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Inner Life

I wasn't sure I wanted to watch A Quiet Passion , a movie about the life of poet Emily Dickinson, whom I've admired since the first time I read her work. Sometimes you can know too much about your heroes. Yet I was curious about what influenced her and the sort of family she had. Emily lived in Amherst, Massachusetts all her life, and was one of three children born to a prominent lawyer with strong religious convictions that likely dated back to his Puritan roots. She was raised, as most girls during that time were, to be modest, thoughtful and pious. Despite her upbringing (and here I can directly sympathize) she had an intense and often fierce curiosity about life, death and the meaning of it all. At the same time she lived a very closeted, isolated existence as if to keep the world at a distance, perhaps finding it too painful to stray beyond the familiar and familial. What seems like a colorless and uneventful life allowed Emily to pen almost 1800 poems, a body...
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Celebrating Us

Back in June my guy and I visited Celebration, Florida to walk around town and admire some of the beautiful houses there. To see pics of our day, check out my album here .
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Well

Watching Impromptu , a movie about the love affair between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin, was rather like attending my first professional writers' conference. You have an opinion of your peers based on their work, and then you meet them in real life and discover they are very different from your idealistic notions. This is not a bad thing, actually -- I don't think anyone should occupy a pedestal -- but it is disconcerting to say the least. So was this movie. The premise: Radical novelist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (Judy Davis), who lives in Paris as George Sand, falls in love first with the music of Frédéric Chopin (Hugh Grant), and then pursues the composer like a lovestruck groupie, this despite having a complicated life and string of past and present lovers creating havoc in it. Chopin, the only decent character in the entire production, is in a health decline with tuberculosis, and really just wants to be left alone. Chaos ensues as Sand chases Chopin around P...
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Upcycling Vera, Part II

For my first Vera Bradley upcycle project I'll start with this much loved tote in the retired Minsk Plaid pattern from 2012. It arrived with signs that it was used for quite some time and even repaired by the previous owner, which made me very happy. I like to think that person liked to mend things like me rather than buy new -- or maybe it was a thrifter who found it before me. The solid black fabric on the handle straps was added to cover wear and tears, just as I repaired another Vera bag with the same problem back in April. To prevent the straps from becoming too thick from my planned repair I'll first remove the old repair. That was actually really hard to remove, it was applied so well with hundreds of tiny machine stitches -- took me about an hour with a seam ripper. With that removed, you can see what the person who repaired the bag before me tried to cover up -- a lot of strap wear. I went to my scrap bin in search of a black solid I could use to re...
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Imprisoned

The Chinese drama The Prisoner of Beauty is one of the best long historical/political series I've ever watched, so I was surprised after finishing the last episode to see how polarizing it's been among fans (this is also why I don't read reviews of series and movies before I watch them.) Evidently the male lead is considered ugly, which is absolute crap. I thought he was quite handsome in an unconventional way. Also there are a lot of people saying this series is mediocre, which leads me to believe they didn't watch it. The main story: to broker peace, old enemies arrange a marriage between Xiao Qiao (Song Zu Er), a beautiful and clever young woman, to Lord Wei Shao (Liu Yuning), the cold and apparently ruthless head of the Wei family. Xiao actually takes the place of her cousin (who has fallen in love with a stableman) and is quite resigned to a difficult relationship with her new spouse, as her family turned their backs on his, resulting in the murders of his...
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Upcycling Vera, Part I

I thought I'd share my methods for upcycling thrifted Vera Bradley bags so that anyone else who's interested in doing the same can follow my process. A disclaimer: I paid $9.99 for this lot, and I'm only interested in making them useful and pretty again. As always any vintage textile of value (including bags) should be cleaned and repaired by an expert conservator to preserve it. The first step in my project is to clean out the bags and then give them a bath. Unless the bags have never been used I tend to find debris, dirt and random bits in the pockets left behind by the original owner. In this lot I found a tiny claw-type clip in a pocket of a purse, and a key chain with a fabric fish on it attached to the strap hardware on another. After they get a bath I'll reuse those, too. To launder the bags, I secure all the loose straps or elements with safety pins and group them in colors for washing: all reds and pinks, all blues and greens, lights or darks, ...
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An Old Beauty

The vintage copy of The Sketch Book by Washington Irving that I won at the thrift auction for ten bucks arrived, and it's older than I assumed: the copyright date on the illustration page is 1899. It's a beautiful, fragile little book. I'm having fun imagining who might have bought it 126 years ago. Did you know that Charles Dickens was a huge fan of Washington Irving? Or that Irving was the one who coined the term "Gotham" for New York City? I have never read any of the author's work, so I'm going to save this for Halloween, when I fully expected to be scared witless (again!) by The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , which is in this short story collection.
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