Goodbye and Hello. (I Hope!)

I've been writing this blog - a companion to my eBay shop of the same name - for some time now. But things change. I'm still collecting antique textiles, still dealing in them, but over the past six months, it has become clear that the balance has shifted and I'm doing far more writing - and publishing under the Wordarts imprint - than antique textile dealing. I don't think I'll ever stop. I'm too passionate about textiles for that and find them well nigh impossible to resist. So I'll still be haunting my local saleroom, still doing a bit of buying, researching and selling.
In fact, I often become so fascinated by my textiles that I find myself writing about them and their history in novels such as The Curiosity Cabinet, and my newest novel, due for publication to Kindle in the next week or so, a Scottish historical novel called The Physic Garden.

Over the past eighteen months, my novels, short stories and plays have been selling well on Amazon's Kindle Store (the handful of traditionally published books aren't doing too badly either) and there are a lot more where these came from, all kinds of backlist titles, as well as new but as yet unpublished work. I plan to publish something, whether it's a trio of short stories, a piece of non-fiction, or more full length fiction, to Kindle, every month for the whole of 2013. I may not manage it, but I certainly have enough good material to do it!
Alongside this, the plan is to put at least some of this work out on Kobo and to publish all the novels, starting with the Physic Garden, which is very dear to my heart, in paperback as well, for those who haven't yet converted to e-readers. It's a tall order, a lot of work, and it will be exciting - but time consuming.
Added to this, I'm a regular contributor to a blog called Authors Electric - you'll find me blogging on the 18th of the month, but there are lots more fascinating and varied posts on there, so do check it out. I'm also serving on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland, as well as on various local village committees, I blog regularly about writing on my Wordarts blog AND I have a new venture planned with a handful of other writers for later this year.
All of which has meant that I've been neglecting my Scottish Home blog.
But there's more to it than that. Quite often, I'll write a post about the history of a piece of embroidery, for instance, or an interesting antique - but I won't quite know whether it belongs here, or on the Wordarts blog. My own 'Scottish Home' in rural Scotland, is a big part of what makes me tick as a writer. The Physic Garden, which is set in Glasgow and in the countryside round about, in the very early 1800s, brought that home to me very vividly. And of course, there are textiles and gardens in it.
So, I've taken the difficult decision to amalgamate the two blogs. All the posts from the Scottish Home will be staying where they are. I'm not deleting anything. But in future, I'll be writing - rather more often, I hope - about a mixture of writing, textiles, history, gardening, living in Scotland, more writing - and all kinds of other interesting things, as well as a few reviews of new and old books thrown in for good measure.

If you've been following this blog, it will still be here. But if you want to read new posts, please go to Wordarts, and follow me there. Which is why I've titled this post Goodbye and Hello. See you over on Wordarts, I hope.

My Dolls' House At Christmas - And A New Project

The house with the dolls going about their business!

The nursemaid at her sewing machine.

 There's been a very long silence on The Scottish Home for which I apologize. Before Christmas, I was busy with a couple of writing projects which took up almost all my time.
They still are taking up a lot of time, but one of them is particularly relevant to The Scottish Home, of which more in a moment. Just between Christmas and New Year, we succumbed to a nasty virus which seems to have floored most of this village. We became couch potatoes for a while and spent most of our time watching old movies on the television. Fortunately, we were well supplied with them! We're on the mend now, but it meant that our Christmas holidays weren't as vibrant as they might have been and we had to turn down one or two nice invitations.

You may remember that last year, my 'big' Christmas present from my husband was a magnificent Georgian style dolls' house. I had wanted one for a long time. Alan had made one for me many years ago, but it wasn't quite the style I wanted and it was rather big.

Eventually, I gave it away to a young family member, but I stored up all my miniatures, some of which had been brought back from Vienna by my late mother when she and my father lived there for a year. I knew that sooner or later, I would find the house I wanted.

Maybe Mrs Dolls House Doll is feeling a little unwell too? A doily makes a nice mat.

And then I found it, online, in time for Christmas 2011: the house I had been looking for.
I made an offer on it, and it arrived, carefully packaged, in a huge cardboard box. As soon as I could, I dug out the box with all the lovely furniture and miniature items, and installed them in the house.

The cook takes a welcome break in her kitchen.

I've been 'playing' with it on and off all year. There is quite a bit still to do. I think it already looks lovely but I want to make curtains and stair carpets and more decorations for the walls which still look a little bit empty to me. The house has a couple more dolls now, too. At first, the family consisted of a mother, father, little boy and baby. Now there's a nursemaid and a cook, too. I like to pretend (well, I am a writer, after all!) that the house is really much bigger than it appears, that there are rooms you can't actually see.

Mr Daddy Doll reading. No Kindle in evidence though! 

I took quite a lot of photographs of the house trimmed up for Christmas, so here they are! We even included a Christmas tree with a little bough from the lodge pole pine which was our own Christmas tree. And I took the three tiniest dolls out of my big Russian doll and put them on the mantlepiece in the drawing room.

So what about this new project? Well, for some years now, I've been dealing in antique and vintage textiles as a way of helping to buy a little more time for my own writing. Now, though, the balance has shifted a bit. I'm not abandoning the textiles altogether, but thanks largely to Amazon, I can now spend more time writing. I have, however, learned a huge amount along the way, so I'm currently working on a guide to dealing in collectibles, mostly online, as a way of making some extra income. It strikes me that many people would find it useful. It should be ready for publication as an eBook in the first instance, by the end of January. That's the plan, anyway. Watch this space for more information.

The Nursery

Who is this Elegant Edwardian Gentleman?

This is a departure from my usual Scottish Home posts which tend to be about textiles, my other passion in life along with writing. And as regular readers will know, I quite often manage to combine the two, as in my novel The Curiosity Cabinet! As an interesting aside (well, interesting for textile and vintage nuts like me) when the Curiosity Cabinet was being prepared for its first publication as a paperback, rather than the Kindle edition, the publisher's editor queried my reference to 'bright Indian cottons' as anachronistic. It wasn't. It was about right for the time and place of the novel. She was fully entitled to query things she didn't understand, but this was one area in which I had done my homework, mostly because I'm fairly obsessed with such things!

However, this isn't a post about antique textiles, for a wonder, but instead, it's a post about antique and vintage... er... people. I buy lots of my textiles at auction, in various salerooms, as well as at antique markets, car boot sales and charity shops. But sometimes, I get a little more than I bargained for. This handsome chap - a head and shoulders portrait in oils - came with a bundle of very beautifully embroidered pictures - not hugely old, but well executed.  There is no name on it, and no signature either, but you can tell from the back of it that it's rather old and very nicely done. I mean he's a real person, isn't he? Unfortunately, I have no idea who he is - a Scottish Edwardian gentleman. He could be a politician, I suppose. He seems like a gentleman of consequence. Maybe he was an artist or an architect. Maybe he designed some of those splendid Glasgow buildings. If he was my great grandfather, I would want to know, but somebody cleared him out along with various household possessions, and put him up for auction in among a heap of other things. I'll probably try to 'rehome' him on my eBay shop. There are people out there who collect portraits even if they don't know who they are - although he's sustained a little damage over his years spent in somebody's attic, and could probably do with some professional cleaning. I like him though. I like his wide set eyes and that fine moustache!  Writers like this kind of thing - we're free to invent whatever we want, and that makes him intriguing. What do you think?

Our Belated but Beautiful Designer Burns Supper (And a Spooky Picture!)

The Rustic Supper Table

We hosted a somewhat belated Burns Supper in our house last weekend. Our friends, John and Brenda Kevan, travelled from their home in the North of England, (although John is very much an Ayr lad) with a car full of tartan throws, cushion covers, and various other textiles, candlesticks, lanterns, and half the greenery in the Lake District. A bit like carrying coals to Newcastle, remarked Brenda, bringing Scots pine to Scotland!
John and Brenda have been wedding photographers for much of their working life so far, but Brenda has always had an interest in antique and vintage interiors and crafts and has a huge talent for interior design. 
This is a skill which I hope and trust she is finally going to begin to exploit in a number of exciting ways. Watch this blog for some interesting links coming towards the end of this year. Brenda brings a little magic to even the smallest of projects. Her Christmas gifts, for example, are invariably wrapped so beautifully that you can hardly bring yourself to open them! But she can also work on a grander scale - as she did here, last week.

Brenda spent all day Friday and most of Saturday transforming this old cottage (built only a few years after the death of Robert Burns, and while Jean Armour was still very much alive) into a rustic idyll - a perfect setting for a Burns Supper. These pictures give only some idea of just how magical it was. One of our guests, a young German visitor, was particularly enchanted. The long dining table (we were hosting some eighteen guests) was adorned with one of my gorgeous old damask tablecloths - I've had this for years and can never bring myself to sell it. I think it came from a country house, since it's enormous and it has deer and pheasants in the weave. Brenda had made a subtle tartan runner, and matching napkins. There were home-made lanterns, with moss and tartan ribbons, as well as rustic wooden candlesticks, miniature pine trees, and tiny pine cones. Hand-made menu holders, with Burns' portrait, and place cards with pictures and manuscript completed the look.

Fireplace trimmed with greenery, roses, feathers. Note spooky 'orbs' on TV set!

For the rest of the house, she mixed red roses (of course) with a variety of greenery and pheasant feathers in a selection of my own large earthenware jugs and vases, as well as a few jars she had brought herself. There was a statue of the poet, a quill pen, piles of old books of his poetry and even a couple of facsimile manuscripts, as well as more lanterns and candles - in short, it was a magical transformation of this cottage. As another friend remarked - you almost expected Rab to show up himself! Well, if you look closely at the middle picture, of the old fireplace, you'll see a profusion of 'orbs' on the right, in front of the television. Of course it could just be the flash from the camera bouncing off the screen, but I have another picture taken from the same spot and with the same flashlight, with nothing showing. So who knows? Maybe he did!

Rab himself with facsimile manuscripts, quill etc