About Miss Rose Potter, Marie Antoinette and my sweet grandma

Welcome back to Boxwood Cottage dear blogging friends and readers and to a no garden photo post for a change although I have tons of July pictures from the garden still to share with you but this month flew by far too fast.

Today is Miss Tiffany's "Show me your form" day! She has got herself a new old/vintage dress form a few weeks ago for a bargain price, which she has called Nadia and her hubby called her a "scary thing" and so she asked her blog friends to help her show her hubby that she's not the only crazy one loving old dress forms by posting pictures of our dress forms.

I feel so very lucky to own an antique dress form, which I got as a gift from a very dear friend in December 2006, you can read my story and see my photos about that here http://carolsgarden.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html in my second post from May 2006.

These antique dress forms are very hard to get hold of nowadays and if you find one you often can hardly afford her which makes my Rose even more special to me. My daughter calls her Miss Potter, I call her Rose, so I named her Rose Potter!

In the picture above you see a close up of her beautiful neck. Thing is she has had no neck at all when I got her, so I asked my dad to make me one and I think he did a very good job!

I love to move Rose around in my studio and to redecorate her every now and then.

For this photo shoot she has got my vintage chapeau clac that I got from my mum as well as a beautiful vintage blouse with lace that I got from another dear friend - gell Al ;-)

The rose wreath I have had for ages already, it was hanging in a window, but suddenly it occured to me that it would look great on Rose's breast, what do you think?

The beautiful milliney roses are a purchase from Holly over at Holly Doodle Designs.

Tiffany sent us an e- mail that she has 50 participants in her Show and Tell today, so I suggest that when you have finished my post you'll head over to her's here: http://shabbyscraps.typepad.com/shabbyscraps/

where you'll find a list of all participants and so to see all the other beautiful and oh so inspiring photos of bloglands dress forms.

And now to change the subject I'd like to show you a little project which I was inspired to do by my friend Sandy over at ArtTeaLife Blog. She and her "Royal Confections" buddies had the idea to do a round robin in which they alter the Vintage styrofoam body form that you see in the next picture and which you can get from Cerri's Little Pink Studio.

I found Sandy's idea so fascinating that I had to order me a styrofoam body form from Cerri and start altering her and here is what came out of it. This is my first try (double click picture to enlarge and see all the details) :

It's Marie Antoinette in case you didn't guess ;-)) She was so fun to create! The fab thing is you don't have to sew or glue to dress her up. I just pinned everything on her with my hat pins. Even her hat is made with a hat pin (you can get these gorgeous hat pins at Cerri's shop too and also at Andrea's Onehundredwishes and others). I used a vintage wallpaper border from my friend Nicole of Small Treasures, a fabric yoyo for the hat from my friend Anita of MyCountryCottageGarden, a millinery flowerm,some borders, pink Dresdens, lace etc..

Here is a close up of her dress:

And to finish today's "creative post" here is a picture of my last Vintage Wallpaper Wallbox.

It's made from a Kellogs Smacks cardboard box this time and the sweet children in the picture are my grandmother Elfriede and her lil brother. If you haven't seen my first one have a look here: http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/1647/wallpaperbox3wo6.jpg The fabric border below the old picture says "Vergißmeinnicht" which means "Forget me not" in English and I feel that when I use her photo in my art she'll surely never be forgotten about at least not as long as I live.

That's all from me for today folks, I'm off now to look at all the other "Show me your form" posts which will take some time I think, so if you do so too, you'd better make yourself comfortable ;-))

Happy summer days!

Carola xox

P.S. All pictures in my posts should enlarge to see more details when you click on them and then click again on the orange button in the lower right corner of the photo.

Sweet summer days and I have two "one to one" swap offers!

Welcome back to Boxwood Cottage in July dear blogging friends and readers!

At first I'd just like to show you a few impressions from my summer garden

And then some of my latest solder works

I've swapped 3 of these pendants with lovley flickr friends and kept one for myself to wear

Here you can see me wearing my pendant:

Can you ever get enough of roses? I surely can't and I love to bring them in the house freshly picked from the garden like the Rokoko roses in my picture above. Below you see a close up of my beautiful English David Austin rose "Heritage":

And as always in summer I have to show you another picture of my beautiful Eden85/Pierre de Ronsard rose:

Another rose bouquet freshly picked on a rainy Sunday to bring the garden inside:

Here I spend a wonderful Sunday afternoon with roses and beautiful home and garden magazines dreaming up new decorations and garden corners:



Talking about beautiful magazines I have a swap to offer to two of you, I'd offer you one of these beautiful German garden-living-creative magazines

and one of these brand new round pendants:

if someone of my dear US blogging friends would be so kind to send me the latest Somerset Life magazine (July issue) in return and from another one of you I'd be so thankful for the last Somerset Life issue with the pink glass glitter bottle on the cover!

They are so hard to come by over here and you'd make me very happy if you'd swap them with me! Just leave me a comment or send me an email and I'll get back to you asap!

Also I like to thank you all very much for the lovely comments you have left on my last posts, they were such a great pleasure to read! :)

Have a beautiful new summer week everyone!

Hugs Carola xox