Hermès: Lost in Translation

I am not sure that Hermès has a clear understanding of what the upcoming Memorial Day holiday is about. It is about remembering those who have died in service to our country. Not really about refreshing memories.

Too Much?

I found this image on the Guardian, in an article about celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee later this summer. It’s just a small sample of what’s available to celebrate the Jubilee. A bit of overkill perhaps, but at least it’s all coordinated.

I’ve asked Man of Mode to see if he can scare up a copy of this magazine to send me.

I’ve hunted for it here, but can’t find it. I did, however, get the special edition of Country Life which featured Balmoral.

And They’re Off…

That was the cry late Saturday afternoon, sending off the Preakness horses, which was the pivotal event in the weekend for Baltimore. But let’s back up a bit.

My amazing friend, Flippa, is moving back to South Africa with her husband and daughter in a few weeks. {stops, wipes tears, continues} Friends of ours had a huge going-away party (GAP) for her in their amazing 1800’s town house, and by that, I mean the original sense of the word, not a town-house development. I have been promised a full tour of the house at a later date, when there aren’t 70+ people and plates and plates of food scattered around, but I will give you a few teaser shots. Like the amazing basement kitchen.

And its incredible floor, imported specially from Hungary.

Part of the fun at the GAP was the incredible food, from dozens of tiny cupcakes with pictures of Flip and her family, and American and South African flags.  You can tell the scale, because the flags and pictures are on toothpicks!

We served summer favourite Southsides, or as we’ve renamed them Eastsides.  Oh, I could have sworn this shot was in focus!

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Saturday dawned bright and clear and all day, I could hear the helicopters and airplanes buzzing around as they circled Pimlico Racecourse, a few miles away. As I sat outside brushing Connor, I saw a few planes overhead spelling out words. But the fur flying on the ground was much more of a distraction. We use a Furminator, and it really gets the job done.

Everyone gets into the Preakness spirit, including the gals at the local grocery store, where I headed to pick up some Mouth Party Caramels as a gift for our hosts later in the evening. 

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A few weeks ago, as I was driving around taking pictures of houses, I pulled up in front of one of the most beautiful houses in Baltimore and was hanging out of the car window pointing my camera at it. There was a car parked there, but I didn’t pay any attention to it until a man popped out and asked (nicely) what I was doing. I babbled on about how I loved the house, and I wrote a blog, blah blah blah. We started chatting and ended up exchanging business cards. Needless to say, I never got the picture of the house.

Fast forward a few weeks and a lovely dinner invitation arrived from the charming man I’d met. I was so excited to see the house up close, and it was not a disappointment. One of the owners is an interior design professional at a very prestigious architectural firm and at one point, both of the owners sold antiques.

We were met on the terrace with the most beautiful cocktails… champagne, St. Germaine and a lavender liqueur in a gorgeous William Yeoward glass.

A tour of the house followed, and in each and every room, we gasped at the beauty of the one-of-a-kind pieces, the finishes and the artwork. I had looked at some of the “before” images from this house, and it’s like night and day what these friends have done with it. The architecture helps a lot, like this wonderful space at the landing between the first and second floors, but if you don’t have the vision and the right pieces, it falls flat, like in the before images.

There are all sorts of little nooks and spaces in this house that make it so special.

And then there was the dinner! OMG. We started with a silky Thai soup with gorgeous chicken, coconut milk, and just a hint of heat.

The main course was beautiful house-made pasta, with pancetta, fresh baby peas, cream and parmesan, along with the most delicious tenderloin, cooked on the grille.

Dessert was simply stunning. White chocolate bowls, brushed with milk chocolate, filled with a crème custard.

And the table had the most magnificent peonies from the garden. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such massive peonies.

Every aspect of the evening was such fun, from the company to the setting, to the food and the weather.

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Naturally, that all came crashing down around my ears when I returned home to find blood on the windowsills at the house. Connor must have been freaked out by something.

I was just sick about it, but I can’t find any rhyme or reason to when he panics.

My friend Andrea, who owns the great company, Bosom Buddy Bags that I wrote about a few weeks ago, sent me this picture. I’ve been helping Andrea set up a blog over the past week or so, and I’d love it if you wandered over there and gave her a little encouragement. She’s so creative and she has a bag for every occasion, including the Preakness!

Andrea and I were doing a swap of services, my blog expertise for one of her bags, but when a friend arrived before the race needing a bag to go with her outfit, Andrea gave her the one I’d picked out. But she made me another one! How lucky am I? So go check out the Bosom Buddies Bags Blog, okay?

My House: One Year

It was just one year ago that I settled on the 110-year old farm house that has become my home. I don’t know why Connor didn’t take down that tacky satellite dish when he was up on the roof chewing the gutters.

There are still a lot of things I want to do to the house and they are, in no particular order:

• Paint the kitchen and do something about the brown cabinets. They are actually wood, and I could paint them, but I haven’t given too much thought about a colour.
• Paint the upstairs hall. I bought frames to hang along the length of the wall, but then became paralyzed about what to put in them. I bought a fun little booklet in London called “I Bought a Liberty Scarf” reprinted from the 1930’s, and thought I might frame the pages of that.
• Make a garden. When I went to do this a few weeks ago, I found that some bright spark had put down black weedproof fabric on the front and back of the “lawn”. It’s about two inches below the surface and I’d have to pull up everything to get the fabric up. Can’t fathom why it was done. I am container gardening now, so at least I’ll have a garden.
• Get rid of the closet in my room. They blocked off one end of my bedroom to use as a closet, which is great. But what isn’t great is the six feet of dead space that it created. There’s a hanging shelf/rod system that runs the length of the closet, but the closet is only two feet wide, and so I can’t get into either end of it, which means a lot of wasted space. I need some more thought on how to deal with it. I have an idea but it’s a little strange.
• Frame in the kitchen door between the living/dining room and the kitchen. Right now, there’s one long wall with no break, so if I frame the doorway, I can paint the kitchen a different colour than the living/dining room.

I know that there are a million never-ending things I can do, but this is the short list.

One thing that isn’t on my house list, but that I do regularly, is repair Connor’s babies. He is very attached to Pink Baby, but “someone” and I am not naming names {Halas} has chewed his arms, legs and ears. So every few weeks, or after “someone” has visited, I spend a few minutes with my sewing kit, stitching arms back on, pulling together sides, repairing ears, etc. I can tell the difference between Pink Baby and Army, both pink stuffed pigs. Army doesn’t have any arms and Pink Baby has one.Every night, when I get on the phone and call my Mum, Connor goes upstairs, gets Pink Baby and comes back downstairs. Funnily, I never see him take Pink Baby upstairs.

My Chandelier

I mentioned that I bought a chandelier at Jake’s yard sale over the weekend, and now I’ve hung it.I bought some sisal rope and used one of my sailor’s knots (if you can’t tie good knots, tie lots of them!) to hitch the rope around the ring on the top of the chandelier. Then I rigged up a cleat with some big screws, so that I could tie off the other end of the rope and raise and lower the chandelier on a big branch of one of my trees. I really need an actual cleat, but until I make it to the yacht supply store, the screws will have to do.I need to add about a dozen or so crystals to the chandelier and David said I could plunder his stash of them.

The other thing the chandelier needs is candle cups. I’ve seen these things in thrift shops for years, and never really understood what they were for. Now I know. The bottom stem fits into the candleholder and the white thing is a little rubber piece that secures the glass in place. You can add small votive candles to the glass cups, so the wind won’t blow the flames out. But I was really envisioning this chandelier with tall white tapers with wax dramatically dripping down their side.The chandelier is a dirty white/beige, and I am trying to decide whether to paint it or not.

Thoughts?

Wisteria

I came across these images of a wisteria garden in Japan, and they’re like nothing I’ve ever seen. They are from the Kawachi Fuji Gardens, in Kitakyushu, Japan, fuji being the Japanese word for wisteria.

I love the colours and shapes of wisteria flowers, and the constant buzzing of the bees that you hear when you’re close to them.They almost look like the northern lights hanging in the sky. Magical and mysterious, but certainly real.Pretty astonishing, aren’t they?

AN EVENING WITH MARY KAY ANDREWS!

I am so excited to announce that New York Times best-selling author, Mary Kay Andrews, will be signing copies of her brand new book, Spring Fever, to benefit Woodbourne on Tuesday, June 12th.

Mary Kay’s books are such fun. They combine many of Mary Kay’s and my mutual loves – the South, junking and antiques, good friends, the beach and a little bit of mystery. I discovered Mary Kay’s books a few years ago, and just loved them. I hunted up each of her books because I couldn’t get enough of her characters.

The book signing will benefit the children at Woodbourne, where I work. In addition, there will be a junking tour of Baltimore using Mary Kay’s junking prowess and my local knowledge. There are a very limited number of slots for this, and there will be a charge for this event, which will be a donation to Woodbourne.

Please e-mail me here, if you are interested in attending either the junking tour or the book signing. It’s going to be loads of fun!

Weekend Update: A May Weekend

Great weekend weather-wise in our area. Clear, sunny, cool and crisp. I’d love weather like this all summer… and that’s part of the reason I loved the UK so much! 

Lots of fun happenings this weekend, so read on!If you’re not reading the blog, Reggie Darling, you should. Not only does the darling Reggie talk about beautiful antiques, reveal family secrets, share cocktail recipes and be charming, he also imparts cleaning tips for antique china and linen. Since I haven’t had on-site laundry facilities for many years now, I’ve grown a little lax about following tried and true guidelines. I generally chuck stuff into the machine, add soap, water and turn it on.  Reggie recently blogged about five of his favourite household cleaning products, and instructions for cleaning linens popped up in the comments several times. So taking this sage advice, I spent part of the weekend giving my collection of antique hand towels and vintage tea towels a good wash, letting them sit for 12+ hours in Oxyclean and then hanging them on the clothes line. Groupings included towels from Ireland, the UK, Bermuda and the States, as well as some old calendar tea towels. If you’re using tea towels, or looking for them, make sure you only use linen, as it is very resilient, and it doesn’t leave lint on china and glassware.

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Speaking of glassware, I went to my friend Jake’s sale on Saturday and there was glassware aplenty! There’s no other yard sale host that I know who would block parking spaces using giant urns with huge flower arrangements!When Jake had his last sale, I saw a hanging candelabra and remarked that I’d love to have something like that to hang on a tree in my back yard. At that point, I had neither a tree or a back yard, but I do now! So look what I bought.The plan is to add some chandelier crystals. Luckily when I mentioned this to David, he told me that there are boxes of them at McLain Wiesand, and to come on over and pick some out. I think I need to bling this thing!

Lots of friends were at the sale when I was there, including pals, Rose & Ivo, who bought numerous urns, vases, pots and other items for their home and garden. Luckily, they also brought their station wagon!

I am not really sure why I didn’t snap up these pitchers. They’re new-ish, but I love brown transferware.I had to take a picture of this gal leaving with her treasure… a cherub pedestal!

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Connor was good as gold all weekend. Does this look like a puppy who would climb on a roof?He loves to rest his head on things, and this is his new fleece lambie.

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I have a huge announcement tomorrow, so check in around mid-day for the big reveal!