Three Guesses . . .

. . .  and the first two don't count.

Remember that from grammar school?

Get ready to guess, or maybe you already know.  What is this?

Answer at the end of the post.

Meanwhile, we are hoping to meet our new tenants soon.

Howard says he saw one of them flying out the door and off to work this morning.

They are a little flighty.

But we love their landscaping.

Our hedges have never looked better.

 Let's peek in from the front stoop.

 Ah, they are into Stickley design, I see.

 I love what they've done with the place.

That twine and string shabby look is all the rage these days.

Very chick.   :-P

I wonder if they have any children?

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As to what that first picture is . . . you probably knew.

It is a poppy bud, in the act of popping open.

A poppy not yet ready to pop!

In just days, we'll have lovely brilliant red poppies dancing in the breeze.

Our Iris are finally blooming; pictures tomorrow, must fly now!

I'm getting just like our tenants!

-- Cass

Brilliant!

What's brilliant?  The sunshine!


Today is the first really clear and bright and sunny day in . . . weeks!

 It was so sunny in the conservatory when I came downstairs this morning that I was blinded.

And startled; it's such an unfamiliar sight!

 But now . . . the weeds are exposed in all their grisly glory.  Oh dear.

Time to put on those new gardening gloves and start pulling!

Well it's not all weeds.  Just ... mostly.

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So, you know the lovely beige and pastel needlepoint rug I showed you back on May 17th?

 My eBay bargain?

This rug, below, that Anne and I put in the Parlor. . .

. . . and have already taken out of the Parlor, leaving the felt pad behind to look sad and lonely and ugly?.

 On Tuesday, the lovely postman delivered a box.

And in that box . . . another bargain eBay needlepoint rug.  (An even better bargain.)

I am so in love with these needlepoint rugs!

This morning, before catching a bus into New York City, Howard and Annie did this:

Action shot!

 And this:

Action shot of Howard's and Annie's feet smoothing wrinkles.

So now there's a different summer rug in the Parlor:

 It's not fully smoothed over the pad yet, and the furniture isn't back in place,

but Annie and her dad had to catch their bus!

I think this black-background rug with its soft pink and green and bits of blue floral design

is a better fit for this room for the summer than the pink roses one.

In the Fall, we'll put a vintage Persian in this room, but for this season
of flowers and vines, a flat floral needlepoint rug works just fine.
(Plus I haven't found the right Persian yet!)

The pink roses rug will migrate -- permanently -- to one of the guest rooms.

Annie votes for the yellow room.  I'm thinking the pink room  . . . jury's out.  Check back.

In the meantime, I love this black and floral rug

for this room; I think it grounds it nicely.

Hey!  There's the pink rose needlepoint rug, folded and left on the wing chair.  Oops.  Better go move that now!

 Time for me to tackle today's To-Do List, a mix of routine and Wedding stuff.

 Happy Wednesday to all!  -- Cass

Check out what's happening in the Great Outdoors elsewhere; visit Susan's

A Southern Daydreamer blog for Outdoor Wednesday.  Click here!

Above The Salt

A busy Tuesday --
shopping with both my daughters,
and a visit to the alterations lady for Alida's wedding gown,
Anne's bridesmaid's gown, and my M.O.B. dress.

 Just enough time to share with you some pictures of my mother's salt cellars.

 She had 8 of them, with tiny spoons.

 But these are not those spoons, although they were packed in with them.

 As I recall, she had very tiny pewter spoons.  Maybe shell design?

Anyone know where they are?

These are Norwegian silver demitasse spoons.  Too large for the tiny salt cellars.

Mom loved using these salt cellars for dinner parties.

Usually they were not used for dinners where children were present,

as we thought it was more fun to play in the "sand" than use them as intended.

Look!  This one has rolled over on its back in surrender.

That's it for Tuesday.

Wish us luck in shopping.  Oh, such a chore!

Visit Tam at The Gypsy's Corner for Three Or More Tuesday.  Click here!

All the best . . . Cass

A Lazy Lady Polishes Her Silver

You may already know that I've got a
boatload of old silverplated flatware.  

I love the stuff.

I hate to polish it.

With our daughter's wedding coming up in fewer than 5 weeks,

I want even my mismatched old silverware in its best bib and tucker for the occasion.

Leave me out in the air, and I wrinkle.

Leave silver out in the air, and it tarnishes.

It just happens, y'know?

But at least for the silver, there are remedies.

Below, The Lazy Lady's Silver Polishing treatment has begun for some pieces,

while their tarnished relatives wait patiently alongside the hot tub.

Welcome to The Lazy Lady's Silver Polishing Club.

All you need to join are some bits of silver.

Line them up like meek little lambs in a disposable aluminum pan.
(You can also line a non-reactive pan with aluminum foil.  I find the pan is easier.  I'm all about easy.)

Membership in this Club is free, or pretty darned close to it,

because the only thing you need to buy is a big box of this stuff, which is cheap:

Generously sprinkle baking soda over your waiting victims flatware.

And put the kettle on to boil.

It's not tea time.  Pour the boiling water over the baking-soda-covered flatware.

It will bubble up most gratifyingly, then settle down.

Walk away, put your feet up, have a cuppa, come back in a little while when it's not blistering hot.

Fish the flatware out of the aluminum pan, and rinse it in the sink.

Take an old, soft towel, and dry each piece, giving a quick light buffing to really bring out the shine.

And you are done.

Your old tarnished flatware can join its gleaming relatives,
where they will all admire one another's brilliance.

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I didn't invent this method; it's been around for a long time. Even Martha Stewart has instructions for it on her web site.  It's a chemical reaction; the baking soda in water transfers the tarnish from the silver to the aluminum.

When you pour the boiling water over, you will smell tarnish -- you know that unpleasant metallic smell that settles in your nostrils?  And when the polishing is over, the pan or foil you used will be dark with tarnish, so you won't want to use that disposable pan for a batch of brownies to take to the church coffee hour.  Ick.  Save it for silver polishing!

Silver is hard to photograph.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Anyway, some pieces look dark; they are not.

One warning:  If you have valuable antique pieces, or other pieces that are purposefully antiqued, or you are particularly fond of a darkened patina on some of your silver, don't use this method.  It really polishes and cleans too well for that; you may lose those darkened areas, the ones that highlight any raised areas.  I haven't explained that very well, but you know what I mean!

Next project:  A furniture arrangement for our parlor;
we can't come up with a decent one.  It's just not working!   -- Cass

Let's Take An Old-Fashioned Walk

It's another mostly cloudy day here in northern New Jersey.

We are tinkering with furniture placement in the Parlor,
and it's not going well.

When your husband says, "This looks stupid," you know you've got a problem.

So . . . let's get out of the house for a bit, shall we?, and beam ourselves back to

a lovely sunny day in May of 2009, and take a stroll around That Old House.

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(May 2009)
It is a perfect gift of a day -- sunny, warm and breezy.   Let's walk clockwise as we leave the sunroom . . . and Mother Nature has come through handsomely for us, with the first iris blooms of the season:

Right next to the house, a gaggle of iris plants!

Iris blossoms are so over-the-top, no elegant restraint in their makeup.
They are flowers, and darned proud of it.

Around the front of the house... do we have window boxes on the porch already?

Nope, just flats of impatiens waiting to be planted!

And...

a big sprawling angel wing begonia that I hope is big enough
to distract you from the peeling paint:

Dion de-coding secret messages left in the fading azalea next to the porch steps:

If you squint your eyes and don't look closely, the porch looks pretty good, with its Boston and asparagus fern hanging baskets, and when I plant window boxes and some foundation plantings other than dandelions . . . it will go a long way toward distracting from crooked shutters and faded paint!

Crab grass and other assorted greenies masquerading as a lawn in the side yard:

And there is a mystery.

Look closely at this side of the house.

There are no shutters on this side, although their  hardware remains.  But that's not the mystery.  Enlarge the photo below, and notice the clapboard siding in the section to the right.  It is original (ca. 1832) to the house:

Do you see?  At the top of the wall, the clapboards are narrowly lapped, and as you come down the wall, they widens, until they get to the level of the bottom windows, where the width is much wider -- widest of all.  On the rear part of the house, to the left, built 50+ years later, the clapboard is of uniform sizing.

I figured this couldn't be just sloppy carpentry, so I did some research and discovered that it was most likely done on purpose.

This side of the house takes the brunt of the weather, with the upper floors more exposed to wind and rain, so the savvy fellow who built this house gave his upper clapboards minimal exposure to the elements, while allowing maximum exposure for the lower ones which would not take such heavy weathering.  It was a common practice.

Clever, no?  And it worked; those cedar clapboards are still in good condition after all these years.

Well, let's keep walking, toward the back of the house.
A little patch of Lily of the Valley is fading fast:

Further along the back wall, a grindstone leans against the old stones:

And I present to you the world's ugliest conifer.  What the heck is it?

Across from the wall, a sprawling rose bush is ready to pop hundreds of dark red blossoms:

The bleeding heart is still going strong:

Along the wall, another iris has burst forth!

Nearby, a clump of chives cuddles up to rampant spearmint:

(You can just glimpse some gazania and cosmos Alida popped into the border yesterday.)

Annie tidied up the ivy . . .

and now we need to tidy up the tidying:

Back to beauty; in a nearby pot, a hibiscus begins its summer show:

And Oriental poppies are almost ready to pop!

Time to go back inside.  At the edge of the granite slab that serves as our doorstep, a basket of pansies has been valiantly blooming since March, and showing no signs of stopping:

(You can just make out the pink begonias Anne tucked in along the conservatory border yesterday.)

I hope you enjoyed our stroll around That Old House,
and the "mystery" on the side wall of the building!

Dion has decided he wants to stay outside for a little while.
This will last until he realizes that I am inside, where the refrigerator lives.

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Changes since 2009 -- the shutters are off the house, and it's all being prepped for painting.
The hard 2010-2011 winter has delayed the flowering of so many plants, including our iris.
The world's ugliest conifer is gone from the perennial bed.
Our lawn is now more grass than weeds.  Pretty much, anyway!
And we are looking forward to our daughter Alida's wedding to Josh on June 25th.
Just less than 5 weeks now.  Eeeek!

Thanks to Chari at Happy To Design for hosting Sunday Favorites!  Click here to visit.

-- Cass