Don’t Smoke!

I picked up two little Staffordshire Dogs at a sale this weekend. Honestly, I almost didn’t get them because of how filthy they were. I started cleaning the one on the right, and then thought I should take a picture to see the before and after shots.I scrubbed them a bit with dish detergent, but that didn’t do a thing. Because they’re not glazed, I thought I’d try a Magic Eraser®. Since I didn’t pay a lot for them, it wouldn’t really matter if they were ruined. But it worked like magic! Basically, the nicotine had put a coat of stain on both pieces. It had also given them a little bit of a shine. The very thought of living in a house that’s had that much smoke in it just makes me ill.

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This is another of the many things I did this weekend. I had a great old candlestick which had lost all of its silver-plate. I didn’t want to have it re-plated because it’s a but wobbly and as a finished piece, it wouldn’t be worth it. So I got a can of black gloss spray-paint and re-imagined the piece.

It’s actually in four parts, so I took them all apart and gave them a number of light coats of paint, turning after each coat to make sure all parts were covered. I think it turned out pretty well! If I do this again, I might take a rough sponge to the piece before I spray it to give the paint something to grip.

How was your weekend?

Talk Talk

I was asked by one of my old schools to give a talk in October. The school, Roland Park Country School, has a continuing education program called Kaleidoscope which has a wide range of courses. As part of the series, they usually do several talks about Baltimore. And as you may know, I think that Baltimore is so much more than The Wire, or a John Waters’ movie.

Out of almost 1900 posts I’ve done over the past six-and-a-half years, more than 600 have been about Baltimore in some form. I think that this talk is going to be a lot of fun. I will be telling stories, showing slides, and generally professing my love for my city. Hope to see you there.

Naked Ladies

Tis the season for spotting Naked Ladies in gardens around this area. Don’t be dashing off looking for Playboy centerfolds, but do keep an eye out for a late summer variety of lilies!

Naked Ladies, a variety of amaryllis, are unusual in that they flower without the usual long leaves of other lilies like day lilies.

Their leaves sprout and grow in early summer and then die back. Around mid-August, all of a sudden, the stems shoot straight up and each stem has between five and twelve flower on it. They die back after a week or so, and then the leaves sprout for a second time.

My friend Stiles loves the Naked Ladies especially because they were a favourite of fellow Marylander and gardener, Harvey Ladew, whose incredible gardens we so admire.

There’s a great old story about Harvey Ladew and a friend who were discussing acquiring Naked Lady lilies probably in the 1930’s or so. “Ladew had admired the lilies in his friend’s garden,” says Ladew’s chief gardener Tyler Diehl. “The friend cabled to say he would send 50 naked ladies to Monkton if Mr. Ladew could handle them. Mr. Ladew cabled back, saying that he could easily handle 50 naked ladies if they were disease free. Of course he knew the message would scandalize telegraph operators on both ends, which was part of the fun.

When I was talking about the Naked Ladies to some friends the other night, one of them grabbed my hand and pulled me out to the then-dark garden. “Are these Naked Ladies?”, he asked. He’s spotted them in the garden of the house where they’d just moved, and had sworn that they weren’t there the week before.

Blue & White with a Contemporary Twist

I was strolling through Facebook and some fascinating contemporary blue and white pieces caught my eye! Enough so that I clicked through to the website and browsed around until I found the pieces featured at Pagoda Red.

First up, blue and white bottles modeled on Coke bottles by artist Taikkun Li.

This pair of lucite chairs has each joint hand painted in blue and white porcelain in the Ming Pattern. By July Zhou.

You can get a better look at the joints here from a detail on a table.

How about this piece from a recent exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston?

This contemporary necklace out of blue and white china discs was also featured.

Here’s the original plate!

Paul Scott takes a piece of Spode, copies it almost exactly, and a new piece emerges.

This is a piece Scott salvaged from the shuttered Spode works’ kiln.

Wedgwood and Royal Copenhagen have produced contemporary versions of their classic pieces. I remember seeing “After Willow” for the first time when I was living in London. I had to buy one piece, even though I didn’t even have a flat yet! They took elements of the original design and expanded them to fill the piece.

Most of Wedgwood’s pieces like this were done by ceramicist Robert Dawson.

Regardless of how contemporary the pieces are, they’ve still got a classic look to them!

This and That

When I posted yesterday about our boating trip around the creeks near Baltimore, one of my commenters chided me for not reporting some wreckage I saw along the shoreline. Since it was a wood-hulled boat, I presumed that it had been there for decades, and that someone else had probably already rung it into the Department of Natural Resources. I also figured that since the Coast Guard is right along the other side of the creek, they might have noticed some rotting wood wrecks littering the creek. Turns out they’ve noticed it already and have even conveniently marked the location on the chart. I might sound like I am being sarcastic, but I’ve been reading navigational charts all of my life, and we had charts (in electronic form) on the boat. It’s essential that things like wrecks and submerged pilings, cables, buoys and marks, and any other impediments and aids to navigation are noted on the charts for reasons of safety. Of course, it’s a whole other thing if the boater doesn’t understand the chart, or what the symbols or lights mean. Tragedy comes of not knowing. Here.

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I am working with a researcher to find information on a man who was very influential in medicine in Baltimore for about 15 years. He was very involved in creating our medical library, at one time, the largest collection in the US. Of course, that necessitates hunting through our archives, which are only very loosely documented. But it’s fun to hunt, regardless. The other afternoon, we unearthed several files of old receipts which were just such fun to read. When you parse the sentences, they’re quite funny. They offer rates to both City and Country merchants. They have the most reasonable terms. And they take rags, which will be made into paper.

Here’s another classic one. Items will be made in a “Tasty and Faithful manner, with Dispatch”. As you can see, we got a lot of printing done, as we were publishing medical journals, books, pamphlets, and lists of members.

Most of them have beautiful engraving, either of their goods or their building. Others have some fanciful motif on them. But all of them are pretty small – most measure less than an inch or two in either direction. Here are some of my favourites.

Of course, how could I resist this one?

This one says that the stone used for the engraving will remain the property of the printer, who was still in business up until the last decade or so.

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I keep finding paintings around our offices, and today, I found this gal hanging on a wall.

None of the women in our portrait collection are marked with any identifying information. It really bothers me.

All for now! Ta!

Day on the Bay

For years, I’ve sailed the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, exploring creeks and coves, delighting in the birdlife that is seen in its air and along its edges, and weathering all kinds of storms.

Today was an adventure of a different kind. I generally SAIL on the Bay, and do not ever motor. It’s not been for lack of opportunity, but for the fact that I’ve always considered myself a sailor. But when good friends invited me for a day on the bay on their new power boat, I happily said yes.

We started by heading up-river into the city to see if we could find the Francis Scott Key buoy, which we did pretty easily.

The biggest difference between motoring and sailing is that you can actually get places when you’re under power. The creeks we explored today would have taken us days to see under sail, and if the wind wasn’t right, we’d never have made it up through some of the cuts.The other big difference  is that we were exploring the urban industrial side of the Bay, today. These urban creeks are fascinating if for no other reason that realizing that the infrastructure that keeps our lives running smoothly is massive and not particularly attractive.

However, along the same creek, we’d see a view like this.

I have to admit, I love crumbling old things, so it was such fun to see the hulks of old wooden ships slowly rotting in the creek.

And there were others.

The old piers, old ships and old houses are just left to slowly return to the sea and to the land.

And then there were the beams, rails and bridges that dot this part of the Bay.

As we motored through the creeks, we saw Great Blue Herons, Snowy Egrets, Cormorants, Osprey and a zillion seagulls.

The weather was great and it was fun to see Baltimore and this small part of the Patapsco River, and the Chesapeake Bay from a completely different vantage point.

Thanks for a great day, Kit & Nolan!

Bosom Buddy

My childhood friend, Andrea, and her partner, Karin, are the most creative gals I know! They’ve parlayed their love of handbags, cuffs, necklaces, bright colours and tortoiseshell into a great business, Bosom Buddy Bags. A few weeks ago, before the gals took off on a multi-city gift show tour, I had a chance to stop by their warehouse just north of Baltimore and see what’s new for the coming seasons.

If you’re like me, you’re on a constant quest to find the perfect bag – large enough for everything you need for your day, but also large enough to hold files, an iPad, a notebook and more, but still have it look smart and chic.

The gals have scored a home run with this bag, and it comes in several fabulous colours, including black and a great orange, which, surprisingly, can be a neutral. It also has a small pouch inside for your tablet!

But bright colours are really their stock in trade, and they’ve expanded their line this year.

Lots of fun cuff bracelets, in brights, black and tortoiseshell.

Each one has a different motif on it, and you can mix and match colours and motifs!

Also new this year are pendant necklaces, hung from tortoiseshell links.

Seriously, these are calling to me… can you hear them?

Again, pick your motif, pick your colour.

Of course, Bosom Buddy Bags’ stock in trade is their range of bags. For the summer, their woven bags are perfect and can be as fun or as elegant as you choose.

And they even have elegant bags for wintertime – velvet and grosgrain, feathers and frogs.

They have a new line of clutches and small zipped bags for those occasions that you don’t want a huge bag.

Here’s one of their bags at a summer party.

To find a stockist in your area, please click here.