SHE SELLS SEA SHELLS...

                                                             
...sometimes, at antiques fairs, but quite often she can't resist keeping antique seaside souvenirs.

Like these Victorian glass sand bells, paperweights filled with coloured sands from Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight.

 

This one is eight inches tall, and heavy enough to be a door stop.

 

 

I love this primitive sand painting of The Needles, created by master mariner William Carpenter, again from local coloured sands, in about 1850.

 

An antique Sea-Weed Basket, with a poem.

 

Call us not weeds - we are flowers of the sea -

For lovely and bright and gay-tinted are we,

And quite independent of sunshine or showers;

Then call us not weeds - we are Ocean's gay flowers.

 

Not nursed like the plants of a summer's parterre,

Where gales are but sighs of an evening air;

Our exquisite, fragile and delicate forms

Are nursed by the oceans and rocked by the storms.

 

The Joys of the Sea.

 

 

You can take the girl away from the seaside, but you can't take the seaside away from the girl.

 

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