It's fun to see inside people's homes on their blogs. It's most fun when the blogger is a good photographer, which I am not, but I thought I'd putter around the house and throw up some photos anyway. The embroidery above is Ukrainian. It was made by the mother of a friend of mine who was born in Ukraine. It is a long table runner, and I am very grateful to have it. It makes me happy, but more than that, it reminds me how important the "small" things in life are.
I have orchids, this one was given to me by a friend. The bloom is spectacular. So nice when the temperatures outside are below freezing.
Our daughter is home from her first year in art school. The painting on the left is a copy of Edouard Manet's The Fifer, which she made in Painting 101. We liked it so much we framed it. The painting on the left is by our friend Stapleton Kearns.
This is a pillow my mother-in-law made for us celebrating our marriage. Needlepoint. The plaid throw we bought in Scotland. I love plaid, my favorite plaid is the modern reconstruction of the Thorsberg Mantle (circa 200 A.D.) on page 67 of "Textiles, 5000 Years".
Our kitchen gods.
Yes! A sink full of dirty dishes! Our dishwasher has been broken since right after Christmas (so nice of it to wait). Doing dishes is not bad actually, especially when your daughter stands next to you and dries and you have a nice cozy chat right out of Prairie Home Companion. But the point here is the plate, which she decorated when she was perhaps four.
We love this redware pottery, made in Maine by Henderson's Redware. We bought this plate at Maine's Common Ground Fair, a wonderful country fair.
Knitting Out Loud narrator Melissa Hughes, who did such a lovely job on A History of Hand Knitting and The Art of Fair Isle Knitting, spends the winter in London and I babysit for her amazing begonia.
Our house is stuffed with books.
My grandparents blue and white china on the right, and my great grandmother's gold rimmed china.
Dining room rug. Okay, this is silly.
Clock we inherited from my husband's mother's family.
This painting I found at Goodwill for seven dollars. Sicily? Corsica?
Bits of stash.
Clivia.
Hand knits in our basket of hats and outdoor gear by the door.
A painting by our friend Cathy Melio.
Our daughter.
This delightful primitive, painted by a friend, reminds us of our long gone cat Hodge. He was a character.
This painting was in the dining room of my grandparents' apartment in New York. They loved modern art.
These amazing books were given to me by a friend who used them in her youth. They are interesting in terms of the history of education in this country. I just pulled one of these off the shelf. They re meant for elementary school age students. The table of contents begins: Mr.Pickwick and Sam Weller by Charles Dickens, The Death of Caesar by Plutarch, The Death of Caesar by Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Life of Johnson by James Boswell, The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allen Poe, Abraham Lincoln by Theodore Roosevelt, Of Expense by Sir Francis Bacon, Ode On a Grecian Urn by John Keats, and on. Published 1913.
Modern Italian faience plate.
This was a baby blanket crotcheted by a friend for our daughter. It now resides on a stool.
A shelf of my gardening library. Vita Sackville-West is my favorite garden writer. Then Katharine White, with her wonderful Onward and Upward in the Garden, written about her garden in Maine.It's an old house and I love it.
Best wishes to everyone for 2011!
