cross-stitched jane

One of the nice things about swapping is that occasionally you'll receive something made in a craft that you don't do. I haven't cross-stitched since I was a child, so it was a pleasure to receive this pretty cross-stitched bookmark from my partner booklover for the Jane Austen swap, quite painstakingly done with neat stitches and lace.

Chris didn't actually make the bookmark herself, so I rather wonder about the lady who did. I wish every handmade thing came with its own little story attached do you'd always know how it came to be.

I've been working on a few sewing projects that I can't share quite yet, but they've been keeping me pretty busy! Lots of photographs to take in the days to come.

jane bookmarks + download

If you can stand looking at a second set of bookmarks in one week, I have another download to share with you! I'm very fond of Jane Austen of course, so I made a set of these for a Jane bookmark swap during last week's paper crafting.

I decided to keep them pretty simple, since the quotes themselves are already so lovely.  The images are of a Jane silhouette, the covers to a couple of her books, and the picturesque logo for Houghton Cottage in Hampshire, England. If you'd like a set for yourself, you are welcome to download a copy here. Just print them onto cardstock, laminate and cut...and once again, these are for personal, not commercial use, please.

For a slightly different take on Jane, I bought a set of hilarious Pride and Prejudice and Zombies postcards a few months ago and used quite a few of them during the witching season. I never really finished the book itself, but these pictures are fantastic, and the postcards themselves are really well-designed and of great quality. Quirk did a really great job with these, and I hope they'll branch out with more interesting book projects in the future.

jane in the mail

Today I'm the one who got exciting mail. After sending maps to Cynthia in a Swap-Bot wish tag game, I requested "anything Jane Austen" other than the books themselves.

Libby Bear, also known as Ellen, was nice enough to grant my wish in the form of a ballpoint pen from the Jane Austen center in Bath, England. How fun! So now Jane may be helping me write notes and lists and such. Which seems like something she might've approved of.

Side note: I do so like receiving packages marked "par avion" and "Royal Mail" and such. I think it'd be nice if our U.S. postal service had more exciting postmarks and stickers...but until then, I suppose it's up to us to make our own parcels more interesting to look at.

Big thanks to Ellen for her clever pick. I never dreamed I'd receive something so close to the source when I asked for something Jane, but how nice it is to have your expectations exceeded.

bookish

A trip to the library, a trip to The Iliad Bookshop, and a delivery from Amazon all on the same day? I must have been a very good girl indeed.

The loot by mail this weekend included the latest Coralie Bickford-Smith designed Emma (it's beautiful! And it's from Penguin, my favorite publisher!), season one of the Canadian television series Emily of New Moon (which I've been dying to see for literally years--they're finally all available here in the U.S.), darling little Labels and Stickers from The Small Object, and Sarah Water's fabulous gothic mystery, The Little Stranger, which I never got to finish when I had it from the library.

At Iliad, I also came away with the sequel that I didn't know existed to Harriet the Spy. I'm not referring to The Long Secret or its better follow-up Sport, but to a book released somewhat recently in 2003 called Harriet Spies Again by Helen Ericson. Although it was written with permission of Louise Fitzhugh's estate, and was presumably timed to the film adaptation I never saw, I tend to look upon these things with a great deal of suspicion.

But of course, I had to read it--and it's actually pretty good so far. The author does a nice job of echoing Harriet's muttering and suspicious thought patterns, which made the character such an original, as well as in illustrating the loving but careless interactions between Harriet and her parents or Cook. I'm only about a third of the way through, so the major plot devices have yet to really take shape, but thus far it's been a very pleasant surprise.

Books are full of such great promise, aren't they? I'm very much looking forward to diving into this pile.