Embroidery and Funky Foliage

 

I am hiding.

There are men with enormous ladders at That Old House, getting rather
up-close-and-personal with her, cleaning out her gutters.

I cannot look. 

I'm at the desk computer, which is surrounded by windows, and I've closed the blinds. 
I am so squirrelly about heights that I can't bear to watch someone else
climb a ladder and scramble around on the roof.

Although I guess squirrels don't have height issues.  Rough life for them if they did.

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But it's Wednesday, it's a beautiful crisp October day, and it's picture perfect.

I can prove it.

With pictures.

 Just one little corner of our patio area, right outside the sunroom.

A mum and a pumpkin cozy up on top of the stone wall, right along the steps up to the driveway.

 October brings some pretty funky colors to the foliage at That Old House.

That's a hydrangea right behind the pumpkin, and our psychedelic forsythia in the left background.

Echoes of past lives:

Can you see it in that top stone?  Robert Tuttle chiseled his name there many decades ago.

I'll bet his parents were not pleased.  The Tuttle family owned this home for generations.

Echoes, too, of recent summer . . . cherry tomatoes still ripening,

and a lone geranium duking it out with the weeds in a flowerpot.

I'm taking my Dad to the apple orchard today;

there aren't many of these days left before Winter sets in.

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Inside the house, my newest eBay treasure:

. . . a tablecloth that's destined to make her company debut on Thanksgiving,

on the grownup table in the dining room.

She's all cotton, and 133" long, so she is big enough to have a bit of an overhang

(not the same as a hangover) at each end, even when all the table leaves are in place.

Some details:

That's a tiny blue thread, above, not a mark.

A major confession:

I took a dozen pictures of this tablecloth, and it was not

until I was looking at them on the computer that I realized  . . .

that I'd photographed the wrong side of the cloth!

Doh!

I had to take new pictures, which I used in the first shots, above.

But look at these pictures:

 Ummm... yeah.  Those threads connecting different parts of the satin stitching

belong on the wrong side of the piece.

(Or, as they say in Brooklyn, the left side of the piece.)

Would you believe I used to teach embroidery and I still made this dopey mistake?

 I don't have any pictures of the cloth spread out -- no room! -- but it's got a lovely center medallion.

My eBay price?  $20.00 and reasonable shipping in an envelope.

I thought when I got it that it would turn out to be one of those recent Chinese tablecloths with the slick fabric and machine work.  But it's a heavy cotton, it's got at least some age to it, it's in beautiful shape, but is it hand done?  It looks so to me, but I wouldn't bet the house on it.  Heck, I wouldn't even bet Howard on it.

Maybe it's that I just cannot imagine anyone doing that much handwork!

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Check out what Fall is up to in other people's neighborhoods, at Susan's

Outdoor Wednesday, at A Southern Daydreamer blog.  Click here!

Kathleen at Faded Charm blog hosts White Wednesday.

Visit her by clicking here!

Happy Wednesday!  I'm off to buy apples and pears with Pop! -- Cass