I know I
just mentioned magic lantern slides, but I stumbled on these from the late1890s/early 1900s on a really pretty tumblr blog called "
Mothic Flights and Flutterings" and I just had to share. No wonder the French writer Marcel Proust was so fixated on the magic lantern from his childhood...
"At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window...."
"...But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time."
According to my mailbox, it is autumn. All of the fall catalogs are rolling in and after this scorcher of a summer- I am ready. Of course I am coveting all of the clothing, but I also love to look through the houseware catalogs and check out their fall spreads. Simon Pearce has some shots that are so simple and feel like New England- I can just smell the hot cider and feel the crisp air.
There really is a site for just about every subject out there and that means there are fantastic places like getmortified.com . Getmortified.com is essentially a home for angst and awkwardness - it calls itself a "comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids". Adults share everything from their childhood journals and letters to the movies and photographs of their youth. (My personal favorite- reasons they deserve to marry Jon Bon Jovi)
Thanks to a gal about town in Minneapolis, I learned of the Oronoco Gold Rush Days and I am so jealous I live half a country away from this event. This flea/antique market that takes place one weekend a summer in Oronoco, MN has been happening for over 30 years. Just based on the photographs my friend snapped during her day there, I know I would be crazy for it....
I heard vintage suitcases are all the rage....what a treasure trove.
Ah, the dreamy feathered hair captured on a tin lunchbox for posterity.
I love the groupings by color- it makes everything that much more appealing.
I wish that there was a market like this near my hometown.....even the photographs are fantastic finds from time spent there.
Illustrator Polly Dunbar has a series of "Tilly and Friends" books, published by Candlewick Press, that are some of the best toddler titles around. They are charming and humorous with a group of the most unique illustrated chums to come along in quite awhile. Sarah Jane over at sarahjanestudios also posted about the Tilly series not too long ago and I am so happy to see the word spreading about these books.
