Happy Halloween

No Halloween shall be complete without my favorite antique October accessory:

 

Sofia is visiting us again.

Sofia has only ever travelled as far as our home in Norfolk,  but she Will. Not. Stop. speaking about how any day now she’ll ride away to London, crash a ball at Devonshire House and make Lord Byron fall madly in love with her, and they will run away together to Italy, where they will cohabit in a ruined Catholic abbey and spend their nights writing epigrams and solving riddles with the ghosts of deceived nuns.

 

On Wednesday last, she tearfully pressed upon me this portrait of herself to remember her by.

I wish she’d just GO already. I swear I’ll wear the damn brooch every day if it will get Sofia and her laudanum bottle out of my second best bedroom.

 

A New Year Necklace

A simple stash-busting project for a bit of New Year Bling: 

 

 

16 inches of faux pearls, pear shaped crystals and matching mountings, a handful of jump rings, and a bean clasp.

 

For real elegance against the stones the pearls should be smaller, but no Napoleonic lady worth her pearls would ever quibble the SIZE of them - she’d grab those honkers, string on some amethysts and sail out into the ballroom, angling towards the candlelight as she went!