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Of mice and men

Published by The Dreamstress

A few years ago, just after we got Felicity, while she was still a tiny kitten, our neighborhood had a mouse outbreak.

It started in the camilla hedge a few houses down, and a week later, we had a mouse in our kitchen.

I don't want mice in my house, even if they are wearing cute costumes

Ick.  Eww.

So of course I needed to get rid of it, and Felicity wasn’t big enough to do the job, so we needed a mousetrap.

I didn’t want to use poison because of Felicity and the possibility of the mouse dying in the walls if it worked.

Double ick and eww.

And I didn’t want to use a snap trap because of Felicity and the probability of dead mouse spilling guts and goo if it worked.

Triple ick and eww.

So, what I needed was one of those nifty little box moustraps that traps the mouse alive and lets you release it a couple of miles down the road, thus inflicting it on someone else.

Yippe?

So off I went to the hardware store.  No dice.  Nothing but the ick snap guts and goo ones.

Same story at the garden centre, the sell-everything-made-in-China store, and the other hardware store in my neighborhood.

So after a couple of hours of unsuccessful searching, I got grumpy, went home, and got start and started calling places rather than visiting them in person.

Four stores later, I finally called my local grocery store, and they guy at customer service said “yeah, sure, of course we have live mouse traps”

Yay!  Yipee!

So I popped into the car, and was there in 10 minutes.

I went straight to the hardwares and mousetrap aisle, and looked, and looked, and looked.  Nothing but the  ick snap guts and goo ones.

So…back to the customer service desk, where I explained that I had just called asking about live mousetraps.  They said “Oh, we know exactly who you talked to”, called him over and he said “I’ll show you right where the live mouse traps are”

Back we went to exactly where I had been looking before, and he points at the  ick snap guts and goo ones.

And I say “But those aren’t live mousetraps.  They kill the mouse when they snap down.”

And he says:

(wait for it)

“But the mouse is live when the trap catches it”

Carolyn’s dress: finished pictures!

Published by The Dreamstress

But only the ones I took before it got sent off to her.

I know, I know, you really want to see pictures of her in it!

And you can, if you follow me on facebook.  Because I posted the first informal pics of her in it there, and she looks amazing.

Actually, you don’t even have to belong to facebook to see them, you can just go to facebook.com and look up ‘The Dreamstress’.

Or you can keep waiting, and once the professional photos come out, I’ll post them.

For now, here is a gallery of my photos of the finished dress.

 

Friday Reads: Flora Klickmann and her flower patch

Published by The Dreamstress

I have a confession.  Sometime I buy old books in op shops just because the books are pretty.

I know.

This is usually a really stupid habit, because our house is quite small, and I generally have to give the books back to op shops when I realise they are less fun to read than to look at.

Sometimes though, my “Oooh…bookey pogey bait” habit pays off, because I end up buying books that I have never heard of which turn out to be fantastic.

One of these fantastic and unexpected finds was two books by Flora Klickmann: The Flower-Patch Among the Hills and Between the Larch-woods and the Weir.

I really almost didn’t buy the books.  They were $5 each, and I’d never heard of Klickmann.  And they weren’t actually that pretty.

Blue and purple but not that pretty

But I did, and they are fabulous.

Klickmann was the editor of the Girls Own Paper in London, and the first book (The Flower-Patch) started out as articles for the magazine.  This means that both books are more a series of anecdotes than an actual story.

Miss Klickmann herself

Klickmann’s rambles engagingly about her work as the editor of the magazine, the foibles of society, and (most frequently), her country house and garden in the Wye valley.

Her books are a bit heavy on floral descriptions (which she also tends to repeat), but give fantastic insight into the life of an upper-middle class working woman in England just before and during WWI.

Her descriptions of people she meets are both apt, and also very familiar.  Haven’t we all known a Miss Quirker?

…a lady well over forty (or more), who apparently hasn’t anything at all to do, and who does it thoroughly well.  She has a couple of very decided and conspicuous gifts – one is the ability to waste the time and dissipate the amiable qualities of every individual whose path she crosses; and the other is a positive genius for saying the wrong thing.

Less universal, but no less interesting, are her descriptions of life during the war: of rationing, and midnight gatherings among the neighbors when explosions are heard and it is feared that bombs are being dropped, of knitting, and ‘adopting’ sailors in the North Sea and supplying them with packages of baked goods.

Interlinked with the war stories are fashion anecdotes, as the rations affected fabric.  Miss Quirker supplies a novel suggestion on economizing on corsets:

You should buy your corsets several sizes larger than usual, and then when they are getting worn, you can turn them upside down and wear them the other way up.  It’s so saving.

Indeed.  And so completely defeats the purpose of corsets and demonstrates such a complete lack of understanding of anatomy that it could only have been suggested by a military man.

We also get a description of the outfit of a well…  tart of 1916.

Eileen was wearing a white Jap silk skirt; a transparent rose pink blouse, that revealed the satin ribbon and lace camisole beneath; pink cotton open-work stockings; white shoes; one of those long stoles made of metallic-looking lustre-brown fur, so beloved of the laundry girl; a bit white hat, trimmed with the most violent of tangerine-coloured velvet, said velvet hanging in festoons down the back, and loops of it caught round the front and fastened to the fur stole on one side with a large would-be-diamond lizard, about four inches long, and on the other with a crescent of similar make.  Her hair, which was done in a wild imitation of the latest eccentricity of fashion, was radiant with more crescents and a sparkling three-tiered back comb.  A string of large pearls adorned her neck.

Despite the popularity of the books in the teens and 20s (21 editions between 1916 and 1922) Klickmann’s writings have fallen out of favour in the decades since then.  Perhaps it is the extensive and well, flowerly, chapters on flowers.  Or the musings on religion and faith.

An add for flowery soap from the Girls Own Magazine to go with flowery writing

Whatever the case, I’m glad I found Flora’s books, and I wish they were available to more people.  And don’t worry, I’ll be sharing lots of tidbits from them with you!

I found them in an op-shop in the same small town where they were originally bought