Welcome to My Shop!

On the home improvement shows, they always say, "A room should have a purpose." Well, in my small house, most rooms need to have more than one. Our dining room, for example, is also my Etsy jewelry supply shop. I thought some folks would like to see where I process your orders. Others might enjoy seeing how I cram all this stuff in here!

 My supply shop (on a clean day). This is a nice room in the winter, thanks to the large skylight and deep south-facing window. When company comes, we can put an extra leaf in the table.

See? I'm an organized hoarder. In front of the shelves I have a rolling cart that acts like a shipping station (bottom right). It rolls out of the room and into my studio when a bunch of people come over.

This awesome antique desk is crammed with inventory. The top shelf holds vintage beads and findings that are all counted and ready to photograph.

And this is where everything goes that's listed in my shop. These carts also roll out of the room when it needs to be a dining room again.

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Antique Children's Book Illustrations

What a great find by the MOTH over the holidays! He came home with an old mailing envelope full of little children's books from the 1880's! Most are basically in comic book format -- and hand sewn.

Copyright 1889 by McLoughlin Bros. New York

Some of the thin books are incredibly fragile, and one is torn clear through. This looks like a great scanning/restoration project for digital images!

I love the old detailed illustrations. They are printed in just two ink colors -- black and red. And there are no halftone screens as in today's photolithography. All the gradations are made with stippling, so I wonder if these might be some kind of etchings?

Then again, this image (from a series called "Mama Lovechild's Series"), sure looks like a woodcut, which was a popular technique in the years before the turn of the century (according to this exhibit).

Did you know there were Five Little Pigs? Or that Mother Goose has a son named Jack??? I really enjoyed flipping through the quaint titles.

There were other cool books in the envelope too, which I'm still going through...oh heaven! Including a Christmas storybook in full color.

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