This is Baltimore: Our Brigadoon

Dickeyville, a small neighbourhood in Baltimore, fits the dictionary definition of Brigadoon perfectly: a place that is idyllic, unaffected by time, or remote from reality. Dickeyville is off the beaten path, down a turn from a busy road, nestled in a small river valley, and completely, utterly charming!

As part of my #thisisbaltimore2017 exploration of the city, I took an afternoon to search out the village of Dickeyville, which is on the western edge of Baltimore City. I had planned to walk through the village, but it was misting heavily , so I just drove around, and will visit later for a walk-about. But I fell in love with this place and wanted to share it with you.

I’ve found that Sundays are a good day to go exploring, as commercial sites aren’t well-populated, and I can wander pretty freely. As I headed over from my first stop, an old mansion on some hospital grounds, where a loggia leads from the mansion to the actual hospital,

I spotted this perched on the hill above the valley.

Naturally, I had to follow the road and find out what it was. I think I could live there!

I finally wended my way down to the village and just fell in love. I have actually been to a few weddings in this church, but never went into the village to explore… mainly because every wedding I went to there, I got lost.

Let’s wander around.

Family friends owned this house when I was a child. It’s a converted church, with a ballroom on the top floor.

Many of the homes are constructed of local stone, and were built for utilitarian purposes, this one a small barn.

This was the Mechanics Hall and later a theatre. It still has the original stage and lights.

This is the last house in the village and was built for the mill supervisor.

You have to cross a scary bridge to get to the mills.

The mill buildings are still in use for other purposes. I LOVE the trimwork on this!

(Shhhh… I was totally trespassing for this shot!)

Here’s the Gwynns Falls which originally powered the mills.

This mill building was converted to an artist’s studio in the 1930’s, and has been occupied by artists ever since.

This was built as the first International Order of Odd Fellows hall, and now houses an art gallery.

This house is currently on the market for less than $300k.

I love the cheery yellow door on this one and I love that the village has these wonderful white picket fences throughout.

I know I’ve already shown this image, but seriously, isn’t that entrance just the most amazing thing!

There’s a annual garden tour of Dickeyville in May, and you can find more information about the village here. I hope that you enjoyed discovering Dickeyville, just as I did!

PS.. I am having issues with my blog platform, so please excuse the wonky formatting. Ugh!

Nevertheless…

As you might know, I designed a line of tea towels (you can find them on my Etsy page), last fall. It was a lot of fun thinking about the designs, working them out and then selling them… A lot of them!

A few months ago, I was poking around an antiques store with a friend and spotted a box of old engravings, some hand-coloured, and some not. Probably late 1800’s or early 1900’s. I love looking at these old prints and thinking about what I can do with them. I leafed through the pages until I found this adorable little girl. I knew she would become something fun! She’s a tiny little thing, about 3x4 inches. But she needed a little work before she achieved greatness.

I scanned her in at high resolution, so that I could play with the dimensions and make her bigger without losing a lot of detail. I added an old print of a globe that she could stand on instead of just a simple ball, and photoshopped it so that it would look like she was standing on top of the world.

But the print still needed something. I played around with some different sayings in different fonts, but nothing struck me. I had one towel made up, but it wasn’t just quite right. Then I was listening to the news, and heard Senator Mitch McConnell chastising Senator Elizabeth Warren, and in recounting it, he said, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” I knew that’s what I needed to add to the design to make it work.

I amped up the colour a little, cleaned up a few spots on the background, added a border, and came up with this:

Funnily, when it’s printed out on cotton/linen, the background looks like an old parchment-coloured linen fabric, complete with the small imperfections. It’s really amazing what we can do with digital printing!

The tea-towels are 50/50 cotton/linen and are printed with water-based, non-toxic inks. They are fully washable and can be thrown in the dryer, but I like to hang them on the clothesline. The towels measure about 18x24 inches. A few people I know are buying them to frame for their daughters and grand-daughters. Over this past weekend, I received more than 25 orders for this tea towel, and if you’d like to order one, click here.

Domes and Cloches

I was at the beach this weekend – brutally windy with some rain – and so we went shopping. I found something that I seem to have started collecting. Yes, I do collect some things, I don’t just sell everything. I found a great glass dome, the third one I’ve found in a few weeks, remarkably!

The two glass domes on the left were the start of the collection. The smaller one is about four inches and the larger, about seven inches.

The one on the right, with the lights in it, is actually a cloche. These are little bee or fairy lights, and are electrified, not battery-operated like so many other sets. They throw off an amazing amount of light!

My friend who wrote the late, lamented blog, House of Beauty and Culture, and who bought and sold Victorian taxidermy, gave me this explanation: Domes are of a higher quality glass and were used to display and protect. Cloches were utilitarian and much thicker and heavier and usually have a topknot.

The cloche with the lights is a heavier glass, which is engraved with vines, leaves and flowers, and it has a topknot. Although the footed glass plate under it came with the cloche, it probably wasn’t original to it.

About a week or so ago, I was in a thrift shop and spotted a hideous plastic-gold clock inside a tall glass dome. So I chucked the clock into the trash and kept the dome and the wooden base. The new dome is about ten inches.

Finally, over the weekend, I spotted another glass dome, this one about 14 inches high and much “rounder” at the base than the others! It came with a wood base, and I am actually thinking about painting all of the bases black, just so they are a little more uniform. I didn’t add the base to the top-most dome, as I thought it might be overkill!

I wanted to add something inside. I had a dead rose in a tiny silver vase, but it was too tall, so I took the rose out, cut off the stem and laid it inside the dome.

I still have one more dome! It’s wider and taller than any of these, and is in another room with a late 1800’s hallmarked English teapot under it.

Here are some other great-looking domes from my blog:

Creel & Gow in NYC

Multiple domes with bee or fairy lights lights. Ditch the antlers though!

Garden cloche from Trade Secrets a few years ago.

Cake stand cloche from Halcyon House antiques

Cloches in clear and blue at Ladew Garden Days

At John Derian in NYC

Victorian domes at John Derian

Some of the Victorian ones skeeve me out a little, and others I have seen are so twee as to make you ill, so I am trying to find a balance in using mine. Any suggestions?

What to Wear… Or Not!

This is one of my favourite weeks of the year – it’s the week of the Cheltenham Festival, a series of horse races in Cheltenham, in the Cotswolds. I was in the UK during the big Gold Cup race last year, and watched from a betting parlour in Mayfair in London.

What I really love is seeing what people are wearing to the races, both good and bad. Generally the good is really good and the bad is pretty horrific. So, be prepared from some snark below and keep in mind that it’s March in England, so not warm and sunny.

Well done! Great tweeds & tattersalls, low key hat, good boots. The skirt is a mite short, but otherwise pretty terrific.

Tail-gate parties aren’t as common at horse races in the UK as they are here, but that’s changing. Good hats, lots of tweed & tattersall, badges showing, and the food doesn’t look too bad.

Zara Phillips on two days of the Festival. 

Ok, this is NOT what you wear to the races! You just can’t drink too much in an outfit like this.

Red, white and blue and doing it well.

Bless her heart.

Fun hat, great outfit, sturdy boots.

Gotta tell you, I’d murder for this coat.

Love the colour combination here.

The purple just makes this sing.

It’s not the outfit, it’s the ears.

There’s a bit too much going on here, from the hat to the scarf to the coat.

More than 20,000 people come over from Ireland to watch the Irish horses and Irish jockeys. It’s a HUGE deal!

Personally, I prefer the tweeds and tattersals to all this.

As usual, I will be watching the Gold Cup Race on Friday, live via Tunnelbear! And if you want to see some amazingly frightening outfits, check the Daily Mail. Or check out my Pinterest page on what to wear to the races.