Lucky days,

Antique treasures for free!

Sometimes I get lucky, and I find something cool in the free-box at my local St.Vincent-de-Pauls' opshop.
  This time 2 big, heavy, old books were calling my name. Their covers were rather battered, and some pages came flying out, but  what do you expect after 117 years....
Each book (1895 and 1893-4) is a compilation of religious magazines to be read on the sabbath, in those days when Sunday was a real day of rest, and you weren't even allowed to "do" things like mow the lawns or bake a cake.
The reading material is highly moralistic, and has a male chauvinistic flavour, but it was an English publication. New Zealand women got the vote in 1893, although they were of course still governed by the same attitude for a long time. In England women got the vote in 1918, but only if they were 30 and over. 1919 in The Netherlands.
1971 in Switzerland. That's right; 1971!

Full of illustrations!

Anyway, these books are full of gorgeous line drawings with cross-hatching.
Just delicious stuff I can play with!
Now don't throw your hands up in horror ; they are not in a good state, falling apart and full of brown "foxing" stains, and silverfish nibbles. Definitely not museum quality.
If I had not found them, they would have been in the rubbish skip by the evening.
I am rescuing them! Giving them a new life!
Now go get a tissue and blow your nose, while I get my paper scissors.....

I might be able to bind the old covers onto a new set of paper, to make a new book.

A Happy day with our friends!

Last weekend we went to a lovely home-made wedding of our good friends. As you can tell they live pretty rural. Those are some gates nicely stacked and decorated with toetoe grasses.
It was a wonderful day with a lovely emotional feel to it.
It was the second marriage of both of them and their respective eldest children signed as witnesses, which I thought was really special.

Eeekk!!!! in the laundry.

I now enter our laundry very cautiously in the evening, after we have found yet another of these huge spiders in there. And I must withdraw my earlier identification as a nursery-spider.
 I believe it is a Vagrant Spider, active at night, eats small invertebrates. Still good mummies, but this one is a boy ( smaller abdomen). Not poisonous. Usually a forest spider, or parks.
 A very useful critter!
 No we don't spray or kill them.

Vagrant spider, male.

I do have a tiny little scream for these though! But it is a different scream than for cockroaches. Those usually involve action afterwards and the clutching of something slappy.
Of course the poor spider is more frightened than I am.

As close as I dared...

I took this shot very quickly, and I felt quite brave... Yes; 2cm long body and with legs about 5cm.
Well, goodnight sir!
And with a quickened heartbeat, I went back up the stairs to put the pictures on the computer.
What a beauty...