Treasure Box Wednesday on Sunday: Time Travel in Blogging

Since I will be heading down to Florida on our usual Treasure Box Wednesday post day, in order to bring my Dad up north with me, I figured I'd make Wednesday come early this week. When ya run a blog, you can do that sort of thing, you know-- make days shift around like dominoes-- and then hope it won't confuse the heck out of the nice people who stop by regularly.

My favorite treasure of this week was this pretty hand-tinted Victorian photograph on glass from We Miss Back When in Apollo, PA...

I had my eye on it a while, and at $8, I finally caved and show them the money.

At the Goodwill in Monroeville, I got this handy-dandy book on British kings and queens...
Now when I have questions about ol' "King Elthered the Unready," "Queen Ethelfleda the Somewhat Snippish" or "King Ferdinand the Impetuous," I'll be able to look 'em up and learn something.

At the same Goodwill, I bagged me a few CDs, too--
And speaking of bagged...
I already had this particular item, but every day I think what a bargain it was. :)

I hope to have a post for you next Sunday. With Dad sick, things are kind of up in the air for me right now, but I don't want to leave you folks with nothing in your blogly goody bags, either. So I'll do my best to keep things rolling.

Silver Eye Center Goes Down the Rabbit Hole with Maggie Taylor

Here in Pittsburgh, the Silver Eye Center for Photography has been showing a collection of works from artist Maggie Taylor, along a theme near and dear to my heart. It's These Strange Adventures, a surreal trip through Wonderland and other remote areas of imagination.
What I found most intriguing-- and I thought you folks might, too-- is that her work is done by layering Victorian engravings, photographs and objects into Photoshop, and creating an illustrative scene from them. So what were once ancestors being sold on Ebay suddenly transform into a serious-faced Alice carrying a Cheshire cat on a moody landscape. Or the King and Queen of Hearts posing, both realistic and cartoonish, for posterity.

This work illustrated a fascinating book of Alice in Wonderland, where the Alice here is portrayed by many different "Alice's" of different ages, in different antique photographs to complete a single story...
Perhaps that Drink Me bottle did more extensive personal alterations than height!

Another interesting thing about the work is its use of vivid vintage colors... shades that make the photos look hand-tinted, the way old lithographs or portraiture would have been during the day.
One of my favorites is Alice here with the dodo and other creatures in the Pool of Tears. Look how seamlessly these individual images were combined to create one full scene...
For my good readers in the Pittsburgh area, there's still time to see this show at the Silver Eye Center. It runs through August 21, 2010, and it's located right on Carson Street on the South Side.

The address is:

1015 East Carson Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
(412) 431-1810
www.silvereye.org

Oh, and before we go today, because I thought this would make you all laugh...
Do you think my cat, Alice, is trying to tell me something? It doesn't seem.... subtle.

Have a Wonder-ful rest of your week!

Treasure Box Wednesday: The Great Outdoors

There's a bright golden haze on the meadow, and the corn is as high as an elephant's eye... No, we're not in "Oklahoma." We're right here in Western Pennsylvania over Labor Day weekend. I went to a picnic out a the farm of a friend's uncle. And I thought as a minor change of pace, today we'd take a look at some of the treasures of late summer/early autumn.

Like these stripey monarch butterfly caterpillars...

They're just hanging around, munch, munch, munching away, storing up the food they need to transform into a bright orange butterflies, and flutterby south for the season...


This fellow is already well on his way to his brand new look for fall...


The gourds are out slightly early this year, and it looks like it's been a bounty...


These spaceship shaped squash are a good six to eight inches in diameter...


The tomatoes are getting big, beautiful and oh-so-ripe. I had one of them, in fact, in a BLT on Tuesday night. Mmmm, can't beat those garden tomatoes!


The pumpkins here are HUGE... Several of them are about hundred-pounders. I'm really not sure how they're going to move them. I know my friend's brother has his sights set on a really ginormous jack o'lantern!...


They'd planted several different kinds this last year, and they seem to be doing really well.


Across the street from our picnic, some four-legged friends paused for a nibble...


...And a photo op!


Just a couple of other things I wanted to remember to tell you before I go. For those who check out this site through the main www.thriftshopromantic.com homepage, I won't be updating that section until Tuesday, as it's fairly involved. I will have a new Sunday post, though, set to publish automatically, here at http://thriftshopromantic.blogspot.com -- so I hope you'll pop by on Sunday anyway!

Why all this automation and pre-planning? Well, I'm off to meet some of my blogging friends in Philadelphia this weekend. So here's hoping I'll come back to you with some great pictures, some fun new information, and a lot of good stories!

• Did you miss last Sunday's post of inspiration photos of period kitchens? Well, just click here.

And otherwise, I hope I'll see you this Sunday. I will be checking my email, so know if you email, I'll try to respond as soon as I can.

Have a lovely one, my friends!