The end of an era…but it was good whilst it lasted!

 

                    (The board that my lovely daughter designed for me!)

Way back in the late 1990s, I started to sell cotton, craft fabrics, on eBay. I enjoyed it immensely and continued to do this as a kind of ‘sideline’..and an escape from the day job! ( Teaching!)

In 2007, I joined the blogging community and I found myself amongst a group of like minded, vintage loving, crafting people. 

Very quickly, I found myself being invited to join in with the vintage fairs and that was great fun too! I acquired my vintage fabrics from various sources, mostly in the U.S. …and back in those days, the cost of the postage was pretty cheap. Sellers had these ‘global priority envelopes’ into which they could stuff as much as 10 yards! And the £/$ exchange rate wasn’t too bad either.  Good times! 

I’ve always been a history lover and the history of textiles intrigued me, especially the history of feedsack fabrics.

Not only that, the designs were lovely, individual and unique. I loved them!

I also enjoyed making up packs of smaller fabrics for crafters…as many crafters don’t want full yards, because they work with small pieces.

And the years flew by! Things changed. Vintage fabrics became more expensive as did postage costs until it really wasn’t viable to continue selling the fabrics as people just didn’t want to pay more expensive prices. So, I’ve been running down my stock of fabrics and I hardly have any vintage pieces remaining!

Yesterday, I took one of my vintage fabric packs and I decided to ‘create’, altering a clipboard. I actually started this clipboard a while ago but I didn’t get it finished. Having decorated it, I packed it with vintage fabric pieces on the front.

I filled the back with some of those lovely papers from Cambridge Imprint.

Whether it sells, who knows but I had great fun creating it!

Classical music

Do you enjoy classical music? I do! In fact I’ve always loved most types of music.

When I was 7, I was ‘forced’ to have piano lessons. I say ‘forced’ because I really wanted ballet lessons but as my dad had been such a proficient pianist, it was decided that I should follow in his footsteps..(or fingertips!)

I went, each week, to a piano teacher called Mrs Westaway, who lived locally and she was very pleasant. The only problem was that I had to practise regularly and I didn’t always feel like doing it! I’d sometimes stubbornly sit at the piano and refuse to play! However, I must’ve done enough to impress her as she put me forward for my first exam. Being allowed the time off school, off I toddled with my mum, to a house in Torquay and believe it or not,  I achieved an ‘Honours’ grade! 

This continued and I wasn’t too bad at playing the piano…until I reached the age of 14 or 15 and then GCE ‘O’ Levels, (as they were in those days)…and not forgetting boyfriends…took over! The piano lessons lapsed but I could play well enough to be able to use the piano in my reception classroom, at the school in Surrey where I first taught.

As well as this, we had daily assembly and it was expected of the teachers, to play classical music as the children entered and exited the school hall…favourites being: ‘ The Carnival of the Animals’ by Saint-Saens; ‘The Planets’ Suite’ by Gustav Holst; Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’. We had many others too and we had to make sure that the children were told the name and composer of the music that we played. In fact, music played quite a large part in the school week and we were even lucky enough to have a visiting (and superb)music teacher who came into school, daily. Thus, we also entered local music festivals.

I eventually moved to Devon and one day, I noticed in W.H. Smith, a new magazine that came with a classical music CD. It was called ‘The Classical Collection’…

Well, I bought the first issue ( as above ) and I continued to buy them for quite some time.

As for my favourite piece of classical music and composers, there are certainly many candidates and there are far too many to write here but I do enjoy listening to these:

Elgar’s Nimrod (Enigma Variations); 

Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2;

Edvard Grieg’s ‘Peer Gynt’ Suite No 1 and No 2; Wagner’s ‘ The ride of the Valkyrie;

Chopin’s Nocturne No 2 in E flat Major; 

Holst, ‘The Planets’;  

Dvorak’s  ‘ New World Symphony’;

Debussy’s Clair de lune, from Suite bergamasque; 

Johan Strauss Sr’s ‘Radetzky March’;

Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’;

Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ and ‘Swan Lake’…and Sleeping Beauty! 

Ravel’s Bolero; 

Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’; 

Vaughan Williams’, ‘The Lark Ascending’…

And,finally, there is this, which I absolutely love! You can listen here:

Smetana: Vltava (The Moldau) 

So do you have a favourite piece of classical music? I’d love to know!

Stella

 

I only discovered this brilliant programme after watching the Christmas Gavin and Stacey episode. How I missed ‘ Stella’, when it was first released,I’ll never know! Most certainly, the writers have done a superb job!

Set in the fictional village of Pontyberry in South Wales, (which is actually Ferndale, Rhondda),Ruth Jones and David Peet have created a close knit community that contains so many interesting characters. Not only that, they’ve created a community where, when the chips are down, this community manages to rise to the occasion, unite, and help one another get through whatever they have to face. It’s a proper life lesson…and I think it’s well worth watching more than once!

‘Stella’ is a real lesson in how to behave (and, at times, how not to behave!) …and at the very heart of it is Stella, played by Ruth Jones, who is superb in the role.

Stella is a bit of a ‘Pollyanna’ character , meaning that she manages to see the best in others, most of the time. As well as this, she’s very forgiving and exceedingly tolerant. She loves and cares for her family … and not forgetting her extended family. She’s selfless.

‘Stella’ is compelling! I laughed through it and I cried through it! It’s one of the best series that I’ve ever watched; it’s certainly addictive! 

Watch ‘Stella’ and you’ll come away wondering how you can fit words and phrases such as, ‘presh’,  ‘where to is it?’ and, of course, ‘cockin’  into your daily life! 

‘Stella’ is a gem!  Watch it now! 😁