Friday Favorites.

This week in honour of Gina’s Friday Favorites I am choosing this little metal photograph of two very serious young ladies… 

I am sorry to say that the name for this type of photograph evade’s me, but the image is on tin coated with black paint and the girls sit on top of that. I found it in a car boot sale a few month’s ago, and because it was pretty expensive, I chose not to buy the rest of the family, and now I feel kind of sad that I seperated them from their Mommy and Daddy. Is that silly?

I love it because like many vintage photograph’s it makes me feel a bit sad. Who were they? Why aren’t the girls smiling? Who gave them those lovely, perfect little bob’s? Why did the older girl choose to wear that necklace? Too many questions and not a hope in hells chance of any answers…

And that’s the thing with vintage photo’s isn’t it? They only tell us half the story. I know some people find old photo’s spooky per se, but I love them for all that they hide, as much as what they tell…

Although so many of them are worn around the edges, faded and curling in the corners, this one has a permanence which perhaps suggests the girls came from a better off family than many of the women we see in old photographs, many of whom swapped their rags for the pretty dresses we see them photographed in, at the studio doors.   

So tonight I am honouring the lives of these pretty little girls (Is it possible that they are still alive today?), by lighting tiny little tea lights on the bookcase on which they sit. I have got the living room divinely cosy, and to my delight, Mark has laid lavender cut from the garden on the radiators and as the room has warmed up, the scent has pervaded the air and is now mixing scrumptiously with the musky amber candles burning on the mantlepiece.

I have chosen an old pink felted wool cardigan tied with damson coloured velvet ribbons as my snuggle jumper for this winter and now I am padding about in a voluminous vintage Victorian white broderie anglaise nightie, my pink cardigan,  and some snuggalicious blue cashmere socks, with my hair bundled up on top of my head, tied in a ludicrously silly fashion, with a duck egg blue old silk scarf.

I am warm and happy and snuggly, with a glass of scrumpy on my knee, a stoneware dish of salted pecan nut’s at my side, and the latest copies of Mary Englebreit, and the US and UK editions of Country Living on the fold up table, Mark has set up here, beside my armchair.

I only hope, the girls twinkling on my bookcase, enjoyed such total and utter contentment from time to time…