Hello and thank you so much for dropping by. I'm Alison, that's my little boy Finn, and we are absolutely thrilled to have you at BrocanteHome!
Brocante has been online for five years and with soooo much to see and do here, the best way to make the most of the site is to sign up for the monthly newsletter and get my scrumptious way of vintage housekeeping delivered directly to your in-box...
This will be my last post here on Blogger as I have, with heart in mouth experienced the steep learning curve that is hosting my own site at Wordpress.Org, and after a month of the hardest work I can remember since I had to pull my guts out to pass my maths GCSE, the site is almost ready to receive visitors...
I say almost, because I fully intended to invite you over on Monday morning, but today Rachel Johnson, sister of Boris and editor of The Lady tweeted about a post I have written over at the new site about her magazine and before I knew it, just like that, my little old secret was out and I noticed a whole lot of unexplained visitors hopping all over the pages of the all new Brocante...
And so here we are, a few days earlier than I had anticipated with, many of the i's not quite dotted as scrumpiously as I had hoped and an entire section still not yet live (wait and see!), but heavens if I carry on faffing with my fiddly need for perfection I'll still be faffing when they put me ten feet under...
So here is what is going to happen: BrocanteHome here on Blogger will be live until Monday, then fingers crossed it will start to re-direct all traffic all by itself and you will be dragged by your pretty little knitted slippers over to the new site: the only thing you need to do is change bookmark and blog links to the new address if you would, while all feeds will be automatically re-directed and there shouldn't be any need to re-subscribe if you view Brocante in a reader...
I have decided upon this change for a number of reasons: a while ago I asked you what you thought of the current design and many of you suggested that you had preferred Brocante in it's previous happier, dotty incarnation (Hint!). While many readers also suggested that Brocante was both difficult to read and worse than that, almost impossible to navigate and even my own Mum declared problems searching for old posts and reading the text without glasses and a 200 watt light. So I listened and I dwelled and I ruminated on the idea of tackling something quite new to me (and previously rather terrifying) and before I knew it I was sitting with one of the Playground Daddies being taught the in's and out's of Wordpress, and keeping myself up till silly o'clock at night investigating the joys and endless possibilities of the rather wonderful little delight that is the Wordpress Plug-In.
A couple of months later and though I am almost bald with worry about such a big change, most of the Blogger posts have been imported and organized and we are ready to roll...
Hello Darlings, now please don't panic, because my See You Soon is there for a very good reason indeed. While it might at first glance seem as though I have quit the blogging party to go strutt my stuff at the nightclub around the corner, in actual fact, I am very, very, very busy working on a little something behind the scenes, and all will be revealed hopefully by the end of next week.
If by then I haven't suffocated under the mountain of laundry I am steadfastly ignoring whilst all my efforts are concentrated on re-igniting my little old blogging flame, I will meet you here then, and in the meantime, for all those of you who cannot live without a fix of Brocante in your homemaking day, the Puttery Post will be in your in-boxes as usual.
Woo hoo! The Carousel is back in town, so hop on board and lets go for a spin around all that is scrumptious in this lovely little world!! Oh Ok, enough already with the over-enthusiastic exclamation marks. Grey chin hair proves beyond all reasonable doubt that I am not a teenager...
* So first up, my April collage above. Crocheted squares, saucers full of pastel buttons, roses, ballet slippers, a desk I wish I could set up shop at, and right there in the middle, a portrait by the great Russian artist, Valentin Alexandroitsch Serow, called Children, taking centre stage because standing there that little boy looks just like my Finn did this morning before he left for school in his Summer school uniform of shorts, shirt and requisite, Year One, gap, where the teeth used to be...
* Next along, these divine Miette Wallpaper Cookies spotted on Design Sponge. Did you ever see such pretties? And oh the possibilities if you are clever enough to translate pattern into baked goods! Me I can't even turn cookie dough into baked goods so the chances of getting fancy with an icing bag are slim to none, because although my darling sister bought me the retro inspired Tala icing bag tin for my birthday I am yet to get to grips with filling it properly, let alone doing swoon-worthy florals on (burnt) biscuits. Still, a girl can dream can't she?
* Moving quickly on, High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, which was quite the finest example of early twentieth century girl power I have read in a long time, telling as it does the tale of a young girl who equipped with talent and a good eye, takes herself off from the dress shop floor on which she works to the ranks of owner in a period when both her sex and social class went vastly against her. Though my copy of High Wages was the orange and white Penguin, one shilling version bought for a song on AbeBooks, it has not so recently been re-issued by Persephone (with a foreword by Jane Brocket) and is I think, required reading for any woman doubting she has the gall to set up by herself. Or for she who has ever known the futility of loving a man tied to a marriage he cannot leave. (Ooooh and while I'm on the subject of Persephone look out for Paperback Reader's "Persephone Reading Week", running between May 3rd and May 9th, now won't you?)
* Dreaming about a long car journey. An afternoon nap on a very hot day. Remembering how it was to be pregnant through the hottest Summer this century. Mistaking wind for the flutter of a baby in my stomach. Dipping ginger biscuits in melted chocolate. Wearing a silk slip. Wrapping old books up in ribbon tied parcels just for the hell of it. Waking up with violent scent of hydrangeas engulfing my bedroom. Feeling momentarily, bizarrely, petrified by it. Assaulted by fragrance before I have opened my eyes. Seeing Sophie Dahl reading the very copy of the collected works of Dorothy Parker I have hidden under my bed for fifteen years just in case my Mum takes it into her head to demand it back (you can't have it, so let it go Mummy!). Misty Morning, Albert Bridge. Dwelling on disappointment...
"Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So, how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment? We shouldn’t suffer disappointment sighing at something our lives would be better without. We should seek it, track it down, collect it. One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool, calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves.”
Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
* Now contemplating Christmas in April. Quite accidentally, because LoveFilm, in their infinite wisdom have seen fit to send me Christmas Holiday, when I was hoping for Once. Still an afternoon with Deanna Durbin is never a wasted one, and throw in a teapot full of Earl Grey and this years Christmas Planner and I do believe I've got myself a par-tay. Albeit a dememntedly out of season one, but apparently that's how we roll around here: I have watched this Target Christmas advert a few times over, because I have never heard Rachel Ashwell speak (she's got a kind of transatlantic thing going on, as I suppose you might expect), and in one scene during this little video she is, fleetingly, the spitting image of Alison Steadman of Abigails Party and Gavin and Stacey fame...
* Still feeling astonished that I didn't know Cath Kidston and Kirstie Allsop were cousins. Though as my parents like to (frequently) remind me, the gaps in my knowledge are chasms devoid not only of geography and world events, but clearly that which I purport to know. But there you have it. I'm a purporter. One shouldn't trust me further than you can throw me. Dear Darling daughter, we love you, but you are thick.
* And finally, in celebration of National Poetry month, Katherine Mansfield's Camomile Tea, because occasionally melancholy comes wrapped in gratitude and contentment.
Outside the sky is light with stars;
There’s a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.
How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.
Hello Housekeepers, this is a drive by post to point you in the direction of a new set of free dividers for your Housekeepers Planner. The dividers are simple in design and split your planner into eleven categories:
Calendar and Routines Addresses and To-do's Meal Planning and Recipes Housekeeping and Care Instructions Shopping Lists and Receipts Insurance and Inventory School and Medical Records Financial Records and Banking Decorating and Puttery Treats Miscellania and Grace Notes Blogging and the Internet
You can download the dividers here and for those of you who have requested a few screenshots of the planner itself, please find afew examples from the sixty pages included, below...
And if that doesn't persuade you that life is scrumptiously easier when you are the proud owner of a BrocanteHome Vintage Housekeepers Planner then I'll be darned if I know what will!
Don't forget that you can download the free set of blank planner pages that accompany the planner here, and by special request I am working on a new PDF scrumptiously packed with every home-made cleaning recipe I have ever mentioned on BrocanteHome and many more besides, so keep an eye out for that in the next few days...
Have a gorgeous day Housekeepers, and as always, please accept my great big thank you kisses for supporting BrocanteHome. I hope you all know how very much my little Finn and I appreciate it...
If books are literary medicine then Dominique Browning's "Around the House and Garden" should be the salve prescribed to every woman who finds herself abandoned in the former marital home.
When Mark left I truly believed that I would never come to terms with it: that the memories scratched on to every surface he had previously called home would eat me up until there was none of me left. But it didn't happen. Of course it didn't happen: we women are stronger than that. We keep on keeping on until the day comes when memories are simply that: no longer threatening to have us coming undone at every turn but lying, still, washed, harmless, beneath everything we have created since.
Though it is true that, four years later, I still sleep on the far left side of the bed, clinging on to the edge for fear that my very presence will sully someone else's dreams, elsewhere Mark's shadow no longer haunts the house. This is my house now and I lay claim to everything in it: to the treasures I have found and bought without his consultation, the remnants of relationships I have enjoyed in his wake, the evidence of our little boy growing up without his Fathers constant sleight of hand. This is my life now: and though in many ways it a lesser life than the one before, though the car doesn't work, the living room fire died, the house is falling down and today, oh joy of all bloody horrible joys, even the toilet has given up the ghost and requires the administering of a bucket of water to flush it: regardless of all of that, this is my life now and in my own quiet, barely acknowledged way, I celebrate it daily.
Along the journey from Hysteria to Acceptance (making stops at Sorrow and Complete
and Utter Madness long the way!) I was supported by the voices of women, both family and friends, my darling, precious Brocante readers, and when everyone else was tucked up in their own beds and it was just me and my four walls, the voices of women in the books I used as talismans against my own self destruction. Books written by women who had already tread the boards of marital failure and lived to exquisitely tell the tale.
That the arrival of a gift from Sarah Ban Breathnach, containing the 10th anniversary edition of Simple Abundance and a copy of Moving On should have been so timely, arriving as it did just a month before Mark left, strikes me now as rather spookily foretelling, and looking back, I remember receiving the beautiful pink and green parcel and going upstairs to our bedroom to jealously guard it, closing the door behind me and opening it in floods of tears and not really knowing why. Knowing only that though there was something seriously wrong with my relationship and that this gift from the stranger who had effectively shaped the woman I was, acknowledged that somehow I was still worthwhile and there would always be a tomorrow.
But at that time, though I tucked Moving On into my Comfort Drawer, I couldn't bring myself to read it because I simply wasn't ready, so in the weeks that followed, weeks when I couldn't write and lived on cucumber, in those weeks, I read and re-read Dominique Browning's "Around the House and In the Garden", a book I discovered through the pages of Romancing the Ordinary, and a book that would come to be my guide to allowing your house to gently heal your heart.
And so it was. That Summer of 2006 I trawled nurseries and boot sales every weekend while my son was spirited away by his Father. The house never looked lovelier, and though for a while I believed that Mark would be seduced homeward by the pretty auriculas in the little laundry room or the candles constantly burning on the mantelpiece, eventually I came to understand that I had to do it for myself, or not do it at all, for there was nothing to be gained by domestic ritual or puttery prettiness other than the peace it cloaked my shoulders in. That it was indeed time to move on...
So I did. Sarah Ban Breathnach did. And Dominique Browning did, until the day came when the magazine she edited collapsed and once again life changed shape. A calamitous fate no doubt for Browning, but a serendipitous one for us, as she has once again put pen to paper to transcribe her elegant telling of what it is to have your world up-ended, and yet again have to re-invent the future you had so cautiously etched upon your heart.
Slow Love (excerpted in the New York Times magazine here) tells the story of what happened to Dominique after the rug was pulled from under her career and how as a result she embraced a new way of living, described in her own words as "engaging with the world in a deeper, more meaningful way, learning to appreciate the beauty of everyday moments, and taking time to share them with one another", inspired by the aftermath of navigating all the "speed bumps" we encounter in life, "the ones that surprise and challenge us, and the ones we put there ourselves, with purposefulness".
That we should be so sharply defined by what we do, is an error integral only to life in the 21st century, but in Slow Love, Dominique Browning sets about exploring what it is to exist without the confines of a job title, and after an all too necessary period spent lolling about in pyjama wearing despair, sets about showing us yet again that there is life after the mini deaths we mourn so very, very deeply.
So until Slow Love is published I am prowling around Dominique's blog, and remembering the kind of clarity one gains in the aftershock of losing what we once held dear.
Life goes on, Readers. If there is one thing I know for sure, life goes on.
Finley is six now and more often than we ever did before I find we are coming to the sort of blows that usually have me bursting a blood vessel in the effort not to scream and stamp my slipper shod feet while he looks back at me with the kind of nonchalance a little boy only wears when he is busy internally marking another cross on the "there she goes again" chart.
The cause of our arguments?
Mess. Finley is a one boy mess machine. And this is no ordinary mess. This is Finley mess, this is Sensory Processing DisorderI can't stop bouncing off the wall's mess. This is my head is very busy thinking great big thoughts and I'm sorry but disorder doesn't register in my brain kind of mess. The kind of mess that shouts with sheer, utter joy twenty four seven and has his teacher shaking her head in utter bewilderment at me and declaring, "We've never had a child like him." The kind of mess that wears holes in the new school trousers I seem to be buying fortnightly. The kind of mess that falls off chairs and leaves a trail of crumbs everywhere it goes. The kind of mess with a permanently snotty nose, dirty fingernails and a couldn't care less attitude to a level of desperate untidiness that makes all grown up, desperately tired Mommies want to hug it away, disinfect him from head to foot and take a chuggy chuggy train ride to a place where scrumptious little boys don't dash around the house breaking, quite accidentally, everything in their path.
I love my Finley to bits but I am fighting a permanent battle against chaos, and I am starting to wonder whether perhaps now is the time to draw the line: to get all hard-line about the mess and start inflicting rules and chores and Mommy directives to save me going completely off my head. Don't get me wrong: I'm no pushover, but perhaps because I've been so consumed by making allowances for a condition that dictates his ability to keep still, and focus and organize everything from his school-work to his thoroughly haphazard attitude to clothes, I have let him get away with a bit more than the average Mommy would generally tolerate. I worry that what is oblivion to mess will one day develop into a complete lack of respect for she who has to clear it up.
So my question for today is this: should our babba's have babba related chores?
Finley is six- how much do you, or did you expect of your six year olds with regard to keeping his or her corner of the world tidy? Is interrupting playtime to set your child up with a duster and polish tantamount to evil?. Am I on the road to ruin by allowing him to be a child while I bang my head against a flock wall? Is it too late to inflict a little tidiness upon his gloriously happy, carefree, curly topped soul?
Already we have said goodbye to March and April is shimmying her flirty little self on our doorsteps, suffering as always from a touch of weather related schizophrenia and promising more than she has got to give, while we Vintage Housekeepers fling open windows willy-nilly and dream of accessorising our aprons with a pair of twinkly flip-flops and a rosy pink pedicure.
On the Brocante Puttery Post last month we were busy doing our best to breach the goose-pimply distance between Winter and Spring by embracing the teeniest of Puttery Treats: little bits of lovely nothing that at once pamper our soul and remind us why home-making the BrocanteHome way is so utterly central to our way of life- from taking vinegar baths to creating a household mission statement, discovering the benefits of tulips and treasure hunting for the perfect vintage dusting gloves to pop into our housekeepers box, printing "Family Cards" and celebrating National Fragrance day, and much, much more. But my absolute favourites from last month?
Chamomile Sunday from March 28th
By the time the hurly burly of another weekend is done and dusted and I have spent an efficient hour or two making sure the rest of the week will run as smoothly as my Housekeepers Planner suggests it should, I am usually thoroughly exhausted and ready for my bed. You see I believe that Sunday evenings were designed to be spent in bed with a period drama on the DVD, and the scent of lavender spritzed upon our nighties...
Tonight spend a while organizing your week, then put the house to bed and go upstairs to run a bath. Run it as hot as possible, then add five chamomile tea-bags to the water and allow to steep until the temperature feels bearable...
Play something suitably soothing (I favour Mozart's Prussian String Quartets: No.21 and 22) and then get into the bath for a ten minute soak: no more or else the water will go cold and we want to take the relaxing benefit of this warm, chamomile soak back to bed with us.
Climb out, pat your skin dry and climb immediately into nightclothes warmed on the radiator. Then go to bed and read or watch something gentle, (I am watching Berkeley Square this evening.) while sipping on more chamomile, a drink named after us all by Old England, for whom Chamomile once meant "woman"...
Goodnight Sweethearts.x
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And The Housekeepers Pencil Case From March 11th
To my mind the start of a new season should always include a trip to the stationery store: because (bless my cotton socks!) nothing makes me feel quite so efficient as owning new paper and pencils...
Tonight while about to sit down with my spanking new Vintage Housekeepers Planner it struck me that I could do with a really rather scrumptious version of the schoolgirls pencil case: stationery all of my own unlikely to be pilfered by my resident six year old...
And so this weekend I am setting us all a little project... to fill the prettiest all grown up pencil case we can find with our very own collection of essential bits and bobs for journaling the bestest parts of our day.
1. Start by choosing a pencil case. Take yourself shopping with something scrumptious in mind, re-purpose a make up bag, or sew the simplest envelope style case from a scrap or two of fabric and hold together with a couple of vintage rhinestone buttons or a ribbon...
2. Now add your very favorite kinds of pens and pencils. I like a certain kind of ever so cheap, extra fine propelling pencil that I buy by the dozen, and always have a gel pen in a range of pretty colored inks or six available (I favour green or violet ink, while the most stylish woman I know signs everything with a dash of pink), so a couple of both these pencils and pens will go in my case...
3. Next up I suggest a tiny roll of double sided sticky tape, a small pair of sharp craft scissors, and if you can get hold of them, a pair of wiggly edged children's scissors that turn every little bit of scrap paper collected into a work of art. (Don't forget to add a little loop of fine ribbon to the handles of both scissors so no-one is in any doubt as to whom they belong!)
4. Find a glue stick and wrap a pretty sticker around the tube, add a small stapler, a box of staples, and a craft knife.
5. Then seek out the tiniest vintage pill box you own and fill it with paper clips.
6. And finally treat yourself to the prettiest, silliest pencil eraser you can find: they come in the most fabulous designs and their sweet smell will send you hurtling back to your childhood every time you open your pencil case...
Have fun Housekeepers!
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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...
The men in black and their little white Princess ...
And so it came to pass that three generations of our family set sail from our respective parts of England and swooshed our way up various motorways to gather on Good Friday in a hotel in Lincolnshire for the marriage of my Mum's sister Barbie to Steve, otherwise known by the little people as Steve-Break-The-Light because once upon a time he did and it is apparent that some things are never forgotten.
All went swimmingly. My dad gave Barbie away with panache and informed the gathered congregation that as a child she had had him and Mum deeply harassed and he had been wanting to give her away ever since while I spent an inordinate amount of time asking passing pretty cousins to check the whereabouts of my eyelashes which owing to my truly dreadful ability with make-up and glue were dangling somewhere in my cleavage like spiky spiders for most of the wedding.
But despite such spiky handicaps, my Darlings, I still managed to catch the bouquet by proxy. By proxy because I wasn't actually there when Barbie threw it, and it was in fact Helen who caught it, but as the very thought of getting married again gives her the heebie-jeebies, she delivered said bouquet to me, and so I declared it a valid catch, at which point, Richard with the fear of God in his eyes, took me aside and told me, quite sternly, "not to be getting any ideas" and my Mum in defence of my honour informed him that she would never allow her 38 year old baby to marry a man who bore more than a passing resemblance to Heston Blumenthal regardless so let that be the end of the discussion.
And it was, and we went down a line kissing strangers with me introducing everyone to Heston, declaring my intention to run away with the best man who looked in need of a wife brave enough to tackle various sartorial mis-demeanours, and moaning to unsuspecting old ladies about the headache brought about by the application of Cheryl Cole false eyelashes and the impossibility of dating a refusenik. And then I sat down and behaved myself for ten minutes, until the service of roasted red pepper soup, when having worn myself out pinching Richard while nobody else was looking, mid-wedding exhaustion set in and the eyelashes were peeled off and abandoned altogether because sadly, glamour was never my forte and it is clear from the photos above that though I come from a clan of glamorous slithers of women who all look spookily similar, I am in fact an interloper from the Land of the Brunette Giantesses and will one day have no choice but to step out in search of my people.
Still nobody noticed the intruder in their wake, until she (I) decided to scare the horses and took to the dance floor to perform a rendition of Greased Lightening that had Richard shaking his head in sorrow and shame and my Mum in convulsions. Some sort of divine red sorbet was served, champagne drank and a delicious platter of cheese served at half past goodness knows when, by which time the little boys had abandoned their aviators in favour of skidding on their knees across the dance-floor and many men in earrings, (because it seems that, despite all pertinent advice to the contrary, diamond earrings are all the rage with middle aged men in outback of Lincolnshire) had joined them in an effort to bring on the kind of heart-attack ready red cheeks that only occur after a little too much beer inspired Dad-dancing to Showaddywaddy.
The night lingered on. Little Kiera, the blonde darling above, continued to shine, and ultimately all our side of the family ended up squeezed into one corner of the room, perched on each others knees and squashed up on three sofas, where the true extent of the effort exerted by my sister to be sociable was seen in her glazed borderline-demented grin, Richard spilled an entire glass of wine down my front (Though this is much disputed, as it was my wine and I concede that I was indeed holding, said glass at the time), and Barbie, in all her lovely wedding glory turned out to be parading the price label on the soles of her wedding shoes.
It was lovely. About ritual and celebration, family, pretty dresses and kids (read Finley) that wander around in search of balloons while speeches stuffed full of love are made and glasses raised in joy.
Dear Barbie and Steve, Steve-Break-The-Light , please, please, please can we do it all over again next week?
After a week spent hunting for the kind of vintage ephemera that makes my toes scrunch up with happiness, I am thrilled to offer you three lovely images from my own collection, scanned and optimised for your pleasure and now yours for the taking. Simply click on each image in turn to view the full sized version, then right click it and save it to your computer to use however you will...
Have a lovely day won't you?
P.S: Have you bought your Vintage Housekeepers Planner yet? It's quite the most perfect project for the Easter holiday for old fashioned homemakers across the land...
Oh my goodness I have been meaning to share these these gorgeous journal pages from Alisa Noble of Life Is A Beautiful Place To Be fame for the longest time, because not only are they scrumptiously lovely (as all of Alisa's work is, they were also inspired by my very own Puttery Post and I'm not sure there is a higher compliment than to have your work inspire something you so ardently admire yourself...
Based on two posts from the beginning of January, Alisa has taken my suggestions for choosing a word to inspire you throughout 2010 and creating a list of books you want to work your way through monthly (come hell, high water or a brand new Marion Keyes!) and created the kind of pretty I couldn't put together if you offered me free reign in the Brocante's of Paris as a reward...
But then that is the purpose of the Puttery Post: it isn't about inflicting my puttery will upon you, it is about giving you daily starting points for thinking, and dreaming, and home-making and creating, and from those starting points letting your imagination fly, whether I'm asking you to create a garden journal or take a chamomile bath... the degree of lovely, you see, is always up to you.
Thank you Alisa, for being one of my Vintage Housekeepers, and for being so very, very talented.
Buy The BrocanteHome Vintage Housekeepers Planner Today and get organized with sixty pages of the prettiest downloadable forms and planners designed to transform the way you live your life...
I know: you are only just recovering from the last one, but my Darling Vintage Housekeepers the early bird stuffs the best stockings and my scrumptiously lovely Christmas planner will guarantee that Christmas 2010 will find you sitting pretty...
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