Halloween Spree

Went to Alton's world famous Fast Eddie's Bon-Air for a Big Elwood on a Stick this morning. Now that the smoking ban is in effect in Illinois the air really is bon there; no need for a shower after lunch. Then it was time for a browse through local antiquaries. In one shop I saw the most amazing vintage clothing: beautiful silks, satins, crêpes, and laces fashioned into 30s couture gowns. The workmanship and style was just incredible. I wonder whose attic was raided for these gems? Judging by the twiglike size, they all belonged to the same lucky girl. What parties did she wear them to? Where did she live? If she lived in Alton, did she know Eunice C. Smith? Instead of buying a long dress of fushcia peau de soie, I spent a dollar on this faded little doily. All the work that went into something three inches in diameter amazes me.

Two Spooky

It's very spooky out, almost as wet and miserable as the Pacific Northwest at its worst. Just the sort of Swamp Thing weather to get one in the mood for Halloween. Here are two spooky images in celebration of my favorite holiday: a scared girl, and a stag breathing some weird mist, with bats hovering eerily above the field.

Fried Scrapbook

I realized today that I could just wander around taking pictures of the things I have lying out on view and have enough to blog about for 365 days without ever leaving the house. So that means, if I cracked open the trunks in the junk dungeon, I could stay inside blogging for thirty years or so, if someone would just bring me enough sausage to live on. I may be turning into something of a recluse, because that sounds kind of fun! I don't know where I found this scrapbook, so blogging about junk has not improved my memory for past events. So many junk stores just blend into one after awhile. This scrapbook is full of early 20s newspaper clippings, mostly about how to fry things.

1969 Green

Certain years have certain colors in my mind. I was alive in 1969 and it was the metallic green of this box and car. I remember: it had the sunny brightness of an ice cream parlor parking lot, the sweet hiss of a chain-link fence, and permanent pebble marks in its grazed knees.

Vignette in Violet

Shelves are crucial when you have as much junk as I do. My dream place to live, instead of being the standard nice house with a nice view, is a studio apartment on a noisy street with three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Couldn't fit many husbands or other creatures into that set up though. So for now I'll make do with what I have! Here's a grouping arranged by color, starting at the back: a floral box holding a darling ceramic perfume bottle, which still smells faintly of Genuine Devon Violets (my romance-reading grandmother's favorite scent & color!), a bar of motel soap, an old-fashioned pin, some mini boxing gloves, and a turnip.

Moiré

Here we have an illustration of the adjective:
"(of silk) having a rippled, lustrous finish. Denoting or showing a pattern of irregular wavy lines like that of such silk, produced by the superposition at a slight angle of two sets of closely spaced lines."
I don't know where I found this wonderful scrap of silk, stamped with an image of a Crinoline Lady and her swain. There's another just like underneath, and that must be the cause of the photo's slight moiré effect.

I noticed after posting this that you can't see any ding-dang moiré effect at all on the blog. Oops! But I assure you, it was there in the camera's viewfinder, and in my photo editor. Well anyway, that's my offering for today. I wonder if these silks were used on old thirties greeting cards?

My Little Baby Doll

After a long drive looking at pretty leaves yesterday, Bridget kept on driving, and had a sleepover in St. Louis with her grandparents last night. The house feels so different without her! I'm glad she's enjoying city life: she likes sidewalks better than gravel roads, and my mom always spoils her with a blue plate chihuahua special of liver no onions. But we miss her dreadfully. She's our baby, and just can't be cuddled enough.

The Last Persimmon

Persimmon trees are the first to lose their leaves in the Fall, and their fruit is quickly gobbled up by critters. Can you see the last persimmon in our backyard tree? (Look upper left...) One sunset last year my husband and I noticed the silhouette of a huge raccoon climbing out on one of those skinny branches to grab a goodie, it was an amazing gravity-defying sight. Persimmons may have lost their leaves already but every other tree in my area is in full psychedelic glory, and yes the sky really is that blue today, no saturation meddling required! My parents and I drove up to the Riverdock Restuarant in Hardin, Illinois for some of the best beef brisket in the Bi-State this morning, and I can't remember ever seeing such mind-blowing Fall colors before. No camera could have captured them, which is just as well, because I forget to bring mine!

Fall Capelets

No one, not even I, believed for one second this blog would stop showing off my knitting. I knitted like a fiend while listening to all that Georgette Heyer and here's a gallery of the outcome. This fall is all about capelets! Top to bottom photos: The Woods Out Back (i.e. Fall itself), Elderberry Capelet, Ladies' Swamp Mist Capelet, Lichen Capelet, and Ladies' Gothic Capelet. Here's what I really need: more yarn! Oh, wait — I was cooped up inside for five weeks with a computer and a PayPal account and colorful offerings by Elvincraft, so look what happened:


My favorite is this Wild Tussah Silk (see Ladies' Gothic Capelet above for the lovely drape) in Early Autumn Hazlewood and Camisole Dawn, both custom dyes by Kate Duncan. The silk has the most unbelievably luxurious texture knitted up, heavy yet light like vintage lingerie. It's a pain in the ass to wind, since the slubs which give it so much character make it snag like fun, but my All-Powerful Reeling Machine and I finally managed:

Three Cute Pets

Here's three cute pictures of three of my cute pets: Bridget the chihuahua, Brother the cat, and Buster the husband. I'm going to blog more often to see if I can get my words back. And if you want to leave a note about how cute Bridget is, please do, she reads all her fan mail. I screwed up the comment section when changing the blog colors but everything's back to normal now.

Eunice C. Smith

I think the anesthesia must have affected my ability to write. I just can't seem to marshall my thoughts into any coherent order anymore, and when I finally do, the words are all wrong, pompous and arch and full of too many syllables. Maybe that has nothing to do with the anesthesia still congealed in my already overtaxed liver and everything to do with the last 5 weeks spent listening to Georgette Heyer novels being read aloud by plummy British voices. Three days before surgery a set of CDS with all 43 of Ms. Heyer's works came in the mail from the UK and I spent many subsequent hours cramming the iPod full, so that when I got home I would only have to sit up, switch on, and start knitting. (Many thanks, by the way, to my great brother Bob, who supplied me with the critical grape Popsicles during those first few days back in my own domicile.) (See what I mean? I can't even say house now, it has to be a domicile!) For those of you who aren't familiar with Georgette Heyer, she wrote Regency Romances (à la Jane Austen) and mysteries from the 20s till the late 50s. My grandmother used to force feed these to me, and I accredit her work with my high verbal SATs. She's still my comfort reading — or listening — of choice.

But this post is supposedly about Eunice C. Smith (1875-1955), not Georgette Heyer. When (if?) my ability to write returns, I plan on authoring a children's book called Escape from Fairy Godmother School, and so have been keeping an eye out for likely teachers therein. I visualize someone just like Miss Eunice Smith as the headmistress. The wonderful picture of her at top hangs in the lobby of Alton Memorial Hospital, which she and her sister donated the grounds and funds for in 1936. Miss Eunice's father, William Eliot Smith, ran Illinois Glass in Alton (see bottom pic of an array of the company's 1906 bottle shape offerings), and was rich, rich, rich. I'm sure that hat in the photo came all the way from Paris, France. But Miss Eunice was no lazy Lady of Leisure: she was an avid bird-watcher, equestrienne (that's her riding habit from 1910 at the Alton Museum of History and Art), and general mover and shaker. The nurses at Alton Memorial say she still makes her presence known there, and I definitely felt it myself. After I pushed the Fentanyl pain management pump button a million times due to the agony caused by seaweed-salad-&-gut-poking-induced "innard inflation", I got the itchies, which is a common Fentanyl side effect. For itching they give Benadryl, an over-the-counter drug I'd never taken. My nurse gave me a whopping 50 mg. dose of it IV and I immediately thought I was dying for real. I'm not going to rag on the staff for their feeble reaction to my crisis, though I had post-traumatic flashbacks of those next 15 minutes for a couple of weeks. Let's just say I passed my stress test, am now officially tagged as "Allergic to Benadryl", and may well have been saved from the other side by the lingering good energy of Miss Eunice C. Smith!

Revitalizing Junk

One day this last July I found out I had both a suspicious mammogram and a soccer ball-sized pelvic mass. As I drove down the River Road for further CT testing, I thought I was a goner, and examined the worthiness of both my life and this blog. I vowed (as those about to meet their Maker are wont to do) to make both more worthy, should I escape imminent death. I would rub my chihuahua Bridget's belly with extra diligence, and write about people, not mere things. Though I always presume the worst of everyone, and would generally rather knit than socialize, I'm no misanthrope. I find humanity quite fascinating, and not just in a horrified train-wreck watching kind of way, either. (Poor lil Lindsay Lohan though, huh?!!) Someone, as in an actual human being, has to design, make, use, and discard all the cool junk I score in thrift stores, after all. So I thought it would be worth the effort to write about people, and not just junk. If I survived.

But the problem with people is that they are elusive. Junk is not. It's right there on the shelf at Goodwill, and you can buy it and bring it home. The first person I want to write about is Eunice Smith, and since she's been dead since 1955, it's not easy to get info on her. But even if I could get all the facts, how could words capture her essence? I was once addicted to biographies, but nonetheless always felt a bit stultified when I finished reading one, like I'd been crammed into a packed elevator. Spirit is limitless; persona is confined — and people are both.

I had a lumpectomy for the suspicious mammogram, and that was just a benign fibrocystic change. Then I had good old-fashioned slice and dice surgery on the ovarian cyst, which also turned out to be totally 100% benign, though rather large. I spent two days in Alton Memorial Hospital watching every inspiring episode of "From Wrecks To Riches," where a middle-aged grease monkey takes GTO etc. junkyard husks and turns them into Super Muscle Cars, then sells them for big bucks. In retrospect, the one thing I would most recommend to anyone undergoing abdominal surgery is to not eat for at least a week beforehand. (Let's just say that all the seaweed salad I inexplicably binged on two days prior to the procedure was a mistake.) So here I am, able to wear jeans again instead of drawstring pants, and feeling good. I knew I was fully recovered when this morning I had that classic trio of irresistible cravings for: a Diet Pepsi, some Jolly Ranchers, and a thrift store score. You see here the score, a complete Time-Life set of The Art of Sewing, © 1973-5. The covers are covered in fabric! The content is detailed and comprehensive, and the photos are cheezy the way only 70s photos can be.

I took the utter magnificence of this score as a sign that Junk Is Worth Blogging About!

As I Live and Breathe

I made it out of the hospital for my wholly benign but surgical procedure and through recuperation, no problems. I don't mind working in hospitals, but I sure hate being in one on the other side of the bedrail. Shudder. Maybe the experience will make me a more compassionate nurse when I go back next spring. Doubt creeps in... But maybe! In that vein we have here a bulletin board crammed with objets, the centerpiece of which is a postcard of a wooden statue of Guanyin, Chinese Goddess of Mercy. This is one of my favorite works at the Saint Louis Art Museum. If you stand in front of her long enough, you can see her breathe. As mentioned previously, this blog is going to feature more posts about people who interest me. Coming up soon: Eunice C. Smith and Mildred B. Carpenter.