mini collection 7

vintage thimbles

These are old plastic thimbles. I love the colours. Some of them are slightly the worse for wear, having spent some time embedded in a very strange piece of work I did for my Foundation course a few years ago. Here's a detail -- just a detail as the full thing was too strange for mortal eye to behold.

You can see some of the thimbles cowering under layers of wax and glue. Happily I rescued the thimbles when I decided to break this monster up.

Time to look in the bag

Cathy gave us a peep inside her shopping bag from the Vintage and Handmade Fair today, so I decided it was time for me to look inside mine too. Apart from getting the little clown cup out, I had literally dumped my bag on the floor in my nightmare 'office', which is too horrible to photograph at the moment -- I'm not proud of it.

cloth book

     So, out you come, my pretties...

cloth-book doggy

probably my favourite thing -- two sheets of toy watches

close-up

box lid

shot glass inside the box

Squeeze-box clown

teeny cracker-toy pistols

Weeny deer brooch that seems to be made of jelly

fat cloth-book robin

Some other little deer have already run off to the forest...

Vintage and Handmade and Home Again

This weekend I dragged the family a couple of hundred of miles across the country so that I could attend the Vintage and Handmade Fair at Chipping Sodbury. Well, we had the added incentive that my husband's family live near there, so we were able to see them for a nice meal on Saturday, but the icing on the ... ice was the fair.

Taken from the car on the M4

 Ooh but it was cold, especially as I kept opening the car window to take photos on the motorway. Don't worry, I wasn't driving. I like to take photos out of moving cars, particularly of pylons looming up but I didn't catch any pylons this time, only a few nicely twisty trees.
     So the fair was brilliant. I felt as though my particular corner of the blogosphere had come to life, and I actually met Kitsch and Curious Elaine and Gary, which was absolutely delightful. Cathy, Elaine said you were there too, so I'm really sorry we didn't get to say hello to each other.
     I seem to have spent rather a lot of my pocket money and now I'm in that state of denial where I don't look in the bags I've brought home until the guilt has subsided and, also, by the time I do dare to look, there's the added benefit of having half forgotten what I splashed out on. There are the makings of projects in those bags, that much I know -- but is it too awful to think of cutting up cloth books to stitch the pictures onto something else?

Thank goodness for de-icer, that's all I can say.
     We were home by 4pm and making ourselves tea in our proper teacups, which is something we only do when we return, like hunters, from forays into the world. And we had slices of stollern, which was wonderful and actually tasted as though German frauleins had lovingly soaked the marzipan in schnapps or some such, even though it was only from Sainsburys.
     This is an odd little post, sorry -- the photos don't seem to go with the subject matter. I should be doing little plush rabbits and wheely dogs and my NEW reindeer (I feel more adventures of the plastic reindeer coming on...). But I thought I probably ought not to take photos inside the fair. So here are some of the things I already own instead.

One can never have too much trash, no?