My Vintage Miss Piggy Fantasy Calendar, and the Weekly Photo Challenge: Express Yourself

I’d forgotten I was a Miss Piggy fan in my former life (who, moi?). I must have expressed myself at the office, and after that, people brought me Miss Piggy gifts for my desk and bulletin board. I found this 1981 calendar when I cleared some boxes out of the basement last summer. Here’s the glamor-pig on a fantasy Harper’s Bazaar cover…

See the little Kermits on her scarf?

The theme here is a magazine cover for each month. Since I’m a sci-fi fan, of course I like this Omni cover. Omni ceased publication in 1998… hmm, I’ve found several vintage magazines so far, maybe I’ll find a real Omni magazine in one of my other boxes.

Look at the lower right — is that a planet or a froggy eyeball?

I was in danger of tossing this calendar into the recycling bin when I thought:  “Oh what the heck”, and listed it on Amazon. That was a few months ago. Today, it sold!  I sent it off to its new home, still amazed that someone wanted it, and grateful to the 21st Century that there’s such a simple way to share it.

And by the way, that anti-gravity miracle weight-loss method sounds interesting, yes?

Here’s Miss Piggy on a Life cover…

(Detail) Miss Piggy with her froggy fans…

It’s time to admit I did find some “real” Life magazines, so why not Omni? I’m pretty sure these belonged to Bob’s father, who was a stamp collector.

Now back to Miss Piggy… Wouldn’t it be fun to have a job making up stuff like this? Here’s a detail of Christmas a la the Saturday Evening Post.

Do you see the Frog in this picture?

A closer look: Miss Piggy gets to be her own Christmas Tree angel.

 Now I’m wondering if Miss Piggy was the Hello Kitty of yester-year. What do you think?

For more on the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Express Yourself

In case you were never a fan: Miss Piggy Muppet Wiki

Oh dear, she has a Facebook page

And here is some famous Miss Piggy wisdom. Take that Hello Kitty.

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Spare Room Makeover, and the Weekly Photo Challenge: Serenity

Where have all the Browncoats gone? The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the weekly challenge serenity was my DragonCon T-shirt.

“Firefly” is a long time ago now… why do I still have this shirt?

But there’s more than one kind of serenity… so, back to ‘coming clean’. Here’s a peek at my guest bedroom, the one that used to function as a big closet. (sorry, no “before” photos from the big-closet days — this is a “during” so it’s sort-of cleaned out in these photos)

The “during” room …

Spare Bedroom blahs

Yuck, right? I inherited this walnut bed and dresser from my maternal grandmother. I’ve had it since I was a child. I wanted it to have some color around it.

Here’s Sam painting the ceiling for me. Tall guys do ceilings. Short women do walls.

The patch of blue is the future for the walls. And, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: either that ceiling fan goes or I do.

Bob used this room as a big closet. He archived his clothing here, including most of the suits and ties he’d ever worn, back (I think) to the 70s, plus the extra khakis he was saving for his retirement. Maybe it’s only natural that I felt like a traitor when I started giving them away. It felt like giving away my last connection to him, but however hard, eventually its the only sane choice.  Admission: there may be a few things left in the closet… I must get to that now that I’ve remembered.

Once I finally parted with his clothes, I tended to use the room for storage too, just for different stuff.  It’s been a useful space to sort out donations, accumulating them until I had a load to deliver.

Here it is after I finally finished painting and got it cleaned up and rearranged.

Blue bedroom. Now I need a guest.

Total investment:  2 gallons of blue paint, 1 gallon of white paint, time (thank you Sam), and the two blue linen pillow cases that I put over the headboard to lighten it up. Oh wait — and a new white window-blind.

As for storage: the books-for-sale bookshelf is to the right, stock still dwindling.

What does this have to do with serenity? Well, I was hoping the blue walls would provide some.

How’d I do?

More on the Weekly Photo Challenge: Serenity

Serenity the ship

Still Selling Used Books, and the Weekly Photo Challenge: Shadowed

There were no shadows in the pea-soup fog we’ve had outside the last two days. So, I’ll take the shadow challenge literally and use the cover of my most recent book sale: Colonial Survey, by Murray Leinster.

Cover detail: it’s a little disturbing that this 1957 cover looks like it could be ripped from current headlines.

Have I mentioned how much I love vintage sci-fi covers? When I find books like this I always want to keep them just for the cover art. This cover is by Wallace Wood (1927-1981), an American comic book artist, book and magazine illustrator, and independent publisher.

I had a good sale day: two books on amazon and a sweater on eBay, plus I’ve been delivering donations and making progress on clearing out. I’ll celebrate by sharing a few more book covers. These shadowy illustrations come from the books I haven’t listed for sale… yet. I’m saving them for last because I like looking at them.

1978: Cover art by Ralph McQuarrie… early Star Wars tie-in. Lord Vader poses before what appears to be a nice Arts-and-Crafts style forest.

1960: Why is it always the women who have no clothes? (besides house-elves that is) Cover art by Ben Feder.

1958: Moonshadows! Cover art by Remy Charlip.

I can’t imagine where Bob found this 1946 British edition. I couldn’t find an attribution for this cover art. It’s my favorite though… I think this artist and Russian artist & designer Alexander Rodchenko may have been separated at birth.

No wait — maybe this one is my favorite. The floating face in the foreground and the light in the distance, snapping us back to the picture plane — brilliant. 1961 edition, Facial Justice, cover art by Vera Bock.

That’s all for today. Now it’s back to the bookshelf for me…

Have you ever judged a book by its cover?

 

For more on the Weekly Photo Challenge: Shadowed

… and a Vera Bock pinboard.

Hellebores are Blooming, and the Weekly Photo Challenge: New

Here’s what’s new in the garden: the upward-facing hellebores (aka lenten roses) I planted last spring are blooming …

They started out white in late December, and shaded to rose.

They surprised me by coming out about a month earlier than my standard hellebores, which are just now budding. That may not be a good thing: we’re expecting temperatures in the teens tonight. It’s too windy to cover them, so we’ll see how tough the blooms are.

Hellebores bloom early in the year when not much else does, keep their blooms for months, and their foliage year round.  They’re advertised to be deer-proof, an attribute I hadn’t paid much attention to until I saw Bambi wander through the back yard a few weeks ago. Plus, they self sow, so if you have a few years to invest, they’re not only a beautiful and sustainable ground-cover, they’re easy to propagate (and, don’t climb the trees or stage hostile take-overs like English ivy).

I’m going to be careful to pull the mulch back when the seeds form, so they can take root and make new hellebores next year. Here’s what the standard downward-facing hellebores look like after the blooms have been out a few weeks. This photo is from March of a previous year —

Standard hellebores: you can see the seed pods starting to form. They really are downward-facing, but they don’t look it because they’re uphill from my camera.

And here are some seedlings— it’ll be another year or two before they’re big enough to bloom.

New baby hellebores (and a soon to bloom rose-colored bud)

I have some of the standard hellebores available for pass-along. If you live close by and are interested, let me know.

Someday I’ll make it to Piccadilly Farm’s Hellebore Days. Who could resist an address on Whippoorwill Road?

Related:

More on the Weekly Photo Challenge: New

More on Piccadilly Farm.