Around the Neighborhood

You never know what you're going to see when you go walking. Today, I passed a house in my neighborhood and saw a pile of legs! I HAD to go home and get my camera.

Around the House

When I go walking, I like to collect interesting dried bits-seed heads, pine cones, twiggy pod things. Then, they get displayed around the house. The square vase in front is ceramics and was purchased at a street fair. The large vase in back was purchased in Maine and is made from a beach rock. The vase on the right was also made from a stone but was a gift from my sister and is from the east coast of Canada.

Love is in the Air

It's almost Valentine's Day! I have for you today, "The Fireside Book of Love Songs" with pictures by my favorite illustrator duo of Alice and Martin Provensen. The book was published in 1954 and has some great full color as well as 2 color illustrations. And some are pretty racy for 1954!

Hope you have a good day with your sweetie!

In My Office...

Owls! I have a number of owl items and here are a few.

The Kleenex box on the left was designed by Cori Dantini. You can visit her blog here and her Etsy store here. The ceramic owl in the tree was purchased on Ebay and the picture with 3 owls was done by Canadian artist Susan Black. You can visit her Etsy shop here.

Card Designs

My cards come from all sorts of inspirations but the following designs were inspired by mid-century fabrics.

I created my leaf card (on the right) after seeing this Scandinavian influenced 1960's bark cloth. (on the left)

I did this one (pink birdie on the right) after seeing a fabric by designer Lucienne Day (on the left) that dates from the 1950's. What inspired me was the rectangular shapes and the line art going through them and what evolved was this bird and flowers. The following are two books from my collection, each with great mid-century reference.

"Fabulous Fabrics of the 50s (And Other Terrific Textiles of the 20s, 30s, and 40s)" by Gideon Bosker, Michele Mancini and John Gramstad was published in 1992 by Chronicle Books. "1950s Fashion Print" by Marnie Fogg was published by Batsford in 2010

Angie Lewin

One of my favorite contemporary artists is British print maker Angie Lewin. Her artwork has so many layers that create new shapes and patterns within the composition and make the images infinitely more interesting. Most of her artwork depicts plants and landscapes of England and Scotland and feature close up details of weeds and plants gone to seed. I was so excited when a book about her was published in 2010 and I highly recommend it! (I purchased it on Amazon here). The following images are greeting cards produced by Art Angels and purchased from British shop One Brown Cow (they have an excellent selection online). You can visit Angie's website here to see more of her inspiring work.

Flower Power

It may be winter outside, but it's always spring when I wear one of my vintage flower pins. These enamel pins date from the 1960's and the variety of flower shapes seems to be endless.

Blog Winner!

I won this very lovely silkscreened calendar tea towel from the very talented Galia Bernstein of Dancing Kangaroo. You can purchase them from her Etsy shop here. I think it's a great start to the new year!

Christmas Day Greetings

The colors of this Christmas book are not very traditional, but fit Southern California where today it's 75 degrees and sunny.

The book dates from 1958 and was published by Viking Press. The illustrator, Ilonka Karasz was well known for her New Yorker magazine covers. She also illustrated another holiday book, "The Twelve days of Christmas". Perhaps I'll buy that next year.

Santa Claus is Coming!

These charming illustrations are from a holiday book (published in 1999 by Mijade Publications, also in French) by Belgian artist Muriel de Crayencour.






Merry Christmas!

Vintage Christmas

Here are a few vintage Christmas cards from my collection. They date from the 1920's to about the 1960's.

Lucky Finds 2

I was at my local junk/thrift/antique shop which has about 4000 books (in no particular order) on shelving that is so close together that it's hard to walk in between. I was shimmying through, head sideways scanning the shelves when I spotted...."The First Book of Jazz" written by American poet Langston Hughes and illustrated by Cliff Roberts (who also did "Thomas" in my previous post). I grabbed and looked around to make sure no one else had seen MY treasure (forget the fact that no one else could possibly fit in the same aisle). $4 later, the book was MINE!!! I couldn't believe the price on this relatively rare book. Obviously, the sales girl didn't know what I had, and I wasn't going to enlighten her.

First published in 1955 (mine is the 16th printing) the book has fabulous mid century illustrations, all done in black and white. Here are a few of my favorites:









There's not much info on Cliff Roberts - I believe he only illustrated 3 books and was more involved in animation and commercial art (graphic design to you and me). You can read a bit about him here.

Langston Hughes was a Jazz lover as well as a poet and author and you can read more about him here

"Bouquet"
Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow
-Langston Hughes

Lucky Finds

For ages, I had been searching for the wonderful children's book "Thomas", written by Mary Harris and illustrated by Cliff Roberts. It tells the story of a little girl named Frances, a mischievous cat named Thomas, and a caged bird named Lynette who longs for freedom. I was lucky enough to find not one, but TWO copies this fall. One copy, shown here, is in German and I have decided not to be greedy, and offer it for sale on Etsy. The book is really hard to find because it seems to have never been reprinted after the initial release in 1956. The book was featured on Design Sponge a few years ago. Enough chit chat-enjoy the pictures!