Why don’t you come on over, Valerie?

Well, Open Studios is over for another year, but I just wanted to show you our greeter-lady, Valerie.

I have a folder full of display ideas, but I really wanted this one – a lovely vintage lady standee just like ones I had seen here on Nicky Grace’s blog.

Mum set to work and found the original on google images, she was a Jantzen advertising girl.

We blew her up to just over 5 feet tall (from about 12”) and used a free website called blockposters.com to print her out tiled onto A4 sheets. Mum added a skirt and also a half moon to the bottom to help her stand up and to strengthen those little ankles.

Mum transferred the image to a sheet of 1cm thick MDF (£6 from Wickes for 2’ x 6’). Transferring an image onto a soft material like wood is easy – place the template over the top and redraw the lines, pressing hard with something like a ballpoint pen. When you remove the template you should be able to see the groove left behind by the pen.

The cutting out is the only bit I did! Mum’s not a friend of power tools, but I am. A quick whiz with the jigsaw and we had this:

And then mum did her painting thing:

You’ve got to admit, she’s very good at it!

And here’s Valerie greeting visitors to our workshop!

Isn’t she amazing?

Beccy

A box of treasures…

My great aunt sent us an interesting box recently.

It turned out it was full to brimming with old family photos.

I have no idea why my great aunt didn’t want them but she had heard from my gran we’d been researching the family tree and thought we would like them, which was really lovely of her.

I love old photos and here are a few of my favourites.

My gran and grandad getting married in 1959. I think I’ve mentioned her wedding dress before. A few years ago we found it in a box in their garage. It’s beautiful, and she still has the head-dress and veil. My great-gran made the whole thing for her and it’s tiny. Needless to say we made her move it to a safe place in the house.

That’s my great-gran on the far right in the above photo, she was tiny, we called her our little gran. This is the only photo we have of her.

My big great-gran in the 20’s, May. I only ever had two great-grans, and they are both my mum’s grandmas. May was my grandad’s mum and she was a formidable woman who lived to 96. A lot of the photos centre around her so the bulk of them must have been her collection.

May’s mother and father Norah and Joseph, my great, great grandparents. He died in 1912 aged 38.

Great aunt Daisy, May’s sister, looking awesome on a motorbike. That’s May standing behind her.

May with her husband Herbert (this is the only photo where he doesn’t look grumpy, my gran assures me he looked pretty mean in real life too) and their daughter my aunty Betty. I love that my great gran is in a full swimming costume but he’s just rolled up his trouser bottoms and hasn’t even taken off his suit jacket. He’ll be wearing braces under that jacket too, he is in all the other photos.

Isn’t family history fascinating? We’ve managed to get the tree back to about 1600 in several directions and although my mum knew most of these people I’ve never seen some of them before, and we’ve certainly never seen them young. They used to just be a list of names and dates in genes reunited but this makes them real.

There are about 100 photos in all, and it took ages to scan and identify everyone in them – some are still unidentified like this one:

Look at those amazing dresses, especially the one the little girl in the front is wearing. I wish I knew who they were.

Beccy