Breathtaking needle felted mittens from Etsy in December 2008, please contact me if you know the artist so I can give credit.
A frosty cotoneaster shrub on the way up to the studio...
...and its twee berries
As Victorian ladies loved to do, I cradle a hot cup of cocoa to warm me up
on a frosty winter’s morning in my studio.
Hot cocoa is better in a Theodore Limoges bullion cup!
A favorite Austen out from the library.
Like women from the early 19th century on have done, also, I enjoy losing myself in the world of Jane Austen on quiet winter mornings. I like to use a bookmark cut from printed pictures of the excellent fansite Pemberely. It helps me form the characters in my mind when I know what they wore.
This one is a Charles E. Brock c. 1907 illustration of Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby from Sense & Sensibility. The interesting things are Brock chose to depict them in fashions from 1790s, when Austen wrote the ‘first draft’ of Sense & Sensibility called ‘Elinor and Marianne’, and Marianne’s hair is in an Edwardian ‘Gibson Girl’ pompadour true to fashion in Brock's day. Perhaps it was meant to attract current readers, the way later publications of Anne of Green Gables illustrated her in the 1930s or 1940s even though the story takes place 40 - 50 years prior!
Photo by Starr Ockenga
Pretty Victorian cocoa boxes from the collection of William Frost Mobley of the Ephemera Society of America printed in Victoria February 1990 illustrating its soothing yumminess at breakfast.
May you enjoy your quiet winter moments!
.jpg)
