Hello Old House. What’s Your Story?

Hi. This is a unique old house that I walk by now and again and have taken pictures of at various points during this past year.

It stands out on the street and I've never been able to not looked at this place while passing it. I've wondered about its quaint historic look and about the owners who I've never once seen but who take such great care to keep it looking as perfectly kempt as it is.

It's a small home that would have been the first structure built on what would previously have been an empty field, so based on what I know about the history of the area, that would have been sometime in the 1890s.

This style of home is called a Workman's Cottage. If you're interested in reading the history on these types of homes in Toronto there is a good write up about them here. Here's a quote from that article, 'The cottage style in Toronto is a descendant of a one storey house with a gabled roof shown at the great Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851 as an example of ideal worker’s housing that would not be cramped or unsanitary like that of so many workers in the Industrial Revolution; these homes, innovative in their day, had windows for fresh air, separate bedrooms for children, and even indoor sanitation in some cases.'

The first picture (above) was taken the other day, June 2014,

This is how it looked last month in May ...

Little Origami Shirt : A Handmade Greeting Card for a Man

c="http://www.loulou.to/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/handmade-fathers-day-card-origami-shirt.jpg" alt="handmade-fathers-day-card-origami-shirt diy" width="640" height="640" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-24157 blk-brdr">It is Father's Day here on Sunday, so I made this card featuring a tiny shirt folded from a piece of paper, with real little buttons sewn on, for my father.This would be a good card to give any man, for any occasion. I find it harder to think of good ideas to make greeting cards for men than for women, so I was pleased to find the folding instructions for it on this Youtube video.I used a pre-folded card base that came with a matching envelope, but if you wanted you could always make that part too. Other supplies included a piece of patterned paper. I happened to have some 'real' origami paper that I found during this thrifting trip, but you could use a piece of gift wrap or even plain white paper, to give it more of a dress-shirt look. The paper should be cut to a 4 x 6 inch rectangle, so for mine I just cut a 2 inch strip off the standard 6 x 6 origami sized paper. Then I used real thread to sew on some tiny buttons I had, which were salvaged from one of Nick's old shirts before it got tossed in the rag bag. They were originally used near the cuff, plus a spare sewn into the seam of the shirt. But if you don't have tiny buttons, you could use beads or sequins, or make some out of paper. Then I made a white mat from some card-stock and stuck everything together with two sided tape, although glue would work too.

Celebrating a Year of Friendship with Andrea

Regular readers will know that we enjoy spending time with our friend Andrea. Last month marked a year since our first meeting and we all thought the occasion deserved celebrating. We called it our First Friendiversary and she volunteered to make us dinner and being of Czech heritage the menu would include some of her family's traditional dishes. We love trying new things and were looking forward to tasting what she was going to make.So a week ago Saturday, Nick went to pick her up along with all the groceries she would need for her culinary creations.

Dining Amid the Treetops : A Barbecue at Isabel’s

As mentioned in yesterday's post (here) where I told you about meeting a friend I met online and her husband in real life when they came to Toronto recently. We met on a site called Second Life where our friend Isabel also met Anna. And so we all went over to her place for dinner on the Friday of their visit to the city.

Issy and her flatmate Barb hosted a lovely outdoor party on their deck, which is situated way up high on the top floor of the old home in which live. The setting was perfect and it was a beautiful night for an outdoor gathering.

Meeting An Online Friend in Real Life

A week ago Thursday we had the pleasure of finally meeting someone we've known in our virtual lives for years. Anna was a friend from our time spent on Second Life, where we used to perform a weekly musical show. It was a fantastic platform for making online friends, a few of whom we still keep in touch with two years after we last logged-in there. (I actually began my blogging days by keeping a site about all the shows we did in Second Life.)

It was very exciting going out and crossing the border from virtual to real friendship. Anna and her husband were visiting Toronto from the southern United States and, just like going on a blind date, we had to describe what we'd be wearing so we'd know one another.

We met at a place called The Rex and moments after greeting were all comfortably talking as though we'd known each other for years (which we kind of did).