Nursery Rhymes and Picture Books

I love vintage children's books and here are two I found in the bookshops of Hay-on-Wye last week. The first one is charming - I especially like the little girl's dress with its pale blue flower print fabric and puffball style. I absolutely love the handwritten text in this old book and the mixture of full colour prints and one colour line drawings (done for economy reasons, yet I think it adds variety and richness to the book design).

The second book caught my eye for it's nostalgic cover but then it interested me for another reason too. This copy had been used by a long ago editor to revise and update the edition.

Pictures which were considered too old fashioned were crossed out and annotated with the word 'replace'. Even children's names were being updated too (though if it was to be updated again now they would be putting a lot of the old names back!)

I love this little piece of bookish history, quite a find for me, and I'll treasure it because of its torn cover and crossings out!

The photo below is of a Picture Book quilt, made for the grandbabies to snuggle under when they have a nap at our house - with lots of nursery print fabrics to soothe them as they drift off into the Land of Nod.

Hope your week is a happy one! x

First Vintage China I Ever Bought

This little blue and white creamer is the first piece of vintage china I ever bought. It was in the Seventies and I was an art student in Manchester. I found the little jug (I didn't know it was a creamer then) in a junk shop near college, where (not very attractive) old furniture used to spill out onto the pavement. Sometimes they had records and paperback books we were interested in.

But one day I saw this little jug and bought it for few pence. It was roughly wrapped in a piece of the Manchester Evening News and I took it back to my room in the student house I shared with several others. There it joined the art materials, books, patchwork fabrics, records, clothes and general muddle I lived in at the time. It was the beginning of years of collecting vintage pieces - and I still have it with me today. It moved from flat to cottage and from house to house with me. In the Eighties I painted it for a book illustration, with cornflowers, buttercups and wild roses.

Today I've taken it out of the cupboard and filled it with a posy of clove-scented carnations or pinks, and a few other little garden flowers. It's a wonderful little bit of china for displaying posies and the memories it holds will always keep me especially fond of it.