Hello Darling Spring...

Spring is such a gift isn't it? We muddle our way through Winter trying to see through the blankety walls we build between ourselves and real life, cursing cold and snow and bin- men who abandon our wheelie bins on frost covered paths, and it feels as though it will go on forever. That never again will the sun make the dust dance, nor will we dare to step outside without three thermal vests and the lesser spotted Long Johns...

But no sooner are we resigned to a life rich in hot chocolate and frost bite, then lo and behold, with a flick of her glittery wand, Mother Nature banishes Winter and Spring settles upon our souls, inviting us to run to the school gates without a coat and pop into the garden three times a day to watch the buds of our chamelia unfurl before our eyes. Inviting us, most curiously, to be better than who we already are.

This morning I woke up terribly early, the gnaw of period pain interrupting a gloriously vivid dream and making it impossible to sleep. And so I tumbled out of bed, all mussy hair and ruffled white nightie and crept like the ghost of myself, down the stairs.
And there it was: Spring. Right there in my living room! She'd let herself in, all green and bright and beautiful.  The ivy wrapped around the tree outside my window suddenly alive again. The sky the kind of crisp blue only Spring can deliver. The milkman whistling and jangling and happy.

And so I sat and did nothing. Staring at the sun making patterns on my Victorian floorboards, doing nothing, reading nothing, sipping peppermint tea  and making reckless plans. Dwelling on a weekend full of sorrow for a friends loss, fear of the kind of sinister goings on that have a nearby house and it's occupants held up by knife-point, and sensing that my relationship is in jeopardy because I'm too old for living right there in the moment with no plans for tomorrow. Because without plans we are lost. Because without plans we are at the mercy of trusting every fluttery emotion, unable to wrap ourselves up in the certainty of a bigger picture, no matter how vaguely sketched. Because without plans we drift, and nobody appreciates a drifter. Because as always my Darlings I am a slave to my hormones and my emotions cannot always be trusted, no matter how lyrically I might spill them out...

It is a time for starting again, Spring isn't it? A time for shrugging off cocoons and fluttering our wings again. For getting a grip on what is and not what we hoped it might be, choosing to re-invent the same scrumptious wheel, and popping possibility like paracetamol, unhindered by the debilitating comforts of Winter and not yet exhausted by the heat of Summer.

Spring I think, is more than anything, about celebrating life: new baby bunnies, frolicking lambs and ours. Our lives! It is about saying this isn't all there is and on this, the first day of my self-declared Spring, I can go out and chase life up and down the lane! I can channel Alice and admit that I used to be much muchier, that somewhere along the way I lost my muchiness and today, today my friends I am going to hunt high and low for it, and take no nonsense and remember to be myself and see the Doctor about my twitchy eye and make lemon curd and a birthday cake for Richard with hopes for tomorrow baked right there in the topping and hang out a line full of lavender scented aprons just because I can and sweep the front path and work on the project that makes me feel giddy and resist screeching when my son's teacher fails to notice that yet again he isn't in the line of children she is supposed to be delivering safely on to the playground, and instead go into the classroom myself and get him and the coat he hasn't quite managed to pull on and issue my icy, but effective "I'm so disappointed in you again Lady" face to dear old teacher, and whisper the (probably unlikely threat) of a letter of complaint and take him home and stuff him full of love and gluten free cornflake cakes and make the damn cardboard house for the school project that has turned into an a quite hideous display of parental talent and ostentation and maybe sign myself up for a course in anger management while I'm at it?


Ah Spring. You are quite the devil aren't you? Who knew you could inspire such emotion? Muchiness ebb's and flows, but as sure as Easter eggs are chocolate, you return, and I for one, adore you.

The Vintage Housekeeper's Planner Is Here!

Heavens above would you look at this, the day I'm not sure any of us believed would ever come has finally arrived! Yes my scrumptious, patient Housekeepers, the BrocanteHome Vintage Housekeepers Planner is finally available and I do believe it was worth waiting for!

With sixty downloadable pages, charts, logs and forms there is absolutely everything you need to start to plan a life more organized: a home-maker's dream of routines, rituals, accounts, and records that will I hope make all the difference to your life as a Vintage Housekeeper and help you create the space, time and money to enjoy as many Puttery Treats as you feel you need: because that's what organization is all about really isn't? Shoving the dull stuff out the way so you can get on with living a truly fabulous life!  

So what is included in the download? Are you ready for this??

The Housekeepers Creed

A Page-A- Month 2010 Calendar

Dates To Remember

Morning Routine Planner

Evening Routine Planner

Weekly Routine Planner

Daily Planner Page

Weekly Meal Planner

Monthly Dinner Planner

Shopping List

Kid's Chore's Start Chart

Favourite Family Recipe Cards

Freezer Stock List

Pantry Stores

Dinner Party Record

Grocery Price Check

Important Addresses

Birthday Gift Record

Insurance Organizer

Valuable Items Inventory

Electrical Goods Record

Credit and Debit Card Log

Bank Account Record

Everyday Spending Log

Housekeepers Weekly Budget

Housekeepers Monthly Budget

Medical Record

Medical Appointment Log

School Record

School Attendance Log

Parent and Teacher Discussion Record

Babysitter Information

Emergency Caregiver Information

Gardeners Annual Tasks

Seed Starting Notes

Houseplant Care

Our Pet Log

Internet Password Log

Online Order Record

Ebay Sales

Ebay Purchases

Book Wish List

Library Book Record

Favourite Puttery Treats

Decorating Organizer

Weekly Gratitude

and

21 Lovely Things.

I have based the Planner on the original Brocante Planner with a new design and colour scheme and many, many more pages and organizing ideas. Over the next year I will continue to offer free add-ons (blank pages, dividers and worksheets coming free to all Planner buyers next week!) and supplemental packs for sale (by popular request, for Empty Nesters,  new Mummies, special events etc...) and this should mean that in the long term you will be able to organize your entire life through the little dotty wonder that is the Vintage Housekeepers Planner... 

Should you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me here and in the meantime go right ahead and press the button below and buy yourself a teeny dose of bliss for just $17.50...

Oh what it is to be organized Housekeepers!

Because There Is No Milk In the House

Friday. Though there are things to be done and food to be bought, you return from the school gates and curl up with a book you need to finish before evening when the playground mummies will gather to discuss it. Though you are one hundred and seventy pages in, there are more than three hundred pages left before you will be able to deliver your view from an educated standpoint without sounding like you have gathered opinion from one of the many on the internet now seemingly shaping your personality.
You read and because there is no milk in the house, drink sweet black coffee, pulling a musty scented blanket up to your chin and turning your phone on to silent so it's shrill ring will not disturb a world inhabited by gay men and sneering politicians. You lose yourself in it and everything beyond your sofa and the furtive realm of Conservative Britain circa 1986 ceases to exist, though guilt weighs heavily on such absorption.
You are avoiding yourself: this you know for sure.

You are frightened of the weekend stretching ahead of you. A weekend that by your own insistence, you will spend alone: face to face with what you want. What you need. But before that there is an inevitable end to deal with: a story rich in vice and greed imploding on itself. With just ten pages left, at midday you find can't bear it, so you get up, unravelling your blanket like so many bandages. You find Mrs Lippincotes neatly packaged in the porch and gather it up with a fistful of bills. Then you cook plain pasta and eat it sprinkled with nothing but black pepper from a bowl older than everybody you know. Your skin feels tight, shrivelling up, no doubt, in anticipation of your 38th birthday in a few weeks time. There is no milk in the house. Your burn your thumb. For the second day running you bite back tears.

The thought of housework appals you. Days like this come rarely now, so you allow yourself the petty indulgences of self inflicted melancholy. You read the last ten pages of the book and tap two fingers into the fleshy side of the palm over and over again. You have stepped outside yourself and don't want to step back in to the obligations of housework. Or childcare. Or behaving like a normal human being. Though reading in the middle of the day strikes you as something akin to sin,  you don't want to stop, so when you put down the most deserving of Man Booker Prize winning book club choice you barely allow yourself time to cross the decades before plummeting into Elizabeth Taylor's story of a woman unwilling to conform.

Reading in the middle of the day. You suppress a tsk and carry on.

There are just two hours left now until real life will drag you back on to the playground to pick up a child still so very high on what it is to be. Suddenly having no milk in the house strikes you as the worst kind of abbhoration: the most telling sort of domestic neglect. Tonight you must go to book-club and pretend to be normal. The sort of woman mindful of what is in her fridge. You shove feet into boots as comfortable as slippers and go out into a shock of sunshine. You must not bring a child into a house without milk. Children need milk the way Middle England needs wine: for fortitude and back-bone. Comfort and strength. You walk along, opinion springing unbidden to your mind. Opinion that will die a death on your tongue when faced with the good housewives of Aughton later on. But no matter, you know what you know.

You walk home the long way, up the hill, huffing and puffing with life. The weekend is here. There is milk in the house. You are still capable of independant thought even if you cannot express it. Not so much unwilling to conform as unable. But all is well.
All is well regardless. You dab another drop of Rescue Remedy under your tongue and try to come to terms with it.

Housekeepers Carousel

Welcome to my second Housekeepers Carousel: a quick round-up of all the things that stirring my emotions this week...

*First up, Sulamith Wulfing. When I was a little girl my Mum owned a book called "Childhood" which combined Khalil Gibran quotes with images, like the one above, that at once bewitched me and sent a little shiver running down my childhood spine. The other day while hopping around the internet I came across that same beautiful art all over again, and for a little while I was a girl again, stirred by the beauty but still bewildered by the sorrow in the eyes of the children described.

* Next, music, because I feel like dancing this week. And throwing every window in the house open and saying hello to my chamelia which has finally got around to blooming and wearing a frilly pinny to serenade the mop brush, and having a little cry because relationships are so bloody hard, and seeking comfort in yesterday and worrying a little bit about tomorrow and mostly just playing First Aid's "Ghost Town", the first song in the player above, over and over again because the words spike me, then mixing it all up with a whole dose of happy and memories and the kinds of songs one should really only play in the car so no-one need ever discover just how ludicrous you really are. And yes, I am talking about Rupert Holmes "Pina Colada" song. Click the arrows to hear whats on my (eclectic!) playlist this week...

* Watching Vanity Fair with Reece Witherspoon as I write. Eating a tiny lunch of gouda cheese and yellow plums. Considering getting off my bottom to walk to the post office and procure a Cadbury's cream egg. Waiting for the delivery of The Nine Rooms of Happiness and Keeping the House, because rumour has it, it is some kind of wonderful. But rumour could of course be wrong so I will keep you posted!

* Thrilled by the Joy Junket manifesto. Making room for (even) more joy. Waiting with bated breath for mail order to arrive at Anthropologie.Co.Uk (Any minute now!). Feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities provided by Wordpress. Irrationally excited for Cath Kidston. Horrified by the bitterness of Middle England in their reaction to her success. Making this Mark Twain quote my mantra...

"Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol. You want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment."

* And seeing a bit of everyone of us in this snippet I found I don't know where, (but please feel free to enlighten me if you do)...

" These are the kind of girls who hang dream catchers above their bed, who eat pomegranates and read old history books for fun. These are the kind of girls who take pictures of their hands with disposable cameras and wallpaper their bathrooms with pretty roses. These girls sketch eyes and mouths and little drawings all over things, they look you right in the eye and almost through you when you speak to them.

These girls camp out in their backyards for fun, they light candles everywhere, and if you visit them at home they usually have all sorts of animals. Their wardrobes are filled with silk robes and bows and hats, they drink tall glasses of milk and snack on chocolate while they watch the sun rise. These are the kind of girls who ride bikes through the city to the cinema that plays old movies in the middle of the day. They watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Rosemary's Baby". These are the kind of girls who are quiet in public. They were the kind of girls who put too many marshmallows in their hot chocolate and when the sun came down, lit the fire and pretended to be in the North Pole. They would water colour things they couldn't see, and eat French toast for lunch. These girls were the kind of girls who always believed in unicorns, they believed in the power of love and dreams. They were the kind of girls who gazed out of windows at bigger worlds, and rain made them think of faeries and tree houses. In the Summer they read Jane Austen and listened to Fleetwood Mac while sipping cold tomato juice.

They told ghost stories under huge floral sheets, candles glowing beneath their faces. The spooky endings made them scream and laugh. They huddled together so they wouldn't get too scared. Every sound outside made them jump."  

Rosy Royledge Shelf Trim

There can't be a prettier sight than opening a cupboard and seeing shelves trimmed with roses which is why discovering lengths of vintage Royledge paper edging ($8.99: auction ends March 8th 2010) on Ebay is always such a pleasure, with the rosy length above being a particularly scrumptious example...

Royledge was a company producing the most scrumptious of shelf trim, lining and a collection of rather fabulous "Roillies", aka paper doillies, most pertinently from a vintage housekeeping aesthetic in the 1940's and 1950's. While shelf trim and lining from other companies can often be found while treasure hunting it is the site of  box of Royledge trim that most delights my heart, because it is so often scattered in the kind of pretty florals we all adore in color schemes that haven't dated...

There is just something so puttery about lining and edging shelves in happy little patterns that I can't resist, though of course exactly the same effect can be achieved with lengths of vintage lace or ruffly trim...

Let Sleeping Babies Lie

Just because I never want to forget how precious he looks when he is asleep.

A Very Puttery February

Goodness, commit to doing something once a month and in the blink of an eye, a whole month passes by. Because, yes Sweethearts, it is time for all my Puttery Post lovelies to check their in-boxes all over again and discover this months Puttery Treats waiting to be collected in one easy download...

February was I think, a rather fabulous puttery month, jam-packed with a series of treats created by little old me and designed to deliver a little good old fashioned homemaking efficiency to your door with all the scrumptiousness you have come to expect from BrocanteHome. Between de-stinking slippers, writing "Happiness" cards  and wafting up home-made tumble dryer softener, this month on the Puttery Post we also got to grips with the menace that is the abundance of chargers we are now required to own, organized a Read Me Later file, mixed up some flu-fighting home-made hand sanitizer, chose a "Flower Book",  created some "Just Because" bowls and awarded someone we love with dinner on an "Aren't You Wonderful" plate...

All that and much more! But my favourites this month? 

The Read Me Next Shelf from February 3rd

If you are anything like me you probably have a barely checked book fetish, and find yourself acquiring book after book with hardly a good hour to spare to read!

While words may be essential to your survival, the constant acquisition of new books is bad for your purse, so today let's do battle with "Gotta have New Books Syndrome!" and instead establish a system to read what we already own before we go trawling the second-hand book shops for one more vintage literary treasure to add to our collection...

1. First choose a place where "books you haven't read" are going to live. Empty a bookshelf,  choose a big basket, or allocate a window ledge on which to store them: preferably somewhere you pass frequently so you will be constantly reminded what is available to read...

2. Scour the entire house for all the books you haven't read, then sort them into two piles: books you won't read in a million years and books you still plan on reading.

3. Give away or recycle the books you won't read in a million years. Today!!

4. Place all the other books on your "Read Me Next" shelf. Add library books and borrowed books while you are at it...

5. Finally (and this is key) make a list of the books you haven't read in the back of your Book Journal and tick them off one by one...

  Only when the shelf is empty are you allowed to go book shopping!


*************

And The Bedside Table from February 11th

I always think that the bedside drawer is the one place in the house we should regard as sacred: that it is a private, secret, cosy place that at once speaks of our more sensual selves, whilst providing a comforting space in which to keep those things that safeguard us in the middle of the night.

Today let's tip out all of the nonsense we have accumulated over a lifetime of shoving in goodness knows what and re-invent our private little worlds in a way that does just justice to who we are and what we need when we are snuggled up under the cosiest of quilts. 

Empty the drawer and return anything that doesn't belong in it to its rightful home. Wipe the drawer out with a cloth scented with lemon juice and lavender oil, then go through your stash of vintage linen and source a pretty embroidered runner or tray cloth to use to line your drawer.

Now comes the fun part: choosing the items to put back in your drawer.

First of all think practically: every bedside drawer should contain a spare set of house and car keys, a spare mobile phone with pay as you go credit available, a torch, a packet of matches and a couple of household candles. (Don't forget to copy a short list of emergency and family telephone numbers on to the back of a vintage postcard in case the mobile fails).  

Next up, add spare reading glasses, a tiny little photograph album with your most treasured family photographs in, your journal, a couple of the kind of pens that make you smile, some pillow spray, paper handkerchiefs, lavender sleep balm, aspirin and herbal sleeping tablets.


Other ideas? A small packet of facial wipes. Private letters wrapped in a hankie and tied in a bow. A tube of hand cream or preferably an all purpose balm like the very wonderful night-stand classic that is Elizabeth Arden's Eight Hour Cream. Bach Sleep Remedy. Massage oil. A tiny notepad. A pretty embroidered handkerchief. Vic's Vapour Rub. A packet of parma violets for sweet breath first thing in the morning. Lip balm. A book that is important to you. A secret bar of the darkest, most scrumptious chocolate you can find. A bundle of short lengths of ribbon for book-marking. A little batch of post-it notes. A pashmina folded flat for draping around cold shoulders.     

And of course anything else you need beside your bed. Night night Housekeepers..

****************

Should the Puttery Post take your fancy you can sign up for a years subscription on Etsy, (the cheapest option!) or pay by monthly subscription here and get my emails delivered direct to your in-box or should you prefer you can simply download each months Puttery treats for $3.00 a month below...

To buy and download January's Puttery Treats click here...

And to buy and download February's Puttery Treats click here...

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding.

Sunday was lost to the efforts of enduring culinary and alcoholic excess following an evening of Greek dancing in the bosom of almost my entire family as we gathered to watched Uncle Kosta do his thing with a bauzouki. 

Much too much merry-ment  meant a bedtime of some un-godly hour and the next day the debilitating effects of taramasalata induced exhaustion meant that it wasn't until four o'clock in the afternoon that it struck me that as 2010 was not a leap year, I would neither have to ask Richard to marry me, nor have time to review Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, before a bunch of white rabbits flung another month at us... 

And so never one to dodge my obligations I pulled on my thermal jim-jams and snuggled up beneath a pin-tucked quilt, with my 1978 Penguin version of the book (68p on AbeBooks!) and a bar of medicinal chocolate, then set about reading from start to finish this promising little novella, certain in the knowledge that my brain wasn't quite up to scratch and thus my opinions of what followed may not be quite as reliable as those proffered by a woman declaring a Vintage Read Along really should be!  

Seventy-eight pages later, the book was finished and I was perplexed. While it doesn't take much to perplex me in conversation, when it comes to books it is rare that I reach the end and don't quite know what to feel. 

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was Julia's first novel and was written in 1932. It describes one day in the life of a family, an important day for this is the one, that Mrs Thatcham, a middle class widow, would marry her daughter Dolly, to the Hon. Owen Bingham. And thus we are hurled into the heart of Mrs Thatham's house in the country, resplendent with all the domestic detail we Vintage Housekeepers adore, then like uninvited guests to someone else's family wedding, required to prowl around the house and observe the comings and chaotic goings of a family in flux. 

Though as readers we are always observers, while reading this novel I could not shake of the sense that I was looking from the outside in, and like any gate-crasher at a party, found myself quite unable to get a good grip on what was going on.

 Dolly is, from the off, rather a darling, but she is troubled on what should be the happiest day of her life, and after a rather alarming moment in front of the drawing room mirror, when in writing akin to quite the most awful of horror pulp, the potted ferns dance "menacingly"  like "jungles in the Congo" and Dolly's white face is reflected "like a phosphorescent orchid blooming alone there in the twilight swamp", her eyes spin in her head "ceaselessly" for five or six minutes until the spell is broken by her Mother's appearance in the room, and thereafter she is banished to her bed-room to begin her preparations for her marriage, while assorted relations begin to arrive and thereafter take centre stage, greeted in turn by Mrs Thatcham who rushes about all of a fluster, bewildered by the jinks in her well laid plans and given to the most dramatic and comical of declarations when that same bewilderment reaches a frenzy. 

And so it goes on. We meet various curious aunties, children and cousins, curious only in the way other peoples families often appears to us and we sit through a series of set pieces between relations and domestic staff, many quite hilarious in tone, until it becomes clear that is Dolly's friend Joseph who is both the pivotal character and the most restless, looking as we are, from the outside in at a family he fails to understand. 

The language though occasionally stilted by age, is lovely enough to engage us, and the story is played out like the very best of theatre with even the wedding itself taking place off-set, while we wait, with bated breath, for the return of the family, and the answer to all the questions presented by a conversation between Dolly and Joseph that took place just before she left to be married.  

And then in a crescendo of a last chapter we are richly, if not rather bizarrely rewarded by the kind of revelation we could only have hoped for. Though I cannot say any more without revealing the story, it transpires that there is good reason for Joseph's behaviour, and the family come's undone in the light of the kind of truth Dolly presumably hoped would never be spoken out loud. A truth, who's impact is quite hysterically diluted by the funniest, and certainly the oddest misunderstanding about the difference between Albania and Albino's. Though maybe it wasn't a misunderstanding at all? In all honesty I couldn't say, because therein lies the part that most perplexed me. Albino or Albanian? Or both? I have no idea.

Perhaps you should read it and enlighten me? Or perhaps I should re-read it and try to make sense of it on an evening when comprehension isn't compromised by memories of a night, when rather than being a gatecrasher at a party, I was instead right there at the heart of it...

P.S: The March book is At Mrs Lippincotes by Elizabeth Taylor. Do come read along...

Synaesthesia

"In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists were fascinated by synaesthesia: the way some people perceive sensations joined together, like seeing letters of the alphabet in a range of colours or hearing music as texture. Victorians named it after the Greek for union (syn) of sensations (aesthesia). In the west, the research fell out of fashion in the mid 20th century, but since the 1980s it’s been rediscovered, helping neuroscientists to understand how we separate and combine sensations.

Classic synaesthesia is something people are born with; cognitive synaesthesia happens when our minds join different sensations, based on our experiences. It’s used by perfumers in the creative process; for example, fragrances are often inspired by listening to music. It’s the psychological side of aromatherapy..."

Synaesthesia is further described by Lush as the "Union of separate sensations" and merely watching the video above has me feeling more relaxed: mostly because I suspect I both underestimate the power of music and have become lazy about using it to reflect my mood...

While the treatment looks bliss all by itself, what struck me most was how we could use the word "synaesthesia" as inspiration for creating the kind of homes that stimulate us: homes that cocoon us and bring all our senses alive to the degree where we are truly mindful about how very powerful our four walls can be in the pursuit of atmosphere...

Watch it and be inspired.

Housekeepers Carousel

Ok Sweetie Pies, I am kicking off a new feature here on BrocanteHome this morning. The Housekeepers Carousel will be a weekly post listing all the lots and lots of little things I think about telling you all week long, but which neither warrant an entire post to themselves, or I simply can't find the time to share. It will be a list of "where I'm at's", "I'm so in love with that's", short quotes, links to die for, moans and groans, things to watch and lot's of other Brocante loveliness, hints and tips not to be missed. I kinda hope it fills a gap... 

*First up, look at the great postcard at the top of this post, I mean Heavens above, what's not to love? The fabulous pink tights? The curtains, the spindly legs of the gorgeous chair? (I heart chairs with a vengeance!). Which all goes to prove, methinks, that nobody did style quite like an Edwardian Hussy...


* Next, Boots Original Beauty Formula. Vintage styling and old fashioned products like Cold Cream, Damask Rosewater and Vanishing Cream that actually work without a whole lot of fuss and ceramide this and anti-oxidant that. Beauty for old -fashioned girls like us! Kath bought me a few of the products for Christmas and then in a moment of oh how much I love this stuff, I went out and bought the rest of the range, cos it looks pretty in my still un-finished bathroom...


* Added to my Love Film list this week? Once, Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House and I've Loved You So Long, a French Box Office smash  with Kristen Scott Thomas, who is so stunningly beautiful she makes my tummy hurt.



* Obsessing over Alice In Wonderland and a heart shaped magnifying class, Miss Marple was using in an episode I watched last night. Eating Marks and Spencers Red Onion and Mint Chutney with every thing.

* Getting to grips with Photoshop with the help of the supremely talented Pioneer Woman. Loving this post  about the complex relationship between Mums and little boys on Scribbling In San Antonio (Thanks Leslie!). Feeling irrationally excited about Liberty of London for Target. (The bike! The flip flops!) Especially since I will never get the chance to shop there...

* Reading Debbie Travis's Not Guilty, because I have followed her career since I too, was once a decorative paint artist, and wanted to read her take on raising babba's alongside a great career. But feeling mildly irritated by the slightly rubbish writing, peculiar attitude to raising the boys she clearly adores, and worst of all, her memories of her Lancashire childhood. All that and in the next week I've got to tackle The Line of Beauty for the Playground Mommies Bookclub next friday. Damn life being to short to fit in every book I want to read...

* Planning something kinda big for BrocanteHome at the end of May and working my socks off behind the scenes for all that entails and for all of those of you eagerly awaiting it's arrival, you will be pleased to hear that the HUGE Houseeepers Planner is almost finished too. Keep your eyes peeled Honey Pies!

* And finally, feeling this quote from Maira Kalman resonate somewhere deep inside the writer in me...

"I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It's not about being starched or polished. It's about having ears that stick out. About breaking yet another glass. It's about seeing something for the first time and mking a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged."

May we never be completely discouraged...

Happy Thursday Housekeepers!