A gift and a meme

Last week my father gave me this book, which he had no doubt found on one of his scavenging missions in a charity shop. I don't already have any kind of compendium of crafting techniques and it's delightfully old-fashioned and no-nonsense in it's coverage of these things. Inside the back cover the previous owner had made a little envelope to keep embroidery patterns in.

Between the pages I came across a leaf and a sweet wrapper amongst other things. Normally finding things in books that haven't belonged to my family or a friend would make me feel a little squeamish...but somehow because it was a craft book, and had obviously been so well-used, it made me feel quite delighted by these discoveries, wondering what special significance the leaf had held and how the contents of the sweet wrapper might have been enjoyed while chewing over the finer points of gesso-work (I did say this book covers everything!).

So, onto the Meme - thank you so much to both Ginny and Ali for very kindly nominating me for this. The rules are as follows:

Archive Meme Instructions: Go back through your archives and post the links to your five favorite blog posts that you’ve written. … but there is a catch:

Link 1 must be about family.Link 2 must be about friends.Link 3 must be about yourself, who you are… what you’re all about.Link 4 must be about something you love.Link 5 can be anything you choose.

I think this is a great way to circulate some of the great older posts everyone had written, return to a few great places in our memories and also learn a little something about ourselves and each other that we may not know. Post your five links and then tag five other people. At least TWO of the people you tag must be *newer acquaintances so that you get to know each other better….and don’t forget to read the archive posts and leave comments!

So here they are:

Family: My sister Laura - Writing this blog has made me realise that, despite not living close to one another, my sister is very much woven into my days. I often have to edit from posts many of her lovelinesses and the thoughtful and funny things that she does, for fear of my blog becoming a weird homage to her and needing to be renamed Laura Teacakes. But in this post there's the unabridged telling of how special she is to me and how lucky I feel to have her as my big sister.

As rules are meant to be broken I've included Endearingly Wonky too, because I can't look at the pictures in this post without feeling a real pang - I love the effort that my small ones put into making these things knowing how much it would please the recipients and the day holds happy memories for me.

Friends: A visit to Donna's beautiful house - I realise that I haven't written many posts about friends, and that's partly because not all of them know that I have a blog and also because it feels like it may be an invasion of their privacy to write about them. But if you haven't seen it before, then do go and have a look around my friend's house, as it is utterly lovely and very colourful.

Myself: Happy and sad - this post is very recent, but I wanted to include it, because it was a challenge for me to write it when it revealed so much of what was in my head. It has become a post that I am fond of because so many fellow bloggers wrote and shared a little more about their selves too.

Love: Lazy Anniversary reflects my feelings about Ian, while the contents of this post (which involve a sample of Mr Teacake craft!) make me love him all the more for merrily setting about making himself look so ridiculous to please our Zebra-girl.

Random: Lots of storage pockets. This was my second ever post - it was strange for me revisiting it, as what I've written seems oddly lacking in personality, and perhaps that reflects how apprehensive I was about blogging for the first couple of weeks. It has all the self-consciousness of the diaries that I'd start every January during my school years, only to give up within the first week because there's very little point in going on with something that bears no relevance to yourself, let alone your imagined reader. But somehow people's comments gradually turn a blog into more of an ongoing conversation...which for me made it easier to write normally - and - not - like - a - robot - - -. I've chosen this particular post because the thing I was blogging about is actually one of the things that I've most loved making. Its intended purpose didn't require it to be tasteful or sensible, and I had so much fun.

As Ali and Ginny both said, this meme is incredibly time-consuming (I've kept leaving it and coming back to it, because I could only handle so much of reading my own archives at one time...and my archives are relatively small...), but if they'd like to play along then I'd like to nominate: Louise, Emily, Becca and Melly because I so enjoy reading the beautiful blogs that they write, as well as Mary-Beth's, with the added reason that she is currently having her one year bloggoversary and I suppose that means that she may be already looking backwards as well as forwards and so I'd love to hear which posts on her blog are special to her.