Royal Wedding Video Preview

I am pretty sure that this is the way it’s going to go on 29 April!

Everybody in the House of LOVE!

Save the Date for the Third Annual Ladew Garden Festival

I am so excited about this year’s Ladew Garden Festival, which is going to be held on Saturday, May 7th at the fabulous Ladew Topiary Gardens. 

The event is such a success due to the work of the extraordinary Chair, Jonathan Gargiulo, a partner at New York’s John Rosselli Antiques, and his talented committee. The committee calls in their amazing contacts to secure top-notch vendors to come to the festival. Among this year’s vendors will be Pennoyer-Newman with their over-the-top fabulous garden accessories; Ann Madonia Antiques, whose selections will be incredible; Dongan Antiques, another terrific vendor; and of course, my perennial (look - a garden joke!) favourite, Halcyon House Antiques, whom you know I adore. In addition, there will be a number of nurseries showing a range of rare and unusual plants. Last year, my mum got a Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree for one of my sisters. The vendor with the BEST.NAME.EVER is going to be there, too… Peony’s Envy!  And you know I love peonies!On a related note, pop over to Halcyon House Antiques’ new website. It is just stunning and has the most gorgeous things, as usual. Plus, you can see how incredibly cute both Stiles and Jonathan are!  With their new website, you will get to see what I see when I visit them in person!  They were kind enough to list Pigtown*Design as one of their friends, and I am honoured to be in the excellent company of  Bunny Williams and John Robshaw.

Details about the Ladew Garden Festival are here.

Victoria & Albert + Wills & Kate

Why yes, I have jumped on the Wills & Kate bandwagon. In fact, I have more than one invitation to watch the nuptials and swill excellent champagne at an ungodly hour of the morning. Just like I did for Charles and Diana’s wedding all of those years ago.

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has also jumped on the bandwagon and has a loverly range of items to help you celebrate. Of course, there’s that spectacular ring! And then a little something to dip into your tea cup. Of course, everyone else has jumped on the Wills + Kate wagon and is selling all manner of novelties.

Lots and lots of different tea towels… Lots of mugs like these… and thi… OMG! I rather like these two items… and This is a little tacky… but pretty funny!

Please Don’t Chop the Pillows!

I was recently looking at some images from a design house and noticed that every single pillow in the room was karate chopped to within an inch of its life! All you could see were pointy little ends sticking straight up – just like a flock herd of rabbits! It looked so funny and totally ridiculous. Of course, if you feel the need to chop your pillows, please follow this tutorial on e-how, and make sure you do it the right way.

Chop Chop!

A Letter from South Carolina

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, or the War Between the States. My family lost a lot during the war and it changed the course of the family’s lives.

My many-greats grandfather, Lucius Bellinger Northrop, was the Commissary of the Confederate Army and was exiled to the north after the War… the North being Maryland. One of my American cousins, now living in England, wrote a lengthy book about the General.One of my beloved cousins, Judge Edward Skottowe Northrop, another direct descendant of the Generals, and I went to find the General’s grave in Baltimore on the anniversary of his death. We went armed with a roll of brown paper and some crayons, and took a rubbing of the grave. I remember as a child, reading a letter from my great-grandmother to my grand-mother, Miss Nina Constance Pinckney Didier, then a young teenager. The letter was written in 1906 to my grandmother who was summering with the General’s brother, the Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, at Sullivan’s Island.It reads, in part,

Your post card of Fort Sumter has just come… It takes me back to my baby days, I can see myself again, in my dress with lilac rosebuds on it, playing in the garden at the Sisters’ school in Charleston and watching the shells from the southern batteries falling into Fort Sumter, held by Yankees.

I know that the Civil War is still very controversial, and while I am not celebrating it, or the South, I am acknowledging my history and my ancestors and the role they played in shaping this country, 150 years ago this week.

Finished!

Whew! I finally finished the slipcover for my sofa this afternoon. It was a much more daunting endeavour than I thought it would be! The sofa measures 78 inches long and 38 inches deep, so there’s a lot to cover!I ended up making a knife pleat sort of ruffle, because I just couldn’t figure out how to figure out how many box pleats I’d need to make a center pleat and then ones on each corner.

For the back, I overlapped two flaps and will put old mother-of-pearl buttons along the seam. I think that will give it a nice finish.

Connor the stoner!

I swapped out the back pillows for some new down ones, and they seem to be working well.Although this was a lot of work – about 25+ hours total – I am glad I did it, because now I know that I can!

P.S. Don’t forget to check out what’s on offer over at Atelier Pigtown! I’ve added a link on the right sidebar so you can check out what’s new at the shop.

Chateau Chic

I received an e-mail from a reader today saying if I liked the images in the post about Flip, then I might like the images at Chateau Domingue, a store in Houston. I know my friend Joni over at Cote de Texas has written about this shop (31 mentions!), but before today, I’d never looked at their site. It’s just filled with beautiful images, evocative of warm sunny days in France and craftsmanship of a bygone era.It makes me want to hop on a plane to Houston… or France! Hop on over and take a look, here!

Knitted Pictures

I ran across these amazing pieces on The Guardian, and was so impressed by the talent of the group, The Materialistics. Starting with a Coat for a Boat last year, they scaled down a bit and knit copies of some famous paintings.

A very timely image, Hokusai: The Great Wave, with the original here, and the knitted copy here.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: As a some-time knitter, I really appreciate the effort that went into these works!

Setting Up Shop

As you may know, I have an Etsy shop, which you can visit by clicking on the link on the right side of my posts.  Etsy is great, and I have done well with it, but it has some limitations.

One of the biggest limitations is that anything you are selling has to be “vintage”, which in Etsy’s case, means more than 20 years old. As I am preparing to de-accession a number of pieces in anticipation of moving house, I find that some of the best items I’ve collected over the past few years are not yet 20 years old.

So it is with just a little fanfare, that I bring you Atelier Pigtown, which will be my additional on-line storefront presence. The shop will feature some of my handmade items, like pillows and pennants, as well as books, silver and silverplate items, French Ivory cutlery imported specially from the UK, china from my extensive collection of blue and white pieces, antique engravings, photographs and much, much more!Everything will be very well priced! As you may know, I am a confirmed Junk Whisperer and treasure hunter, so I’ve acquired almost all of the pieces at a great price, which I will pass along to you. Postage will be set at a flat fee. Small pieces will be $5.00 and larger pieces will be $10. If there’s a piece which is oddly shaped or very large, I will set the price on a per piece basis. Books I have found at the Book Thing will be sold for the cost of postage, since they were free to me (and they’re marked “free book”). As I add pieces, I will be putting up a little notice on my sidebar that there are new items.

I hope that you will find something on Atelier Pigtown that you will love as much as I have!

A Tale of Two Paintings

When my friend David asked me to check out the offerings at the big auction at Alex Cooper Auctioneers last week, I checked out the catalogue and then decided to join him for the preview.

One of the reasons that I was keen to go was that there were two oil paintings by Baltimore artist, Marie Tiffany. What made that so interesting is that she’s the person who introduced my English father to my American mother, almost 60 years ago. Marie is my mother’s second or third cousin, and was a fairly well-known painter here in town. I have some vague memories of her, and I remember seeing some of her paintings with her distinctive signature.

The other thing that was appealing about the two little oils was their subject matter. One is of Baltimore’s Tyson Street, a narrow street of tiny houses, each painted in a bright colour. For many years, my parents, along with a group of their friends, used to drive down to Tyson Street and go Christmas Caroling. When we got older, we went along, too. I have many happy memories of walking up and down this little street, singing carols right before Christmas on freezing cold and sometimes snowy nights. The second painting is of the Edgar Allan Poe house, just a few blocks from where I am living now. It’s a tiny house, and he didn’t live there for long, but it was his home when he died. I recognized the house immediately when I saw the listing in the auction catalogue, and the house looks exactly the same today. I love Poe, and two years ago, I shot a little video of his funeral procession. When he died, there was no service, so 160 years later, the City of Baltimore decided to give him an appropriate funeral, complete with horse-drawn hearse.

The strangest thing about one of the paintings was that it had Marie’s obituary taped to the back of the canvas. Now these two little paintings will become a part of my history.