in your Easter bonnet V

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 Edith

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in your Easter bonnet iv

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Ottoline

image from the National Portrait Gallery

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Cecil's Aunt Jessie-with all the frills

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Cecil Beaton is a favorite.

I have dabbled in designing overpriced, over sized correspondence cards in the past few years with great results. My nerves were soothed- therapy akin to adult coloring .

The concept- gathering the materials, the words and putting them together in a pleasing way within a small space and hope they say something.

Here are the results of one favorite card from Cecil Beaton's book My Bolivian Aunt, the tale of Beaton's Aunt Jessie and her hat.

Cecil Beaton's Aunt Jessie~ (from the book)



the Beaton card, COVER, a vintage French millinery plume & tag with trims laid on a Cole and Son flocked paper



and the words by Beaton:

The women who leaned over my crib had not yet forgone

the lines of the hourglass and were laced into corsets

that gave them pouter-pigeon bosoms and protruding

posteriors.

Perched on their heads, and elevated by a little roll

just inside the crown, were hats which had grown as

frivolous as the milliner’s trade could make them-

enormous galleons of grey velvet with vast grey plumes

of ostrich feathers sweeping upwards and outwards,

or they would be trimmed with artificial flowers

and fruit.

One of the most flamboyant and generous

exponents of the prevailing styles and modes was my

godmother, Aunt Jessie, Who was the first woman

of fashion that I ever knew.

During here lifetime, and especially

the first half of it, she was an ardent

devotee of fashion, scurrying to keep up with the

latest hats from Paris, much as the Red Queen

raced across the squares of Lewis Carroll’s chessboard

Aunt Jessie with other pouter pigeons~( from My Bolivian Aunt)


post cards in my collection from the period~





& a LAST WORD: the Best Design Advice of Recent Note from Alexis Hampton in February's 2009 House Beautiful. Christine Pittel asked 101 Designers-for a Makeover idea the home... So you want to do something right now?...

Hampton advice " Take a nap. When you wake up, everything will seem much nicer."

I agree- a nap can renew your senses and recharge your creative batteries.

a small little reminder inside the Beaton card

inside the card

night night.

in your Easter Bonnet iii

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 Vita

by Lazlo

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in your Easter bonnet ii

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Liane  
~de Pougy

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in your Easter bonnet I

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Mistinguett

by Nadar

When Mistinguett hiked up her skirts to expose her well-publicized legs (she once insured them for $3,000,000), even the sober members of her audience remarked that they were extraordinarily well preserved. In her comic numbers, Titina and Je Cherche un Millionaire, her Parisian brashness and high spirits seemed unimpaired. She kidded with the audience, snatched women's hats, put them on bald-headed ringside patrons, succeeded in getting nightclubbers to stand and join her in singing a final round of Paris.
"It's something electric," Mistinguett explains. "I take them like this. 'Come near me,' I say, and I draw them to me."
Why had she decided to come to the U.S.? "I like to move. I love New York. Everyone goes so fast. I do not like that people go slow." Mistinguett, whose shrewd business head has left her with a bulging bankbook, a safeful of jewels and three big houses, had another reason. "I love money. Not just to spend. I like to keep it—wash my hands in it." For her Manhattan engagement, the Martinique nightclub is paying her $4,000 a week.  Time magazine here (from 1951,Manhattan gets its first look in 28 years at Mistinguett)

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