daguerreotypes

sorry i didn't manage to get photos of the tops i made, but we left earlier than i expected on tuesday. we've had a trying time of it, clearing out granny's little flat, but it has had its compensations, namely finding all of the wonderful old family pictures and photographs!
prepare to wait a while for all the pics to load, i've made them smallish, but there are lots of them!
just to whet your appetite!

all of the tintypes or daguerreotypes were in a box under the dressing table, and i thought they had been lost, my great grandmother had labelled them, so it's all very exciting!
( clickit for photos )

what makes things even more exciting will be divulged in my next post!

more family pictures

granny had some silhouettes on her wall in the old flat, and they disappeared during the move, but they were safe in a box all the time! there are only 5 of them, and the 6th frame was used by my great grandmother for a photo :( she did however label the rest, they are the many sisters of james hunt, his father and aunt, this is the eldest hunt girl, and shows the style of frame

( clickit for more )

this is all so cool, i have a photograph of the mother and son, and silhouettes of the rest of the family! what is very exciting is that we also have, we think, the wedding spoon from the marriage of james hunt to katherine wainright, and another spoon from an even earlier wainright marriage.

last lot of pictures, for now!!!

this is a china plate, one of a pair, of my great grandfather as a little boy, it looks so much like clare that granny said she was to have him, so now she does :) his sister lives with my great aunt, and will be coming to me in due course, as she looks so much like me as a little girl, and they must stay togeter.

( click for more )

all in all i think i'm a very lucky girl, and i can't wait to get my new sewing room/dining room so i can put them all on the walls, constant inspiration :)

the sampler

i'm too tired to try and do photos today, plus they're better in natural light!
the sampler is dated 1802, made by harriot wainright, aged 9 (i think, the stitching of her letters is very wobbly, i think her name should be harriet, too!)
it's beautiful, not at all your usual type, it's what's known as a darning sampler, worked on very fine fabric, almost like butter muslin, and has patterns worked on it in fine silk threads, woven through the fabric, oh bother it, i'll go and take a bad photo to show you...

it's in a dreadful state, great granny, we think, found it in a drawer and sewed it to a peice of paper to protect it, only trouble is it was then folded, and the paper has foxed and marked the fabric, and the creases are very bad, i'm going to use some of the money granny left me to get it restored and framed, and hang it inside a cupboard in my sewing room :)
( click for detail )

i could only find out a very little bit about this kind of sampler, they are very rare and were only in fashion for 20 or 40 years over the turn of the century. i'm going to take it to the royal school of needle work i think to see if they can restore it, and they'll be able to tell me a lot more about it.