Molly Dill

This is a collage thingy I have been working on for awhile now. I want it to be just right so it's not progressing very fast. The photo is of my great grandmother Molly Dill who was born in 1859 in Hardin County, Tennessee. Supposedly the photo was made on the day of her wedding at the courthouse in Savannah, Tennessee in June 1876. The expression on her face makes me wonder if she was happy she was getting married. From everything I heard my mother say about my great grandfather he was a very kind man so I don't think she was worried about how he might treat her. I think maybe she wears the look of someone who never had any choices in her life up to that point. She didn't know who her father was, her mother was dirt poor and then when she was about 7 years old her mother married a widower with two small children. For reasons no one knows, Molly was farmed out to another family and her mother and new family lived in a house a short distance away. My mother quoted my grandmother as saying that Molly never once mentioned her mother. She moved to Texas from Tennessee in 1880and took one of her young half-sisters with her and from what I can tell, she never looked back. She and my great grandfather eventually had twelve children, the first one which died in infancy. It seems she had a lot of heartaches early in her life but she obviously forged a new life with her own large family and I like to think that she was happy.

More ephemera packs on the way to ScrapLovers

Here's just one of a dozen more collage ephemera packs I am mailing to ScrapLovers in beautiful downtown Willow Glen, California. These are a lot of fun to assemble and I hope whoever buys them has as much fun making something wonderful from all the goodies inside.

Silver Lining

A couple of weeks ago I went to a yard sale and because it was fairly late in the morning it was well picked over. On one table was an old crusty box and inside were about 100 pieces of silverplated knives, forks and spoons. Only trouble was, they were all black with tarnish. It was obvious they had not seen the light of day in probably 30 or forty years. Almost against my better judgement I paid two whole whopping dollars for the entire box, took them home and started in with the polishing cream. It didn't take many before I decided to try out a method of removing tarnish I had never tried. It involves boiling water, adding baking soda and soaking. It wasn't perfect but at least it removed the top layer of tarnish and made it easier to get it off with Wright's Silver Cream. Let me just say this about Wright's: it is not the same formula I remember from years ago. While the newer formulation works really well, it doesn't work half as well as it used to.
Here you can see what a lot of it looked before, during the soaking method and then after being polished. Not bad, but a lot of work!

Homage to my Grandmother

The peaches I bought for this cobbler were a little marginal, I thought when I bought them, but they turned out to be great. I took some little online quiz the other day that asked what smell brought back good memories. Immediately I thought, "peaches". I helped my grandmother more than a few times to peel the peaches for cobbler. And the one I made the other night was right up there with hers, and I say that in all modesty.
My grandmother made the best of just about everything: chicken and dumplings, fresh black eyed peas, fried okra, fried chicken, rolls, biscuits, corn bread, bread pudding, homemade ice cream, ah...the list goes on and on. And her pies? Unspeakably delicious. She made a pineapple chess pie that all my relatives fought over at the family reunion. And then there was that peach cobbler. Probably my favorite.
Since I can't seem to duplicate the wonderfulness of her homemade vanilla ice cream I buy Breyer's Natural Vanilla and that is about as close as you can get to what hers tasted like. She didn't really have a recipe that was written down. It was all in her head. I asked her how she made it and she said, "You start with a custard...." She had several recipes like that; her banana pudding, the coconut cream pie...you started with a custard. I never really got the hang of the custard thing, though, try as I might. Sometimes it comes out pretty good, but it's always just a little off. She just had a special touch.

The Day Complete with Joys Replete

I bought this ragged old map at a yard sale a few days ago and was surprised to discover when I got it home that it was a map of North Dakota, ca. 1904. I moved to Williston, North Dakota in 1959, and arrived the same night that Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. He himself was enroute to Fargo, North Dakota that night. I have a very vivid memory of us arriving late at night in our 1957 Buick station wagon. My little brother and sister were asleep in the back seat with me, and my older sister was sitting between my parents in front. I remember looking out the window in awe of the northern lights and thought that I was in the land of Eskimos. My second grade class had been studying Eskimos just a week or so before we moved from Texas and my teacher had told me that I might see northern lights in North Dakota. Sure enough, I did, however, I was a little disappointed upon finding out I was still a long haul from any igloos or Eskimos.
The next day the moving van arrived and we went to our new house while the moving men carried in all our furniture. My sister invited an old friend over to see her. We had lived in Williston briefly back in 1952 during the first big oil boom in the area so my parents and sister already knew a few people. That was when I found out about Buddy, because my sister and her friend were talking about it.
The next day my Dad took me to enroll me in Central School. I had dreaded that moment, being the "new girl". But the kids were really great. I noticed right off that I was about to freeze because the coat I had was not warm enough for North Dakota winters, plus I didn't have any snow boots. After school that day my Dad picked me up and took me to a shoe store next to the Piggly Wiggly and bought me a pair of red boots. My joy knew no bounds. Red boots! One of the best moments of my life. Funny how the simplest of things could make you so happy when you're a kid.

Game Plan

Here are a couple of boxes of game pieces that I have found at yard sales. I used to kind of ignore boxes of games at sales and then I actually opened a few and said to myself, "Now wait a minute..." I include at least one domino plus a few other random pieces in all my ephemera packs. The dominos are great for stamping with Staz On or you can free-hand a design with Copic pens (my latest obsession, I might add).
And how about the wooden cigar box? A friend who had a cigar shop gave that to me years ago. And no, they didn't come from Cuba. The company that made the cigars was in Little Havana, USA, wherever that is.

Yes I Did

I downloaded some photos this morning and discovered that I did take a photo of one of the ephemera packs I sent to Scraplovers. And I put together another one yesterday so here they are.

Collage Ephemera Packs

This is a small package of little tags, faux stamps and the like that I made and will be putting on Etsy. I also just shipped ten large packages of ephemera to Scraplovers@A Work of Heart in San Jose (my candy store!). Like a goof, I forgot to take photos before I shipped them off. But they were chock full of vintage papers, maps, ledgers, foreign dictionary pages, sheet music, old algebra and shorthand pages, scraps of ribbon, ric-rac, dominoes and other game pieces. I like to put together things that I used to always be on the look out for. Out of frustration,I started collecting all that and the next thing I knew, my studio was bulging at the seams. So I save some of it for myself and the rest goes to California.
When I first started collecting old maps and things, I hated to tear them up, but then I thought, "What am I going to do? Hang onto these forever?" And I knew I could never make enough collages the rest of my life to use everything, so I just ripped and tore, and, you know...it's kind of fun.
This morning I was up bright and early for yard sales, and as per usual, the first one I hit was a disappointment. But the next one was more like it. The guy who was selling had two old sheds full of old rusted and grimy stuff...usually the kind of thing I like to jump right into the middle of. But apparently the roof had leaked in one building because all the boxes were falling apart and were black from mildew. But I scored a cigar box full of old receipts, ancient Christmas cards and letters that weren't in too bad shape. And what do you know? There is an old 1904 map of North Dakota in all this. I didn't even realize it was from North Dakota until I got it home and the piece that was facing up had Williams County on it. Seems like some kind of weird karma as I have just this week been contacted on Facebook by several old classmates from my high school in North Dakota. Whenever something like this happens, I always like to think that it's a "sign" or something. But it's probably just a coincidence.
And yes, I'm aware that I ended a couple of sentences with prepositions.