Happy Holidays to all of you!

Pretty Christmas gift tags, cards & ornaments - the internetz has it all!

Today we briefly interrupt the Harewood tour to marvel at the heaps of awesome Christmas freebies that can be found online. Let's start with Kirsty Neale's sweet Christmas cards. You can find the angel and many others on Papercraft Inspirations.

If you'd like some gift tags to go with the cards, you need to look no further than Kirsty Neale's blog (make sure to check out her Etsy store, too -- she's got some adorable stuff! Bunny garlands, anybody?).

The next gift tag comes from Amy Moss on Eat Drink Chic. Isn't it cute?

The next tags are really special -- or have you ever heard of feather gift tags? As you can see from the picture below they look simply amazing when paired with simple brown packing paper. Find them on Love vs. Design.

If you prefer classic design, have a look at these pretties, which you can find on The Sweetest Occasion. They were designed by Jen of Blush Printables.

Last but not least, what about some birdie ornaments? Lisa Rupp is offering these two sweet birds as a free download on her blog. You could use them as gift tags or even as Christmastree decorations.

Harewood House Part 2: The Terrace

Madame Sphinx greets you at the entrance to the terrace. (Have you ever wondered how a spinx does her hair? Perhaps they've got servants for that kind of thing ...)

And here it is -- ta-daaah! -- the formal garden on the terrace.

This is the view from the house, across the formal garden, with the landscape garden in the background.


The view from the balustrade that you can see in the picture above:

They're kind of difficult to see, but all these black spots on the lake and on the lawn? Geese. Hundreds and hundreds of geese. I could already hear them while walking down the drive.

Back to the formal garden. There were pretty fountains, like this one:


And rather cold stone (marble?) benches to the left and the right. You can just about see one of those benches on the picture below. It nestles in the inner ring of the curved hedge in the back.


And then there is the very large, very neikkid man. Right smack in the middle of the terrace:

It's Hercules with a leopard, and it's a modern statue. The original statue was destroyed by severe frost in 1982.

So when you now look out of the window up at the house, you've got a very nice view of Hercules's very nice, muscular bum. Not the worst thing to look at early in the morning, I should guess. ;)

In the next installment I'll take you to see the ice house, the landscape garden and the walled garden.

Harewood House Part 1

In early October I attended a conference in Leeds. The conference was called "Thackeray in Time", and I presented a paper on "Mocking Nostalgia: W.M. Thackeray, Richard Doyle, and The Newcomes" (yes, Dicky Doyle again!) (that's not going to be my last paper on Doyle: at least two more will follow next year). I basically discussed the relevance of remembered history in The Newcomes and how the text and the illustrations deal with, and comment on, nostalgia. Thanks to the research I've done for my novels, I was able to present new findings and insights into the novel (authors do make better scholars *g*).

I had reserved the day before the conference for a bit of sightseeing, and as the weather was simply FANTASTIC (it was hot! in autumn!! in Yorkshire!!!), I decided to leave the city and look at Harewood House, a grand estate near Leeds.

The bus dropped me off in front of the entrance to the estate:

And then I walked down the drive.

And I walked ...

... and walked ...

(pretty meadows to the left)


... and walked ...

... and walked ...

... and walked ...

(Oh look! Pretty neo-gothic church to the right!)


... and walked ...

... and walked ...

(more pretty meadows on the left)



... and walked ...

... and walked some more (which definitely drove home the sheer vastness of such large estates) (and if that's not great research I don't know what is!) before I finally reached the house itself:


It was built in the 1760s for Edwin Lascelles. John Carr designed most of the outside of the house, while Robert Adam (then a relatively young Scottish architect trying to establish himself in London) designed most of the inside. The famous Lancelot 'Capability' Brown worked on the landscape garden, and Thomas Chippendale on the furniture and furnishings throughout the house (whew, that reads like a Who's Who of 18th-century architects and designers, doesn't it?).

Edwin's cousin and heir became the 1st Earl of Harewood in 1812, and his grandson, the 3rd earl, married Louisa Thynne, who had great plans for Harewood. She ordered a reconstruction of the house, enlarging the building and adding a grand terrace to the south side. For this, she chose one of the star architects of the Victorian Age, Charles Barry, who had designed the new Houses of Parliament.

The next picture shows a smallish formal garden at the east side of the house:


And here we have another bit of formal garden at the south side:

Turn right, and this path then leads you to what Louisa must have considered the crowning glory of the house: the south terrace! (To be continued ...)

From my Sketchbook

In the past months I tried several things to kickstart my creativity. Sewing is a great creative outlet, but ultimately, it didn't help me to get back into writing. So at the beginning of this year, I started a sketchbook. I blame this on Amazon and Amazon's book recommendations: among the books that appeared on my page were several about mixed media designs and creating sketchbooks of one's everyday experiences. I loved the idea, thought it might be helpful, and bought a shiny new Moleskine notebook as well as some fancy pens.

First thing I did was to create a title page:

You can see the starting date on the bottom left corner -- dating my notebooks is a habit from the time when I used to write poetry. (Oh wait, did I say notebook?)

Anyways, I dutifully dragged the sketchbook to university to start on drawings concerning my everyday life. As you can see, I decided that the dirty tea mug on my office desk would make a great still life AND could be combined with a still life of my tea mug at home. Cool, eh?



That was kind of fun. Alas, at that point I realised that the paper of the notebook was actually too thin for the fancy pens I had bought. (Duh.) So I started to use a pencil instead. (Oh wait, did I say notebook again?)

Next I tried my hand at a collage kind of thing. Well, not really a collage. More like, "let's take a glue stick and glue something into our shiny bright sketchbook". Tea mug, tea bag, gettit?

For my next everday object to sketch, my choice fell on Teh Kitteh. The strange drawing on the right side? The snow-capped mountains and the lush valley inbetween? That's Cara sleeping in her kitty bed, and the snow-capped mountains are in fact the corners of a pillow. To fill the page I also did a study of her kitty nose and her kitty paw and ... Uh, that's kind of boring. And the results aren't too good either. (I spare you the sight of the next page where I tried drawing with my left hand.)


And then something really wonderful happened: on the page after the unsightly left-hand drawings, I started to play around with words. And the words turned into chapter headings for the WIP.

And then suddenly, I was scribbling away at a scene ...

And after that, the sketchbook turned into a notebook, which I filled with scene after scene, interrupted by some odd comments like this one:


Or maps, like this one:


To my delight I found that my plain black Moleskine notebook is also useful for other things apart from drafting a novel: it is also extremely helpful for drafting the acknowledgments of the dratted diss:


In short, I LOVE my little black notebook!

Lovely, lovely books

Today I bought/received these two books:


The first one has been written by the wonderful Laura Vivanco, dragonslayer assisstant extraordinaire (i.e., she was one of the poor people who volunteered to proofread my PhD thesis). Laura has been reading and studying Harlequin Mills & Boon romances for a long time, and judging from her postings at Teach Me Tonight and our e-mail discussions, I am certain that her book will knock my socks off. I'm thrilled to pieces for her, and even though I wanted to wait until the POD edition would become available, I've just bought the Kindle edition because I simply couldn't wait.

The second book arrived in today's mail:


As you know, I've become a bit obsessed with sewing lately. So far, all I've ever sewn are bags and softies and some really simple quilts, but I do love the idea of sewing my own clothes. So for the past two or three years, I've been steadily building my library of sewing handbooks. All I need to do now is to brave the actual process of sewing clothes.

Which, to be honest, scares me witless.

Sewing softies is fairly easy and cotton is a very forgiving fabric, too. If you've made a mistake in the construction of the softy, you can always improvise and the result will still look good (well, except for that one doll pattern) (and the sock kitty with the strange head) (hey, but the embroidery on said kitty's belly is rather good!). But with clothes? That you want to wear???? Uh-oh.

So I'm still scared, still not sewing clothes, and still finding excuses. Ah well ... one day ... :)

3rd-Advent-Sunday Goody

Are you all enjoying the crispy-cold wintertime (well, or summer, depending on where in the world you live) (and if it's the latter, I hope it isn't crispy-cold right now ...). Here in Frankfurt, we had the first dusting of snow last night -- apparently St. Peter thought this part of the globe could do with a sprinkle of his version of confectioner's sugar. :) By late morning, the winter-loveliness had already melted away, but it was nice while it lasted.

As a 3rd-Advent-Sunday Goody, I won't give you cookies because most of you insist on living so far away, which makes giving people cookies a tad difficult. No, I'll give you a sneak preview of my brandnew, soon-to-be-launched website. I hope you'll love it as much as I do!


On the pages about Castle of the Wolf, you will also find some new pictures of the Black Forest:


And some pictures of me when I was still little and we lived in the Black Forest:


(I'm standing in front of an old organ that used to be played at fairs. In the 19th century Waldkirch -- the town where we lived and on which I modelled Kirchwalden in Castle -- was famous for organ building.)

My love is like a red, red rose ...

... or rather a green, green fir tree that's newly sprung from a Bundt pan. A circle of fir trees, even! Clasping hands ... eh ... branches.



In other words, today I have once again succumbed to the lure of a Nordic Ware Bundt pan, in this case the holiday tree pan. But isn't it adorable? And please note the choo-choo train at the bottom rim. How could I possibly resist???

Okay, so I joined Weight Watchers two weeks ago, and cake definitely does not belong into the category of zero-point food, but I'm altruistic here: I'm thinking of others and the pleasure a cake baked in such a lovely pan will bring to them. Indeed, the purchase of the pan might turn out the perfect excuse for hosting a pre-Christmas tea party! :)

John Denver & The Muppets

I know it's not Christmas yet, but hey, I've only just discovered this, so please bear with me: John Denver & the Muppets singing "12 Days of Christmas" -- how cute is that?

New Academic Website

My new and improved academic website is now up and running (smoothly, I hope!):

www.sandramartinaschwab.com

A new and improved author website will follow soon!

Goody for the First Advent Sunday

Since I can't invite you all for Advent afternoon tea, I've decided to give you another kind of goodie: a snippet from the WIP. In this scene my heroine, who spent the past few years at a (finishing) school far away from London society, attends her first ball. Enjoy!

This, this wonderful ball was magical -- from the candles blazing from the chandeliers, bedecked with crystals that glittered like icicles, to the sweet sounds of the small orchestra.

Imagine that! An orchestra playing the music for a ball! It was so much more ... refinded than Miss Riggs's efforts on the piano during the dancing lessons at St. Cuthbert's.

And best of all: to dance with a gentleman instead of a fellow student! Why, her insides had been all aflutter during the first few dances (even though she had told herself sternly that such silliness was the first step of becoming an utter henwit).

Loads of Cuteness for Mirabel

Here are some examples of softies that were donated by other people to this year's Softies for Mirabel. The sight of so many sweet handmade softies always gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

1. Daisy for Mirabel 2011, 2. Lambkins, 3. DoodleGirl , 4. OWL Parade, 5. softies for mirabel badge, 6. Pumpkin, 7. DSC_5099, 8. Posie for Mirabel 2011, 9. Purple Dino

I particularly love the "Polly" pattern (No 1 und 8). It's from Softies only a Mother Could Love, and I can't wait to try it out myself! It seems to be rather popular in the crafting community as well: you can find oodles of pictures of Pollies online. What's your favourite? The sweet lambkin? The little miss in red? Or perhaps the row of owls?

Three Musketeers for Mirabel

It's that time of year again: Softies for Mirabel, the handmade toy drive organised by Pip Lincolne from "Meet at Mike's" to benefit the Mirabel Foundation, which "assists children who have been orphaned or abandoned due to parental illicit drug use and are now in the care of extended family (kinship care)". The dolls and softies are exhibted in the shop window of "Meet Me at Mike's" in the first week of December before they are given to the Mirabel foundation. It's a charity project I'm more than happy to support.

So this year, I sent along three softies:


The giraffe might look familiar: Corduroy Wes (remember him?) was made from this pattern, too. The doll is a Tilda Christmas angel minus the wings, and the little guy is Henny House from the fabulous book Softies Only a Mother Could Love (= Most.Adorable.Softies.Ever!!!).

The patterned fabrics are from Tante Ema, a fabric design studio based in the Black Forest of all places! Naturally I have to support them by buying many, many, many yards of their fabrics. ;-)

There and Back Again

In case you were wondering: teh Kitteh and I haven't fallen off the edges of the earth, nor have we been abducted by horrible aliens, nor buried under an avalanche of crafting books (though mountainous piles of crafting books seem to grow in my library these days ...). What happened was that I didn't have proper internet access. Or rather, it took me ages (two years to be exact) to install my new computer. But now the 'puter is connected to all the important stuff (except for the printer -- still need to buy a new printer) (there's a pattern emerging here, can you see it?), and I'm properly back online. Yay! So there's hope that I'll get back to posting regularly. :)

Much has happened while I was away from my blog:

• I bought a Kindle
• I got addicted to Kindle books
• I started to think that the Kindle is the best thing since the invention of chocolate
• I sewed softies for Softies for Mirabel
• I went to academic conferences in Canterbury and Leeds and at a castle on the banks of the Rhine.
• I also went back to the Black Forest for the first time in 25 years and visited the small town in which I spent a part of my childhood and which was the model for Kirchwalden in CASTLE OF THE WOLF.
  

Helpful Advice for Crafting Minded People

1. Do not sit on the pincushion (especially if it's still full of pins!). This is painful and embarrassing.


2. Do not step onto the plastic rulers. They tend to slide and make you fall. This, too, is painful and embarrassing.


3. Do not trip over your sewing box. This is horribly painful and embarrassing, and you foot will be black and blue for days to come.

Lightbulb Moment

After some serious thinking and heavy browsing of my Oxford Dictionary of First Names, I've finally found the perfect nickname for my unfortunate secondary character in the WIP: Dodo! (From rabbit to extinct bird - that's not such a big improvement, is it?) And here he is, the Honourable Adolphus Fenton Cole:

With a thunder of hooves the man who was rumoured to be the least well-favoured gentleman of all of London rode up to their landau. His light-blond hair, or what could be seen of it below his hat, bore a strong resemblance to straw; his nose had once been called a potato-shaped appendage; and his hands were as big as the blade of a large - a very large - spade.

Howards End is on the Landing

This morning I stumbled across Susan Hill’s HOWARDS END IS ON THE LANDING – though "stumbled" is perhaps the wrong word as this book sits comfortably on my coffee table, on top of THE FOLKLORE OF DISCWORLD and THE LORE OF THE LAND. Hill’s book is about books, about the books she owns, the writers she has met, the books she has never read. Some passages are somewhat snobbish, and she could be accused of rather heavy name dropping, but still, I like her book because it always makes me think about my own library. (Besides, you can’t really blame her for babysitting Arnold Wesker’s children back in the 1960s.)

And thinking about my library this morning, made me realise that, for somebody teaching English Lit at university, I have rather plebeian tastes. Sure, I love Ludwig Tieck’s "Blond Eckbert", and I adore E.T.A. Hoffmann’s KATER MURR as well as Gaskell’s NORTH AND SOUTH and CRANFORD. I have read and enjoyed Austen’s novels (yet I don’t like all of them). I prefer Thackeray to Dickens, and thought THE NEWCOMES a lot of fun. I’m very fond of Anna Seghers’s DAS SIEBTE KREUZ, which I once knew by heart (years I helped to prepare the centennary edition and had to read the whole novel about six times in as many weeks...). I have always enjoyed medieval literature, and thanks to Dorothy Dunnett I have fallen head over heels for late medieval and Renaissance poetry as well. Despite his suicidal maidens, I’m also very fond of Tennyson, and love a score of other poems and ballads.

Modern literary fiction, however, leaves me stone-cold. As a student I gave up on a seminar on Virginia Woolf because I considered her books tedious in the extreme. Robert Musil – dear heaven, when I struggled to get through DER MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN, most of the time I didn’t have the faintest, foggiest clue what the author was talking about (if any novel ever deserved the title of "loose, baggy monster" it’s this one!). Ondaatje, THE ENGLISH PATIENT – uhmm .... what’s the point??? And A.S. Byatt’s POSSESSION bored me to tears because I thought it was so utterly predictable. I’m currently reading Alan Bennett’s THE UNCOMMON READER, which is funny, sure, but IMO, a short story would have done the trick just as well, or rather, even better. I’ve reached about the middle of the book, and I’m already getting impatient and wonder what the point of this story is. Where does it go? Indeed, I find that this is my biggest problem with a lot of mainstream as well as literary fiction: a story that kind of ambles along without a clear goal (e.g., solve the crime, get the two lovers together, kill off the hero, etc.) makes me itchy. What’s worse, a lot of it is pretentious and utterly depressing. Why the heck would I want to read a book that’s utterly depressing? If I want to get depressed, I switch on the news, thank you very much.

I wonder why literature written by dead people works so much better for me. Probably because said dead people were dependent on writing stuff that actually sold (don’t get me started on publishers‘ policies in regard to advances for literary fiction vs advances for popular fiction! sufficient to say that it makes my blood boil). Hence, they had to be entertaining. Moreover, I can more easily stomach the world view of dead white men, whereas I really don’t see the point of involving myself with the world view of living white men.

See? I admit it: when it comes to reading I’m a shameless sexist, with only a few exceptions, among them Terry Pratchett and Guy Gavriel Kay

This might not be so very obvious in my study, where the classics live and all my books on literature and British history. The other, the older, half of the inhabitants of the study are, perhaps, much more interesting: there, books on on doll houses and on building castles huddle next to books about wolves, dogs, and snails. There are books about nineteenth-century fashion, cooking and historical erotica, about Roman plumbing, mythological creatures, the history of gardening and about European china. This is the collection that goes back the furthest into my own history, the collection that was started twenty years ago or even more. No wonder then that I always get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I stand in front of these shelves and contemplate their contents.

Though the study contains the majority of classics I own, traces of classics can also be found in the library: Louisa May Alcott lives there as well as Frances Hodgson Burnett. WINNIE-THE-POOH hangs out somewhere, too. But for the most part, the library is filled with rows upon rows of romance novels (which can hardly come as a surprise to anybody who reads this blog!), some fantasy novels and mysteries. There’s Christie, of course, but also Sayers (a more recent addition) and Kerry Greenwood’s wonderful Phryne Fisher series. Next to Phryne, you’ll find some old green Penguins squeezed into the shelf. I got them secondhand a few months ago and thought about starting a collection of green Penguins, but quickly abandoned the idea once I saw how grubby the copies were that I got (and they had been deemed to be in good condition on abebooks!).

On another shelf rests a string of Mrs. Pollifax novels (written by Dorothy Gilman). I got the first of them ages ago on a holiday in Spain back in the 1980s. It was so hot that summer that all you could do was sleep or read, and naturally I chose to do the latter with the result that after a few days I had run out of reading material. So I snatched one of the novels Dad had brought with him. Now, THE PERFUME is a book that’s not exactly meant to be read by young teens, and so, not surprisingly, my parents took it away once they figured out what I was reading (that was the one and only time they forbade me to read a particular book). The very next day the family drove to Benidorm in search of suitable books for me. There wasn’t much on offer, really, that might interest an adolescent girl. I chose an anthology with short stories about cats, I believe (or was it an anthology about hobgoblins and ghosts?) (anyways, it obviously didn’t make much of an impression), and an omnibus edition of the first three Mrs. Pollifax novels. The subtitle read "3 heitere Romane in einem Band“, i.e. “three amusing novels in one volume“. “Amusing” sounded nice enough, if slightly old-fashioned, and the book certainly didn’t disappoint. A few years later I was thrilled to discover that Gilman had written even more Mrs. Pollifax novels, though none of them, imo, is quite as charming as THE UNEXPECTED MRS. POLLIFAX

Several of my favourite novels are grouped together in a cabinet in my hallway, right next to the dining table. It contains some childhood favourites – Rosemary Sutcliff, Auguste Lechner, and Henry Winterfeld, who made me fall in love with historical fiction. There are the German editions of Gillian Bradshaw’s Arthur trilogy and her BEACON AT ALEXANDRIA, Diana Paxon’s WHITE RAVEN, Penelope Williamson’s KEEPER OF THE DREAM, and Margaret Hodges’s AVENGER. On a lower shelf you can find Anne Rice’s vampires, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and German translations of Susanna Kearsley’s novels (for some strange reason, I’ve never read her in English). But the best-loved shelf of this cabinet is that which houses Dorothy Dunnett’s novels. I simply love the sight of the bright, colourful spines of the Penguin edition of the Lymond Chronicles (another sight that is bound to give me warm fuzzies). On top of her Johnson Johnson mysteries rest Tom S. Hall’s TRAMPING HOLIDAYS IN SCOTLAND, which I bought because it once belonged to Dunnett’s husband, Alastair Dunnett, and Mary Stewart’s THE WIND OFF THE SMALL ISLES, which I bought because it came with a letter from Dorothy Dunnett: in 1974 she had sent the book to a friend after a dinner invitation. “I don’t know anyone else,” she wrote, “with such a gift for sending their friends away at the end of a dinner not only full of lovely food and drink, but pleased with themselves in the bargain! Bless you both.” Judging from the letter, Dorothy Dunnett, bless her heart, was just as charming in real life as her novels lead one to believe. :)

Election Day

Yesterday there were town council elections in my tiny corner of the world. The ballot paper looked like this (minus the cat): (The monstrous thing Teh Kitteh is sitting on is not the actual ballot paper; it's what we were sent in preparation for the ballot so nobody would freak out in their booth on election day.) Why was the ballot paper so large, you ask? Because there are 93 seats in the Frankfurt town council, and the Powers That Are decided it would be much more democratic all around if everybody had 93 votes. (Teh Kitteh was much puzzled)

To make matters more confusing, you could vote for a party list or for individual candidates, and you could give each candidate up to three votes out of your 93. (At that point, Teh Kitteh gave up and started to attack the ballot paper instead.)

You could also rule out specific candidates (though not in the manner Teh Kitteh employed, by ripping off parts of the ballot paper.)

It kind of makes you wonder how many people did not go to the elections because they didn't understand the procedure or couldn't decipher the relatively small print of the ballot paper. (Teh Kitteh, for one, decided to hide beneath the ballot paper.)

And even when you had carefully studied the lists on this paper, a somewhat nasty surprise awaited you in your election booth: in addition to the broadsheet monster, you also received another, similarly sized ballot paper (which The Powers That Are had not sent out beforehand) for the town council of your suburb.

For which you had 19 votes....