Mad Tea Party Carnival. . .

(As always, click images to see them larger.)

Hello Dear Friends of The Gossamer Tearoom!

Today is the day when we once again join our Dear Friend Vanessa of A Fanciful Twist for her annual Mad Tea Party!  I would like to thank her for all the hard work she puts into her wonderful blog parties, giving us all a chance to visit with each other!  Thank you, Dearest Dear Vanessa!!

As usual, I interpret this in my own way and, like the last few years, that little sweetheart Victorienne and her friend Purple Kitty are back to take you on another adventure!  Are you ready?

Here is Victorienne, in a fun purple toy car, on her way to The Mad Tea Party Carnival!!  Any moment now, she is going to pick up Purple Kitty and they will be on their way to go have fun riding on the rides, having some snacks and enjoying the beautiful summer evening!  Do you have some fun memories of going to a carnival on a warm summer evening like I do?  This time of year always brings those memories back to me in a flood.  

Here comes Victorienne in her little car!

This is where Purple Kitty lives!

I'd love to live there too!

Kitty waves to tell Victorienne she will be right down!

Yay!  Their adventure is about to begin!

And away they go!

That Dear Friend of Ours, The Mad Hatter is the host

of the Mad Tea Party Carnival and he warmly

welcomes you all!

Which ones will they pick?

There's a large looking glass to use when trying on your hats!

How about these?  Very regal, indeed!

Or these?

Very appropriate for a Mad Tea Party Carnival!!

Look!  Purple Kitty is wearing a tea-tray hat!

She even starts to sing that famous song, 

"Twinkle, twinkle little bat,

How I wonder what you're at?

Up above the world so high...

Like a tea-tray in the sky..."

Victorienne listens politely, but then

reminds her they still have more hats to try on!

OH!  So festive!

Victorienne thinks she has made her decision...

But Purple Kitty must try them ALL on!

Until she finally decides that regal is the way to go!

Victorienne decides she would like to wear a crown as well

and chooses this one with the big yellow stars!!

Oh looky!

It's that nice Mad Hatter again!

And we see that he has changed his hat!

He has standards of madness to uphold, after all!

He waves warmly at Victorienne and Purple Kitty

and lets them know that he approves of their choice of hats!

He reminds them to be sure and stop and get a pansy

corsage to wear on their way to the rides!

Kitty is up to her old tricks and takes a large one

to put in the top of her crown!

The Hatter sees that she is a kindred spirit with him!

Several people are lining up for the first ride!

Victorienne and Purple Kitty line up politely behind

these nice boys.

Such excitement to ride The Black Swan Ride!

On to the next ride!

Purple Kitty can't wait to be a bug!!

Ooooh....so pretty!

On this ride, you put on some brightly-colored wings and

you can fly over the large flowers!

A true bug's-eye-view!!

"Look, Kitty!"

So twinkle-y!

And fun!

The ferris wheel is always lots of fun too!

The last ride of the evening...

...but we've saved the best for last!

Victorienne and Purple Kitty ride in their tea cup,

down the tea river,

into a dark cave...

...and come out here,

amidst twinkling lights!

Victorienne whispers,

"It's so quiet and peaceful here,

I wish we could spend all night just floating along."

"Yes, please." replies Purple Kitty.

But, truth be told, riding on all of these beautiful

rides has made us hungry and we are more than ready for tea!

We wait patiently for our treats.

The Mad Hatter greets us warmly again and

hopes we have had fun!

He takes his seat as well and these nice ladies

bring around the first tea cart,

filled with bottles of Iced Twizzleberry Tea!

It's a favorite of the Hatter's and he hopes you enjoy

it as well!

Next is the tray containing the beautiful desserts,

on sticks, like big, ornate lollypops!

There are desserts made of sprinkleberries, twinkleberries,

twizzleberries, squinkles, tweezles and chocolate.

(You can't have thought they wouldn't have chocolate??)

Which one would you pick?

They all look nice to me!

And here are Victorienne and Purple Kitty,

enjoying their Twizzleberry Tea!

They would like to thank you for visiting here

with us today and hope you will make a visit

to our lovely Mad Tea Party hostess,

Vanessa of A Fanciful Twist

and all of the other participants!!

Images used in my blog post today:

Tumble Fish Studios on Mischief Circus,

The Graphics Fairy,

itKuPiLLi Imaginarium on Mischief Circus,

and my own personal collection

and digital collage sheets.

What Are They Up to Now?

Hello Dear Friends!
Just a quick reminder that the time for the Mad Tea Party Blog Party at A Fanciful Twist is very nearly here!!!  Victorienne, Purple Kitty and I have been very busy getting ready for yet another day of festivities, so be sure and check back here at The Gossamer Tearoom, on Vanessa's blog A Fanciful Twist and the other blog parties from the other participants (listed on A Fanciful Twist) on Saturday, July 23rd!

Mad Tea Party Blog Party Announcement 2016

Hello Dear Friends!
It is the time of year again when we wait for the announcement by our friend Vanessa of A Fanciful Twist of the date for her annual Mad Tea Party on her blog!  And today is the day for the big announcement!  This year, the grand, wonderful, mad event will be occurring on Saturday, July 23rd!

As usual, The Gossamer Tearoom will be participating and if you'd like to as well, visit A Fanciful Twist for more information!

As always, I am very excited for this fun event, so I'm back to work, planning for it!  Keep checking back here for updates!

New Digital Collage. . .

Hello Dear Friends!
I hope your weekend was a nice one!  We have spent a great deal of it on our porch, eating meals there, reading, even doing projects!

I have been working on several projects recently and one of them is this new digital collage:

(As always, you can click on the image in order

to see it larger.)

This one is called "The Guest at the Wedding".

I made it from several images from the public domain collection of

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

I don't always know where my inspiration comes from, but sometimes a new project idea will form from lots of things I've been seeing, thinking about, experiencing, etc.  I started following The Woodrow Wilson House in Washington on Instagram (Mr. V and I got married there) and there was a picture of the music room and the gorgeous rich wall tapestry in that room.  If it had rained the night of our wedding, it's the room we would have been married in, instead of the beautiful, lush garden.  (We would have had the reception in the Presidential Dining Room, which is gorgeous, but not nearly as grand as it sounds.  You can't have an event of more than 36 people there, if you wish them to be seated.)  The colors of my collage and the scale of the background make me think of that beautiful tapestry.

As for the fruit sitting next to the wedding guest, I think I was inspired by one of my favorite paintings "El Jaleo" by John Singer Sargent.  It is one of the major pieces in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston.  In this painting, a flamenco dancer whirls across a darkened stage, in front of a row of chairs, where the musicians are sitting.  If you look carefully, you can see there is an orange sitting on one of the empty chairs and that has always been one of my favorite details of this painting.

And, as always, seeing the beautiful images at The Rijksmuseum inspire me!  How wonderful it would be to visit there someday and see some of the works in person!  As you look through their online collection, you can make up your own collection to look at or use in projects later.  Here's mine.  Thanks, as always, to The Rijksmuseum for making so many of their wonderful works available to use for art projects!

Keep checking back, as there are more projects in the works in the world of The Tearoom this summer!

Summer...

Greetings to you again, Dearest Friends of The Tearoom!
I hope you are enjoying your early summer so far!  It is my very favorite time of the year and I spend many days, house-bound due to snow and ice, dreaming of my wonderful warm days on the porch.  Today, I bring you some cheerful pictures and memories of summertimes, past and present.

My current project is repurposing some of my old clothing into some new summer dresses and accessories for The Doll Family.  As I do this, I am flooded with memories as I deconstruct the dresses and blouses I wore on some of the hottest, most sultry, happiest days of my life during summertimes spent in Washington, DC.  As many of you know, I lived there for 15 years and so I spent 15 summers, sitting in front of fans, keeping cool by wearing linen dresses to work each day, walking home under verdant canopies of trees, past little gardens and brownstones, changing into shorts and tank tops in the evenings, making only cold meals from May 1 until sometime in October (I couldn't even think of turning on the stove in those months!) and generally just enjoying the wonderful weather and frequently jarring thunderstorms and downpours of rain!  The sound of the traffic outside my kitchen window as I made dinner and the metallic rattle of the cicadas made me happy!

Many nights, after dinner, I would take walks in Dupont Circle, my neighborhood.  I would walk to the fountain at Dupont Circle and sit on the marble edge, cooling in the summer breeze blowing the spray on my back, watched over by the three art deco marble figures which make up the base of the fountain.  Poets performing spoken word poetry or men who played the drums on stacks of plastic food buckets were common entertainment here.  Leaving the circle where the fountain is located in a small green park, I would wander into Kramerbooks, my neighborhood book store and browse.  I could stop by my favorite Starbucks (there are 5 in the neighborhood!), visit with friends and former co-workers, get a drink and keep walking.  If I didn't feel like cooking, I could go to Teaism, a lovely pan-Asian tearoom, get a bento box and an iced tea or ginger limeade and sit in their tiny garden and eat, surrounded by tall, flame-colored cannas.  Your dinner there is only complete if you get a big salty oat cookie and munch on it while continuing on your stroll around the neighborhood.

Summers are different now.  We jealously covet the few hot, and even warm, days we have.  We cherish a few lush green days spent on the porch, knowing we will have 3 times the number of days in the year that we won't even want to go outside.  We spend entire days, sitting in our Adirondack chairs, eating meals, reading, working on art projects, watching the hummingbirds fight over the feeders.  There are no cicadas (which delights Mr. V no end, but causes me great pangs of homesickness for DC) and the bird sounds, though they fill the air, are different here.  Instead of the mockingbirds, which mimic the car alarms in the city, the catbirds here chatter away with snippets of song, punctuated with "meow" in between, chirps, beeps and cackles.

Returning to our here and now, here are some pictures from our little garden porch from the last couple of weeks.  As always, please click the images in order to see them larger.

The beginnings of my little garden...a tomato seedling

and my old dolls teacups I used to soak morning glory and

nasturtium seeds.

A tiny memorial garden I planted to remember

my dear friend Cardie, one of my

Starbucks Family.

I know he sees it from where he is now.

A sunny morning on my porch.

Here are three members of my Doll Family,

wearing clothes I made for them!

On the left is Hyacinthe, the newest

member of the family, sent to live with us

from Liz, a new friend on Twitter!

And of course, if you are a Friend of The Tearoom,

you already know Thursday and Baby Hoobert!

Hyacinthe sitting in front of the pansies.

I made her drop waist 1930's-inspired dress

from one of my linen dresses.

The collar is made from an old blouse,

which I stained with tea.

The dress is accented with ecru satin ribbon

and my signature mismatched buttons,

from my vintage button collection.

I found some shoes to fit her from an Etsy

seller.  I love their butter color with the lilac

and ecru colors of her dress.  I added more

vintage buttons to coordinate.

Here is Thursday,

wearing a sheath dress I made from another

of my favorite linen dresses from my

summers in Washington.

The dress was made from a flowered fabric

and I appliquéd flowers from a blouse I had

in the same pattern, only in a cream color.

Mismatched vintage buttons, 

vintage black shoes from Etsy and a jaunty

bow make her outfit complete.

And this is Baby Hoobert,

enjoying watching the birds on the porch!

He's wearing a romper I made for him from

some striped taffeta I found in my mother's

fabric stash.  I used some dark red vintage

buttons, which look like cherry candy to me!

Oh! A flower has his attention now!

A sweet baby.

A typical boy, he decided the dirt in the pot

was more interesting than the flowers!

Hoobert!  Quit that!!

We all hope you are having a beautiful day,

wherever you are!

Lots of fun projects coming up for me, so keep checking back often for more summer fun,

here at The Gossamer Tearoom!

An Alien City and Its Unlikely Origins. . .

Greetings to you today, Dear Friends of The Tearoom,

I have always been fascinated with worlds which might exist someplace else.  When I was a little girl, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and there was a time when I answered, "An astronaut!"  I was told that girls didn't become astronauts.  I accepted that answer at the time, especially because my grandfather was an amateur astronomer (even built his own telescopes), and even he didn't think there was any reason that girls should be interested in astronomy!  Luckily for me, even though I had plenty of people telling me what I couldn't be, something in my head told me that I could do whatever I wanted to with my mind.  So, I now dabble in whatever interests me and see things through my own vision as much as I want!  I now place no limits on myself as to what interests me and I am certainly more enlightened when it comes to any ridiculous, if not dangerous, limits placed on anyone based on their gender.

(As always, please click on the image to see it larger.)

My collage today is of an alien city, perhaps located near that brightest star you'll see in the sky tonight.

I think the most curious thing about my collage today might not be what is about, but the source of the images I used to make it.

For sometime I have been fascinated by the botanical photographs of Karl Blossfeldt.  He photographed stems of plants, seed pods, blossoms and buds, very closely, with a camera he made himself!  I was able to find many of these images online at The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  They very most generously have made 200,000 of their works of art available online in their RijksStudio and placed them in the public domain.  You can even save collections to use in your artwork or for future reference, as I have (take a peek at my collections here.) After looking at several of the Blossfelt photographs there, the wheels of my imagination began to turn and I began to think of these botanical artifacts as buildings in an alien urban landscape.  To see which botanical images inspired me in this work, take a peek here.  I also used several images from space from their site for the background of my collage.

Thank you, Dear Friends, for taking a trip with me through my imagination once again today!

The Bat Babies. . .

Greetings Dear Friends!
Some of my most creative ideas sneak in the back door when I am sleeping and I hardly hear them come in until I realize I am in the middle of them.  But others come riding in, making all kinds of ruckus, on the backs of other projects.  This was the case with my new collage sheet Bat Babies & Their Garden of Gloomflowers, for my Etsy shop Velvet Revived.  As I was working on my last collage sheet The Rootababies, I was getting ideas for making some kind of bat creatures as their play-mates!

And so, today, I introduce you to their world...

(As always, click the images to see them larger.)

When the moon is full

The Garden of Gloomflowers is at its most morbidly fragrant...

Their scent attracts many creatures,

and I think I hear the quiet beating of leathery wings now...

Here comes one of the Bat Babies now, 

cute but creepy,

baby-faced creatures of The Night...

Let's get a closer look...

And, look, she is being joined by some of her sisters!

The Bat Babies and their flowers of Gloom can come

to live with you and make your art projects just a

bit gloomier by visiting my shop Velvet Revived!

All of my collage sheets, printable invitations & other

fun and decorative projects are available for

instant download, and therefore, instant gratification!

Oh, and by the way, I just finished the updating of

my shop!  I hope you like it!

I've even taken advantage of Etsy giving us more sections to

use by creating a "Digital Oddities" section for my

dark-but-fun creations!!

And now, back to the mental drawing board,

where my next dark idea is starting to pick at me...

Happy Sunday...

...and Happy Easter and Happy Springtime to all Friends of the Tearoom!  Wishing for lots of sunny days ahead for us all!

Little Victorienne has brought you some flowers to celebrate!

The Rootababies. . .

Dear Friends,
I hope this finds you all well, enjoying cups of tea and formulating your plans for the arrival of spring!

Recently,  I have been researching which plants I would like to plant in my container garden on the porch this summer and I started thinking again about an idea I had had a while ago.  I was thinking about how kind of funny and creepy some root vegetables look.  So, you know me, as soon as I spot them, I feel compelled to follow those breadcrumb trails of creativity!  After finding some public domain illustrations of root veggies, I added some butterfly and insect wings and some images of doll faces (and even one from a spirit photograph!) and soon, I had discovered some new friends!!

And so, in celebration of my newest collage sheet set at my Etsy shop Velvet Revived, these are The Rootababies and this is their story:

(As always, please click on the images to see them larger.)

Somewhere near here (or perhaps, far away)

there is an ancient abbey in ruin.

Covered in vines and overgrowth,

a mysterious group of creepycute creatures lives within.

There, behind the crumbling wall of the ruin,

there is a patch of bare ground,

frequented by a variety of insects and butterflies...

During the day,

these creatures lie in slumber underground.

But at night,

they come up from out of the Earth...

They are so curious about you!

I hope you won't mind if they flutter close to your face!

Here they are, 

emerging from their hideaway in the ruin,

fluttering happily away into the moonlight!

If you find these little creatures interesting,

they would be happy to come and live with you

and make your projects more creepycute!

Click here to be taken to my Etsy shop

Velvet Revived

in order to find The Rootababies!

Valentine's Day Tea Dance 2016....

Dearest Friends of The Tearoom,

Not everyone loves Valentine's Day like I do, but the Queen of Valentines hopes you are having a lovely day nonetheless.  Here's hoping that those who are having a day of gooshey red, pink and purple, mummified in doilies, wrapped in yards of lace, covered in cupcake crumbs will be able to share some of their joy with those who take a more cynical view of the holiday!

I do hope that all Friends of the Tearoom, the Covered-in-Cupcake-Crumbs Crew as well as the Cynical of Commercialism Crew will all join me on the dancefloor as I spin a selection of cynical as well as sweet odes to the day!

David Bowie

Strangers When We Meet

Crystal Castles ft. Robert Smith

I'm Not in Love

New Order

Bizarre Love Triangle

Scritti Politti

Perfect Way

Echo and the Bunnymen

Lips Like Sugar

Psychedelic Furs

Love My Way

Marc Almond

She Took My Soul in Istanbul (Blue Mosque Mix)

(Whew!  After so much dancing, you should have a piece of cake!)

(Images used in my collages from Tumble Fish Studios on Mischief Circus.)

A Tribute...

(As always, please click the image to see it larger.)

Dearest Friends of The Tearoom,

The collage above is the one I have finally finished in tribute to David Bowie.  

I was so very shocked and saddened to learn of his death very early in the morning on January 10th, shortly after it was announced by the BBC.  

I always admired him and his sense of innovation.  In his career, he constantly re-invented himself. 

As we now know, he was still creating art until only a few days before his death, in spite of being so ill.  As an artist, knowing this affects me greatly.  He leaves us with a tremendous gift of an enormous body of work, hours and hours, days and days of music, endless amounts of video performances, interviews and movies.  In this amazing time of digital information, you can surround yourself with his art and almost forget he is gone.  As I listen to his music and watch him online, one thing occurs to me:  To my mind, his parting gift to us was raising the bar as an artist, one last time.  He has challenged us all.  What can we do to devote ourselves to our art by spending every moment we can, perhaps even some of our last ones, making our art?  

UPDATE:  Please see my response to a comment by my friend Bill below for a note about something interesting I learned after posting this collage and blog post.