Backyard Bird Count

The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent. This year the Great Backyard Bird Count was held over four days February 18 - 21. Anyone can participate, from beginning bird watchers to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It's free, fun, and easy and it helps the birds. 

No, I didn't participate this year, but I can tell you the birds I would see in my backyard:

- a pair of Asian Banded Doves

- oodles of Mourning Doves

- oodles of sparrows

- a Blue Jay

- a Robin

- and Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal

all of these birds visit daily for the morning buffet.

I also hear a woodpecker ... never see him, but hear him pecking away.

I thought that today's postcard would be in honor of the Backyard Bird Count.

This is a postcard from The Audubon Postcard Folio

a collection of 30 full-color photographs from John James Audubon's

magnificent The Birds of America.

The back of the postcard reads:

Cardinal Grosbeak, Fringilla Cardinalis, Bonap, M. 1, F. 2. Wild Almond. 

Plate 159 from The Birds of America by John James Audubon, 1833. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Gift of Mrs. Walter B. James.

A big THANK YOU to Beth for being our hostess for Postcard Friendship Friday.

Wishing you well, a JOY filled weekend and happy birding!

It's That Time of Year!

It's college baseball season.

It's time to hear the wondrous sound of the bat hitting the ball.

The Rice University Owls take the field this evening 

against the Stanford Cardinal

and I'm ready!

In honor of the start of the season,

I'm sharing a postcard from the Pomegranate Book of Postcards:

America Plays Ball: Historical Baseball Photographs from the Library of Congress.

The back of the postcard reads:

Hitting the ball in Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C., July, 1942

Photograph by John Ferrell

There's nothing like baseball! It gets you out-of-doors,

fills you with oxygen (all that yelling).

It is a pastime that is enjoyed by young and old, male and female,

East and West, North and South.

Play Ball!

A big THANK YOU to Beth for being hostess for
Postcard Friendship Friday.

***

Many thanks to all of you for your wonderful comments and emails

of condolence on Mr. Dragon's passing to the stars.

His spirit will be with me this weekend as the baseball season starts.

He loved college baseball and the Rice Owls. 

Wishing you well.

Snow Day!

The city of Houston was expecting a snow day.

Instead, they got an ice day.

Ugh.

In the spirit of snow day, I found a postcard to share with you made by the

Detroit Publishing Company.

The postcard reads:

"Every pine and fir and hemlock wore ermine too dear for an earl,

And the poorest twig on the elm-tree was ridged inch deep with pearl."

Lowell

The Detroit Publishing Company was one of the largest American publishers of postcards and photographic views during the early decades of the 20th century. The images are a rich source of documentation for the study of North American landscape and cityscape, and include views of well-known streets, buildings, historic-monuments, natural scenery, industry, transportation and daily life.

Unfortunately, the location of this landscape is not on the postcard.

A big THANK YOU to Beth for being our hostess for Postcard Friendship Friday.

Wishing you well, a JOY filled weekend and a fun Snow Day!

American Art Pottery

The postcard today is another from Pomegranate and their 

Art, Architecture and Design books...

American Art Pottery.

This postcard is also the cover art for the book.

The back of the postcard reads:

American Art Pottery

Vase, 1928

Glazed white clay

Jonathan Browne Hunt (1876-1943), potter

Newcomb Pottery, New Orleans, Louisiana (1895-1940)

From the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art

Winter Park, Florida

"Art Pottery is the term applied to ceramics made primarily for decorative purposes. The American Art pottery movement flowered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as an aspect of the international arts and crafts movement associated with the artist and designer William Morris. Respected in its own time for its quality and beauty, and now avidly sought by collectors, American Art Pottery is prized not only for its technical and artistic virtuosity, but also for it's historical association with with traditional values of craftsmanship, honest labor and the aesthetic enrichment of the daily lives of ordinary people."

"Newcomb Pottery is considered one of the most significant American art potteries of the first half of the 20th century. Influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement, Newcomb pottery was exhibited around the world, sold in shops on both coasts, and written about in art journals throughout the United States and Europe. Newcomb potters (always men) and designers (always women and girls) were awarded eight medals at international exhibitions before 1916.  ...

The students and graduates worked with designs evocative of the American South, inspired by Louisiana flora and crafted from local and regional clay. As the 20th century opened before them, some students moved towards developing more modern designs, yet still maintained the philosophy that no two pieces of pottery should be alike."

More information on Newcomb Pottery can be found here.

Thank you to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

Old-fashioned?

Pomegranate publishes books of postcards on a wide range of subjects

architecture and design among them.

This beautiful home is from a postcard book titled

The Arts and Crafts Houses of C. F. A. Voysey.

From the back of the postcard:

"Design for Broadleys, now Windermere Motor Boat Racing Club,

Gillhead, near Cartmel Fell, Lake Windermere, Westmorland, for Arthur Currer Briggs, 1898.

Watercolor, 265 x 45- mm. 1943.13"

From The Arts and Crafts Houses of C.F. A.Voysey:

"A leading figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941) specialized in the design of small country houses for wealthy clients. With their emphasis on ground-hugging horizontality, hipped roofs, brick walls covered with white-painted roughcast, and enlivening splashes of color, these houses were marked by a graceful simplicity and a refeshing freedom from the imitative styles that had bedeviled so much of England's nineteenth-century architecture."

"Voysey drew his inspiration from vernacular building traditions and practical considerations that led him to reject overblown decoration and clutter. He strongly believed that the architect should take responsibility for the entirety of a design and that no detail, no matter how small, was unworthy of attention."

"From 1910 Voysey's architecture was increasingly regarded as old-fashioned and his practice went into an irreversible decline. For the remainder of his life he was chiefly occupied with the preparation of pattern designs for wallpapers and textiles. The 1930's witnessed the rehabilitation of Voysey's reputation. In 1940, a year before his death, he was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects' prestigious Royal Gold Medal."

A big THANK YOU to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

***

We are having a mini-family reunion here next week.
Lots of folks in and out to visit with Mr. Dragon.
I'll try to check in and at least wave!

Wishing you well and a JOY and fun filled weekend.

Winter Dreams

So many of you are dealing with winter issues.

Snow, snow and more snow.

Cold, cold and more cold.

When I saw this snowy postcard I knew it was the one for 

Postcard Friendship Friday!

 

This is a postcard from another of the wonderful Pomegranate postcard books -

this one on Charles Addams.

Addams (1912-1989) worked mainly in black and white, using ink wash to great and spooky effect, but he turned out the occasional colorful New Yorker cover. 

"A three-time college dropout, Charles Addams was nevertheless an erudite, urbane, and - leaving aside his substantial collection of medieval weaponry - evidently quite normal man. The New Yorker published its first Chas Addams cartoon in the early thirties, and a few years later signed him on as a salaried artist at $35 a week. Nearly all of his 1,300 published cartoons appeared in The New Yorker over the course of a 50 year career.

Addams is probably most closely associated with the wraiths, ghoouls, thugs, and toadlike children who populate a desolate Victorian mansion - the characters, initially unnamed by their creator, who became known as the Addams Family. Gomez, Morticia, and their sinister servants and feral offspring gave rise to a silly but fondly remembered television show and two silly and very funny movies."

From Chas Addams: A Book of Postcards published by Pomegranate.

I'll spend the rest of the day humming the theme song to the Addams family!

A big thank you to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

Wishing you well, a Joy filled weekend, and some sun to warm you!

The Amazing Painting Cat!

I couldn't resist this postcard.

It is from the postcard book Cat Artist's And Their Work.

The original is a lithograph poster made around 1887 and can be found in the

Museum of Animal Acts in Wisconsin.

The back of the postcard reads:

"Cat-marking behavior was trivialized in Victorian times, as this poster shows.

While Matissa certainly made marks with paint, Mrs. Broadmoore

(in reality a rather portly man dressed as a woman),

amused the audience by pretending that the cat's simple paintings were

"pawtraits" of people in the audience."

A big thank you to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

I hope this card brought a smile to your face.

Wishing you well and a fun filled weekend!

 

A New Year Wish

As we prepare to ring in the New Year, I have a New Year Wish for you.

With all my

heart this

glad New

Year

I wish you

Plenty, Health

and Cheer

Happy New Year

A big thank you to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

Sparkle!

On a recent shopping trip, a dear friend and moi stopped by Anthropologie.

There, calling my name, was a collection of postcards.

Glitter Greetings, Joyeux Noel

Cavallini & Co.

Here is one of the postcards from the assortment of twelve.

I think you can see the glitter on the birds.

And, they were on sale!

The lovely Beth is the hostess for Postcard Friendship Friday.

Thank you, Beth!

Wishing all of you well, the happiest of holidays and a bright and glorious New Year!

Postcard Friendship Friday

Seven days until Christmas!

Time is flying by.

All the packages have been mailed -- yeehaw!

Time to sit, cuddle under a blanket with the kitties, have some eggnog, enjoy some old movies.

Rest, relax, read, dream.

Here's Santa on his rocking horse.

As the horse rocks, you can see more of the village behind Santa.

This is my favorite of the reproduction postcards I found on Galveston Island.

A big thank you to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

Wishing you well and a JOY filled weekend.

Postcard Friendship Friday

We lived on Galveston Island for many years.

 Dickens on The Strand is held there in December .

I remember it as a lovely Victorian celebration of Christmas and found this post card at one of the shops along The Strand.

This is a reproduction moving action Santa greeting postcard.

His arm with the paint brush moves.

There's nothing Santa

more enjoys

Than making toys for

girls and boy,

And in his way he's 

wondrous wise,

For he knows just

what'll please

your eyes.

Fun!

A big thank you to Beth for hosting Postcard Friendship Friday.

***

Mr. Dragon is home with his oxygen.

We learned a very sad lesson ... never believe your doctor until the FINAL path report is in.

Cancer cells were found in the fluid that has collected around his lungs.

We have an appointment on Monday to see what is next for treatment.

Thank you for your support, your prayers, your emails.

It means a great deal to both of us.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says:

"Smile, breathe and go slowly."

Wishing you well and a JOY filled weekend!

Postcard Friendship Friday

It's December.

The Winter Solstice is just around the corner.

Christmas! Twenty one days away! Oh, My!

The hurrier I go the more behind I get ... or something like that! 

Two postcards to celebrate winter 

and Christmas.

The postcards were made by Current, Inc. I've had them for years and love the art work.

A big thank you to Beth for being our hostess for PFF!

Wishing you well and a fun weekend!

Edit: Current Inc is still in business!

Postcard Friendship Friday

The Friday before Thanksgiving and one more postcard from

the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Hearty Thanksgiving Greetings

The card is postmarked 1915.

Aunt Ida must have sent a Thanksgiving postcard to Master Ralph 

each year as this was not the only Thanksgiving card from Aunt Ida in

the NYPL collection.

I enjoyed her comment 'I was very pleased with your letter'.

Letter writing -- a lost art.

Beth is our hostess for Postcard Friendship Friday.

I going to be taking a small break from blogging.

Think I will do some reading, crochet a little, and relax.

See you after Thanksgiving.

Everyday should be a day of thanks -- don't you agree?!

Wishing you well, a JOY filled weekend and to my American friends

a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Postcard Friendship Friday

Another postcard for Thanksgiving from the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

This one has memories for me.

I was raised in New Mexico, The Land of Enchantment 

and spent many a Fall feast day with friends at Jemez Pueblo.

It was a different world. Lots of good food that seemed to never end.

Colorful dances to celebrate the harvest.

Another world.

This postcard was published by the Detroit Publishing Company sometime between 1907-08 and titled Hopi Thanksgiving.


The Detroit Publishing Company was an American photographic publishing firm best known for its large assortment of photochrom postcards.

The company was founded as the Detroit Photographic Company in 1890s by Detroit businessman and publisher William A. Livingstone, Jr. The company had the exclusive rights to the photochrom process for the American market. Photochrom is a technique developed in Switzerland which allows the color enhancement of black and white photography with the means of chromolithography. It allowed the company to mass produce photorealistic color motifs long before color photography became economically feasible.

Thank you to the lovely Beth, our hostess for Postcard Friendship Friday.

Wishing you well and a JOY filled weekend.

Postcard Friendship Friday

It's time for Thanksgiving postcards and once again,

I'd like to share one from the New York Public Library Digital collection.

This one made me chuckle.

It is a Raphael Tuck & Sons Thanksgiving Postcard dated around 1907.

  Raphael Tuck & Sons were proudly known to be the Publishers to Her Majesties the King and Queen, with printing houses in London, Paris and New York.

They began in London, England in 1866, selling pictures and frames.  Raphael Tuck was joined by his three sons in 1871 and published their first Christmas greeting card.   

In 1893 they were granted a Royal Warrant by Queen Victoria.

Adolph Tuck, one of the sons, produced their first picture postcard in 1894 of Mt. Snowden in Wales, which was sold to tourists visiting the site.

The first series of numbered postcards was printed In 1898 which was a set of 12 lithographed vignette views of London, numbered 1 to 12 with the "Tower of London" being postcard #1.

They entered the postcard market in the United States in 1900 with an office in New York.   American artists designed many of the postcards, but the cards were printed in Europe (Germany, Saxony, England) and then returned to the states for sale. 

Unfortunately, like many other postcard printers and manufacturers of their time, the history, records, original paintings and postcards of Raphael Tuck & Sons were destroyed during the bombing blitz of London during World War II.

Raphael Tuck & Sons were prolific printers and produced Books, Postcards, Greeting Cards, Die Cut Cards, Fringed Silk Cards, Scrapbooks, Puzzles and more.

Be sure to visit with the lovely Beth, our hostess for Postcard Friendship Friday, where you'll find a variety of postcards to visit. 

Happy PFF and have a wonderful, restful, fun filled weekend!

Postcard Friendship Friday

One more Halloween postcard from the New York Public Library digital collection.

Let's see what she sees in the mirror this time!

"The maiden fair had a most romantic soul,

And wished her future husband to behold.

She gazed in the mirror and one glance took-

And beheld her brother kissing the cook.

Hallow'een Greeting."

Don't forget to visit the lovely Beth, who hosts Postcard Friendship Friday.

You'll see a variety of postcards there.

Wishing you well, a JOY filled weekend, and a spooky, treat filled HALLOWEEN!

Postcard Friendship Friday

Here is another Halloween postcard from the New York Public Library digital collection.

This one is about precautions to take on Halloween.

Hallowe'en Precautions

If you take ten seeds

From A pumpkin shell

And go to the woods

Where the witches dwell

Plant then in front of the door in A cross

You will be rid of them

Without remorse

Postcard Friendship Friday is hosted by the lovely Beth.

Each week you can see a variety of postcards by visiting:

beautiful, old, new, comic, serious, travel.

Happy PFF!

Postcard Friendship Friday

There are five Friday's in October.

That's a good thing, because I've really enjoyed this series of postcards from

the New York Public Library!

I laughed out loud when I saw this one and I hope you do, too!

(Image from the New York Public Library)

"She was filled with romance, and deemed it good sport

To look in the mirror and see it's report.

She gazed quite awhile, then a loud voice heard;

'Come do the dishes now, and don't be absurd.'"

Hollow'een Greeting.

Postcard Friendship Friday is hosted by the lovely Beth.

When you visit you will see a variety of postcards from the old to the new,

the comic to the serious, travel to new places. Enjoy!

Wishing you well and have a wonderful weekend!

Postcard Friendship Friday

I returned to the New York Public Library for this weeks Postcard.

Everyone enjoyed looking in the mirror last week for their true love.

What if this happens??!!!!!

Notice that last week it was Hallowe'en

and this week it is Hallow'een.

Postcard Friendship Friday is hosted by the lovely Beth.

Each week you'll se a variety of postcards from the old to the new,

the comic to the serious, a true variety.

Enjoy your visit!

Postcard Friendship Friday

October arrives bringing cool weather and Halloween.

I visited the New York Public Library for this postcard.

A Happy Hallowe'en

He is your fate

Whose face you've seen

 in the mirrow's face

On Hallowe'en.

Postcard Friendship Friday is hosted by the lovely Beth.

On your visit you'll see a variety of  postcards: funny, serious, old and new.

Enjoy!

Wishing you well and a JOY filled weekend!