When I came to babysit Saturday night I brought along new tongs I had discovered for Mabel's collection. She pulled out all the tongs and invented several new ways to use them.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Additional Tongs
When I came to babysit Saturday night I brought along new tongs I had discovered for Mabel's collection. She pulled out all the tongs and invented several new ways to use them.
Dinner Table Disappearance
When you are four you sit at the table in a full size chair and eat food with metal utensils and drink milk from a glass made of real glass. Four-year-old Mabel's new mealtime drinking glass has an extra heavy bottom to encourage its own stability. She spilled nothing – not one drop – when I came over on Saturday to share her evening while her parents went out to dinner in the Mission for Daddy's birthday.
Mabel told me her memories of the vacation in Portland this summer when she rode on a ferry boat to get to a zoo where there was a real train that she also rode. She thinks that BART (like we have here) is sort of like a train but the train in Portland was really a real train.
And then she slowly disappeared down to the land underneath the table and became a worm going underground and wriggling secretly through the earth and then popping up right next to her unsuspecting grandfather on the other side of the table and scaring the bejeezus out of him.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Bindings
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| Charles I binding |
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| Eikon Basilike binding |
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| Cardinal Alderano Cybo binding |
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| Embroidered Prince of Wales binding |
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| Embroidered Charles II binding |
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| Embossed leather Prince of Wales binding |
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| James II binding |
Armorial binding of Charles II, open to engraved portrait and the text of –
An Appeal to Caesar : wherein Gold and Silver is Proved to be the King's Majestie's ROYAL COMMODITY / By THO. VIOLET of London, Goldsmith. Printed in the Year 1660.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Portrait Miniatures
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| Danish school Frederick III, King of Denmark c. 1676 |
Numberless portrait miniatures have – over several centuries – come to rest together in the cabinets of the Royal Collection. The group chosen here were all created during the 17th century, because that is my favorite century.
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| David des Granges Queen Henrietta Maria c. 1638-45 |
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| David des Granges Queen Catherine of Braganza c. 1660-61 |
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| Nicholas Dixon Anne Hyde, Duchess of York c. 1682 |
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| Nicholas Dixon Queen Mary II c. 1685-94 |
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| Nicholas Dixon Young man c. 1680-90 |
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| English school King Charles II c. 1661 |
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| Pierre Signac Ulrica Eleanor, Queen of Sweden c. 1658 |
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| Charles Boit William Wycherley c. 1695 |
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| John Hoskins perhaps Henry Cary c. 1625 |
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| John Hoskins King James I 1635 |
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| John Hoskins Young man 1657 |
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| Jean Petitot A Lady c. 1650-90 |
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| Isaac Oliver Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford c. 1612-16 |
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Day That Got Away
A couple of weeks ago I spent a cold and foggy day with my celestial granddaughter filling in some idle time on a non-school weekday. I already used a couple of pictures here that had been taken on the fly in the course of our wanderings under heavy grey San Francisco summer skies, but then life shot away from my grasp as other days rapidly succeeded filled with other imperatives and preoccupations so that I ended up forgetting there were still some of the on-the-fly random pictures with Mabel that I could still edit and exploit and share with her world of fans across the continent and around the globe.
