Drinking Absinthe is going to be a pleasure

Totally off topic, I received today my first absinthe fountain! I am so so excited about it, and I am dying to use it for the first time, along with the absinthe glass - also new!
I'll let you know how it goes...

A macabre addition...

Have you seen the movie "The Others"? Are you familiar with the Victorian tradition of post-mortem photography? Well, this is the new addition to my mourning line: a box full of post-mortem pics.

I did not know of this tradition, but I was quick on researching it, and I find it fascinating. We see pics as something so natural that we do not consider the money that cost producing a single picture years ago. So much money that families did not spend it in capturing images of the living. After all, they did see their family everyday. But when Death took a loved one, not only they did pictures of the deceased, they posed them as if they were sleeping. I have seen many pictures of parents with their dead babies, and there is a lovely beauty and melancholy to them...

Most of us have Victorian homes, and these pictures were definitely part of them. Maybe a forgotten box could be found in an attic or at the bottom of grandma's trunk...

A new line for Victorian fans!

My mother asked me some time ago to make a pretty mini fan to go with the wedding gown in her mini shop. Obviously it had to be in white, but when I finished, I made one in black and put it for sale in my shop as a mourning fan.

It occurred to me that I could not only sell fans, but a whole line of Victorian mourning displays. Thus, the Victorian Mourning Line was born!

I have designed all the boxes myself with Victorian artwork. They all open, and some of them even have "something" inside!

I will be listing them in my shop in the following days, so stay tuned!

So happy today! Featured in a Treasury!

One of my Apothecary cabinets got featured in a Treasury on Etsy, made by SerenHandCrafts:

A beautiful and dark theme, that is making me consider the "Mad Scientist" theme for my Halloween party...

By the way, there is a new set of medicine boxes up for sale in my shop.

Working on something new

Since I loved so much the idea of Apothecary cabinets, I began to think about other stuff to fill them up, and then it occurred to me that there are other things in Apothecaries and pharmacies, apart from glass bottles - even though they are awesome with their tiny labels!

The idea of making tiny boxes of medicine was obvious with a visit to my bathroom, so I began the search for antique drug labels. And thus, the sets of Apothecary boxes were born!


The first set is already for sale in the Apothecary section of my Etsy shop. The second set will be up in a couple of days. The great thing about them is that you don't need to have a miniature pharmacy to display them. They will fit in any bathroom, drugstore or doctor's office!

By the way, if you like Apothecary labels as much as I do, you will love what Cathe Holden has made to her towels!

Off topic: English and Spanish languages

My mother tongue is Spanish. I have learned English along the years, since I was in middle school.

Of course, when I have learned the most is when my husband and I moved to the States from Spain. It was the first time that I had really to rely on my skills to talk to and understand people. There was not a teacher in hand to help me or a book to tell me the translation of something that was being said. The lovely people that I met were SO helpful when they talked slowly and looking to my face! To this day, I dread talking on the phone because representatives often talk very fast and not pronouncing clearly.

I have read a lot of books in English - I am talking classics from the XIX Century, as well as modern literature. And naturally, spending A LOT of time on the world wide web helps too, specially to learn new vocabulary. I am better writer than I am speaker - when I talk, my mind goes very fast and I tend to mix up the pronouns (he and she) and the verbal tenses and forms.

It cost me a little bit to understand TV and movies, and we still rely sometimes in subtitles - for example with series such as "The Sopranos". Song lyrics still are tough, depending on who is singing them.

When I began to think in English, as well as talking in English in my dreams, my husband told me that I should be happy, because that means that it's becoming like a second tongue, and that I am almost bilingual.

Well, now I am writing a book in my mother tongue. And to my dismay, I am finding myself relying on my dictionary to find the translation for Spanish words FROM English! I had to look up today "involve", "cue" and "vindictive", because for the life of me, I could not find the equivalent in Spanish. In case you want to know, they are "implicar", "señal" and "vengativo", respectively.

And this happens beside the fact that I talk to my family in Spain every day through Skype, obviously in Spanish. I don't know if I should be happy or worried...

Featured!

Fellow Etsian and blogger Hurray Kimmay has been so sweet as to feature one of my minis in her blog, on an entry about Apothecary decor, which I particularly am very fond of.

Thank you so much, Kimmay!