Flowers on Sunday & The Kindness of Strangers

At the Farmers’ Market this morning, I picked up another bouquet of peonies, and these are just stunning! They also smell so amazingly beautiful and their scent is wafting through my wee house.  The ones I picked up at Whole Foods lasted nearly a week, so I am hoping these do too. 

I got an e-mail from one of my readers the other day, asking if I’d like some books. Barbara writes a delightful blog full of a wide range of topics, and I am always learning something from her. We agreed to meet on Saturday when she came into the city for a family event.

First, it was a great pleasure to meet her and her family, and I appreciated their hospitality. Second – OMG! What amazing books! I have not yet finished looking through all of them – there were about 30 in total.  There were wonderful books on Versailles, gardens, homes, decorating and more, but I did pick some immediate favourites. Of course, 1000 Buildings of London and 1000 Buildings of Paris were two top choices. Mark Hampton On Decorating is a perennial favourite, and a book that should be in everyone’s library. I am anxious to read Duane Hampton’s new book, Mark Hampton, An American Decorator. With a new house on the horizon, Charlotte Moss’s book, Creating a Room, A Designer’s Guide to Decorating Your Home in Stages, should come in quite handy. Although there’s not much work that needs to be done on the new house, I am sure that there will be a lot of decorating ideas I want to put into place. One of my favourite type of books is old etiquette books. Two which were included are Elegance: A Complete Guide for Every Woman Who Wants to be Well and Properly Dressed on All Occasions, and Entertaining with Elegance: A Complete Guide for Every Woman Who Wants to be the Perfect Hostess on All Occasions. They are both written by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, and were written in 1964 and 1965 respectively.

There was a book called “Elegance” about a woman who finds a copy of the original book, and decides to follow all of the rules it sets out. {Click the link for a great review of both.} Funnily enough, I picked up a copy of that book at Book Thing last week.  And now I realize that I have a copy of the reprint of the original Elegance that was published in 2004. There’s not much information on Mme. Dariaux, except that she worked at Nina Ricci and other Paris Couture houses.

Finally, as I mentioned the other day, Gore Dean is selling some of my pillows, and I thought you might like to see a few pictures of them in situ. If you can’t get to Baltimore, you can always find them on my Etsy shop.

Lots going on this week, so stay tuned for details!