THE IRONIES OF OLD & NEW AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

I am joining our friend, the beautiful Chari from Happy To Design,for the 1st time on Sunday Favorites. After you have finished reading my post, please visit our sweet friend and see her contribution and all of the other ladies who are posting oldies but goodies!! This is my first time joining and this is one of my favorite posts. I must warn you...it is LONG!!! Longer than the normal 'Blondie Long' , but I had so many reason to love what I was writing about. I hope it makes you smile!!

I really enjoy reading blogs with pictures of sweet little daffodils poking their yellow heads through the ground in West Virginia, the blue delphiniums waving in the breeze in Texas and the azaleas blooming in all their glory down in Florida. Well, the above picture is about the only sign of spring I have here in the cold midwest. I promise this is not going to be a post where I report and complain about the weather (although the temp is 4 degrees above zero and the wind is picking up...) but rather an uplifting post about looking forward and looking back and some of the small ironies in life that make a big impact.
I love seed catalogs. I began gardening almost as soon as I had my own first home (this one). Our home was sold as a "fixer-upper" and priced accordingly, so my husband jumped on it. He is not a fixer upper type of person but he knows a good deal when he sees one! Our home was also in a nice parish, just a few short blocks from the schools and church. Anyway, if the house was a mess, the yards were a disaster. The original owner surrounded the whole perimeter of the house with maple, oak and black walnut trees. All available space inside the yards was filled with evergreen trees. Hence, the house was absolutely shrouded and actually looked haunted. Not one bit of sunlight came through and nothing could grow, not even grass. I certainly had my work cut out for me. And "cut out " is what I did. Out with all the evergreens, out with some old maple trees with roots that were lifting and cracking the sidewalk and driveway, and after a lot of preening & pruning (and a lot of new sod) I finally had the groundwork to start planting my gardens.
I'm rather a bookish person so I probably spent the whole winter planning said gardens. I thumbed through the seed catalogs, checked books out of the library and made notes. I pretty much immersed myself in this whole gardening thing until The Husband warned me that if I didn't stop showing him diagrams and reciting the Latin names of my favorite flowers, he was going to plant rows of corn in the backyard and blacktop the front!
To make a long story short, I grew my flowers, my vegetables, my vines and ivy, and of course every year you switch things out or add something new, so it's an ever changing process and I love it. And that is why I love seed and plant catalogs. I can almost feel the cool soil in my hands and the warm sun on my back. Sitting back in the evening with a tall glass of iced tea watching the sprinkler flow back and forth, splattering the flowers and making them glisten. Oh, I am in heaven. And these sweet catalogs make it seem so much closer, even if it is frigid outside now!

Hooray!!! Look at this! This is my first piece of transferware! I am so psyched!! I don't even have a china cabinet!! Hee Hee! I bought this last week from the shop I photographed in my last Pink Saturday post. (I didn't include it because it is more red than pink). I am not really a collector of anything. My brain is spread way too far out to want any more than one of anything. (Does that makes sense?) But this transferware is definitely something I could get in to! Isn't it pretty? Next...a china cabinet???

Yesterday was a thoroughly enjoyable day. It was my birthday (yeah, yeah, yeah, another year older). But I am only telling you because the irony part of my post plays in to this, which I will get to sooner or later. I treated myself to another visit to an antique shop, yeah, two in one week!! I'm still sneezing!! This shop was listed on the last page of Romantic Home magazine and I went wow, this is really close by! So off I went. I have to say that this shop had more treasures than trash, and the prices were out of sight. I was actually looking over my shoulder to see if anybody was going to attempt to snatch up something I was drooling over!! I purchased the above porcelain pitcher and saucer. I would say it is about 32 oz. and in mint condition. See the detail on the saucer below.

I paid a whopping $12.00 for this. The bottom shows a little wear and there is nothing on it as far as origin, but I don't profess to know my antiques, I just know what I like. Maybe it's from K-Mart. Behind the pitcher on my quilt rack is a round tablecloth I also bought that needs a few stitches here and there but is going to look wonderful on my table. Can you feel me smiling? :-))

And this is what I was told is a very old chamber pot. Is that what I think it is?? If so, why is it so fancy? Why the delicate handle? Am I going to use it for anything other than a receptacle for flowers or the like? Nope!!! $10.00. Need I say more? By the way, it's big, the top is probably about 16 inches in diameter.

Finally, I saw four little plates hanging on the wall. They are about 5 inches in diameter. The artwork caught my eye. It's sort of whimsical. Quirky, if you will. Like me. Upon scrutiny I discovered the artist is none other than...Norman Rockwell! Who would have thought? The same guy that illustrated the Saturday Evening Post for 500 years. The guy with the museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The guy that did the pictures of the poor, frightened little kids in the doctor and dentist offices that used to hang in every doctor and dentist office I ever went to as a kid? Yep!!

These collector plates were limited editions of hand-colored private postcards that Norman sent to his friends when he traveled in Europe in 1927. You will see that when you get down to the photo of the back of one of the plates. He was 33 years old at the time.

There is one plate each from England, Germany, Rome and Paris. Since I really didn't associate this type of illustration with Norman Rockwell, I did a little research. I learned that when he traveled he liked to use watercolors and oils and went for an impressionistic and less detailed look. I so much prefer this to his later, more commercial work.

I also learned that sadly, when Norman was at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain in 1927, the sketchbook that he always carried when he traveled was stolen. Thirty years later he said about the sketches, "I'd done them for my own pleasure...I still almost cry when I think about it. I've never lost anything I felt so bad about".

I can't help but think that I have a little bit of Norman's sketchbook here. I feel very badly that his private work, the work he shared with his friends is gone. But I have come to know a little more about this man and I think I like him.

And the irony is, I bought these plates yesterday, February 3, 2009, my birthday. The same day that Norman Rockwell was born in 1894. Priceless.

My birthday dinner last night (minus Kevin :-( ...). I came home and hung up my Norman plates.

xoxo

Janie