss it. I spent yesterday evening and this morning getting them ready. It is also Our Beautiful World Sunday, which I thoroughly enjoy, didn't want to miss that one either. It just means that today I am doing a two-in-one post ;-) !
Firstly, this is my photo for today's theme over at Our Beautiful World, DERELICT. I took the photo a couple of years ago whilst out geocaching in France -
Pick up your camera, head out for a little while, and see what you can find in your neighbourhood!
So thats the Our Beautiful World bit of the title. Now to the Plans, what Plans? part. ATCs. When I first thought about the swap, I had planned to use Victorian scrap, music paper, pages of a tiny little pocket dictionary -
Singly, all the bits looked great, together, blah, it didn't do it for me. Somehow it just didn't work. So that plan went down the toilet, lol. I ended up with something totally different, not even remotely like the planned ATCs, but I am very happy with them.
It all started with this 1896 French ledger paper, which I picked for the background -
I didn't have any old photographs the right size to use on the ATCs and I couldn't bring myself to cut any, so I started looking for vintage ads instead. Thats where this came in, a French magazine from 1909 called Je Sais Tout, which means, I Know Everything. Great title, eh? -
Inside the magazine was a short play, called Les Nuits du Hampton-Club and I loved the drawings of the men. I just had to use them on the ATCs. All that remained then was to find a few other bits to put on, a couple of weird and wonderful ads from the same magazine, old stamps, little rosettes made with vintage music paper, that was about it-
Couldn't be more different from what I had planned originally.
I wish you all a really lovely Sunday, enjoy it wherever you are, and thank you so much for stopping by and reading this post.
Toodlepip xxx
Grey. Grey is the only colour I see outside these days. The rain just goes on and on and on. Every once in a while we get an hour or two of respite, even a little patch of blue sky and a ray of sunshine, but those moments are very few and far between. THAT kind of grey I am not liking very much right now. But, there is always the other kind of grey, the silvery kind :-) ! I had searched through my stash for some silver grey hearts for a little project I have been thinking about, and while they were on my desk, I thought I might as well take some pics -
Whilst looking for something to put them on, I came across this commemorative wine bottle coaster -
I hope that the grey in your life refers to gorgeous little treasures, not the weather. For more beautiful greys, check Petite Michelle Louise's GREY DEY THURSDEY post.
Toodlepip xxx
OOOOOOOOOOOOOH, I was just about to link this post to Michelle's party, when I saw my name in her post! Woohoo, I am one of the winners of the gorgeous totes she had found and showed last week. Thank you so much, Michelle! Right, off to link up now :-).
Yay, the ATCs from Kimberly's Valentines swap arrived this morning, and I am thrilled to bits with them. Kimberly is a wonderful swap hostess, and I try and take part in her swaps whenever I can. This year's Valentines swap was a straight forward 3 for 3 swap, and here is what I received in the mail -
Three beautifully packaged swap ATCs and a gorgeous gift from our lovely hostess -
Please believe me, these are in no particular order, just as I picked them up, all three are really stunning ATCs and I couldn't pick a favourite if you paid me. The first one shown is from Jewels -
Absolutely delightful, I am sure you'll agree. You can find Jewels HERE.
This next ATC is from Kelly -
Stunning, and so romantic! Kelly's blog is HERE.
The third ATC is from Sylvia -
Gorgeous colour scheme! Sylvia's blog is HERE.
And this is the beautiful gift received from our swap hostess, Kimberly -
Huge thank you to all you wonderful swappers and to our hostess, I really am over the moon with my swap ATCs.
You can visit Kimberly's blog HERE and you can find some of her totally gorgeous creations HERE.
When I make tags, for Tag Tuesday, customers or friends, I usually end up with a very neutral colour palette and fairly predictable vintage images as well. But every now and then I need to mess around with colour just a little bit. I have all of three Alcohol Inks, three Cosmic Shimmer mist and three Distress Stains, lolol, as well as some Promarkers and Spectrum Noir pens. Thats it. Ah, and a few pastel chalks. Not the biggest arsenal in the world, lol. Anyhoo, out came the paints just for a few mins of splattering, dabbing and wiping -
The distress stains were quite light really, so they needed something else. I embossed them -
Then I rubbed one of them with a little bit of gold cream -
And embellished it without a vintage image! -
And then there was the really deeply coloured background. I did use a vintage image on that one, but only a little one, and lots of other stuff, like gold leaf flakes, watch parts, and I had stamped it as well -
I wonder how long it will be before I get the colours out again.
Toodlepip xxx
