Friday, 27 August 2010
Caring for your furniture.
General Care.
All antique furniture requires a little care from time to time. For most items this is just a wax polish using beeswax once a year. This helps to protect the timbers from drying out and builds up to a wonderful patina over time.
Whilst this takes care of the general appearance of your antiique furniture you should also remember the parts that are not seen. At least once a year you should dust the back and the inside of your furniture. This will help to prevent any infestation, which although not a common problem in most circumstances, it can still cause problems if it goes unchecked.
Once a year you should take a candle and rub it on the drawer runners. This will make them operate smoothly and will also help to prevent wear.
Ifyou manage to break or chip a piece then it should be glued back and held with clamps as soon as possible. Remember to use a good quality wood glue. This willensure a good tight repair.
Some tips we have picked up over the years:
Mahogany furniture. Mahogany can be wax polished as with most woods once or twice a year to keep up the general appearance.If the piece is tired and looking dry it will usually respond well to a coat of boiled linseed oil (mixed with a little stain if faded) available from any DIY store. This should be applied generously and left for an hour before wiping off the excess. The day after you should buff lightly with a soft cloth. You can repeat this process many times to build up anice and resilient sheen. Do not apply linseed oil to anything make from plastic, it will melt it! For lightscratches and scuffs you shouldcover using a good mahogany stainthen apply a little linseedoil to finish.
Oak and PineFurniture. If you oak furniture is looking tired or scuffed/ scratchedthen follow the steps above. For pine furniture you are best avoiding linseed oil and just coating with a clear wax and polishing. You should always remember that period oak willusually have a very deep colour and almost mirror-like patina. Under no circumstances should you attempt to clean this. A light wax should be all that is required to ensure your furniturecontinues to look as it should.
Rosewood Furniture. For general polishing you can use either beeswax or petroleum jelly. It is worth trying both out on a small area to see which works best.
Teak Furniture. Apply a light coat of teak oil and follow the steps as per Mahogany furniture.
Gilt Mirrors. These should only ever need a light feather dusting. Never get glass cleaner on the frame as this will wear away the finish.
This guide is an on-going item. We will add to this as often as possible.
There's Faeries and then there's Fairies
I sell a wide range of Fairies and Fairy related items. I sell Fairies because I love them. They're whimsical, magical, colourful and bring smiles to everyone's faces!
Recently my husband and I attended the Spring Trade Fair at the Birmingham NEC, a famous yearly show held for retailers. It's an opportunity to meet and greet with the vendors who supply my online shop.
The NEC is HUGE and there were hundreds upon hundreds of vendors to visit and place orders with. Decisions, decisions. We knew which Fairies we wanted to stock and were amazed at some of the new lines we discovered. We held the fairies, carefully inspecting their structure, their colours, their consistencies and their quality. At first glimpse, many Fairies looked very nice but the quality and workmanship weren't what we wanted in our shop. Sure we could have bought some butt ugly fairies and flogged them really cheap, but at the end of the day, the customer would not have been totally satisfied to find the pretty fairy in the photo was basically a piece of quickly molded, painted and cheap materials that would never last for long.
After many hours and many visits to the different vendors we settled on the Nene Thomas Faeries, Country Artists Butterfly Fairies and The Fairy Way Fairies, Christine Haworth Faerie Poppets, Nemesis Now Faeries, Leonardo Fairies, Shudehill Fairies and loads of other Fairy accessories like Journals, tiles, mouse mats, gift wrap and so much more.
What do we look for when we purchase our Fairies?
QUALITY
Ceramic - Techniques Of Decoration - Dream Art Gallery
Ceramic - Techniques Of Decoration - Dream Art Gallery
The manner in which colours have been applied to a ceramic surface offers reliable clues to dating an item, clues which can be seen by the nacked eye or better still under a normal lens with a magnifying power of three to ten magnitudes.In the past the paintbrush was the only means for painting pottery. The loaded paintbrush empties the paint continuosly and the layer of paint becomes thinner as it moves across the surface. This gradual reduction in the quantity of paint on the brush creates subtle differences in the shade of colour lending greater liveliness to the images.The rising labour cost faced by factories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a widespread search for new mechanized means of decorating pottery. The first to introduce transfer printing was the english ceramicsindustry. The first transfer prints were black and wear applied over or also under the glaze. After 1750 cobalt blue was preferred and used under the glaze. Pieces using this technique cannot therefore have been manufactured before 1750. This technique consists of coating a copperplate with a thin layer of acid-resisting was onto which the etcher draws his design, exposing the bright metal underneath. The plate is then immersed in a bath of diluited acid. The Etched plate is inked and the surface wiped, leaving the ink only in the design. Finally the plate is passed through two rollers and pressed against absorbent paper which, while still wet, is pressed against the surface to be decorated, transferring the engraving to the pottery, which is then put in the oven.The deeper the incision on the copperplate, the greater the amount of colour transferred.Modern printing techniques, like those using photomechanical processes,were applied almost contemporaneously also for the decoration of pottery. The application of colour is uniform.The variation in thickness of the layer of paint and the consequent range of shades created permits a handmade brushstroke to be clearly distinguished from a printed pattern.Towards the end of the 19 th century the four-colour lithographic process was introduced for transfer painting on porcelain. A piece decorated by this method can therefore not dated to before 1880. In modern reproduction we can see the tiny coloured dots typical of the printing process instead of the touches of colour left by a brush.The quality of the painting is of prime importance in determining the commercial and artistic value of a ceramic item. It would be advisable however to adopt different criteria for assessing Asian and western production. Brushstrokes of the fineness we can admire for instance on chinese and japanese pieces can be executed more easily by the skilled hands of Asian painters than by european artists as the art of using the paintbrush for writing is taught to the chinese and japanese from childhood.
Authentic Rare Antique Ceramic
Speed Up Windows Vista using ReadyBoost
ReadyBoost - Using Your USB 2.0Flash Driveto Speed Up Windows Vista One very cool feature of Windows Vista especially for machines not natively equipped with the kind of horsepower to fully enjoy the rich visuals of Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) applications is ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost enables you to plug a USB key into your machine and have Windows Vista use it as memory.
Installing/Configuring the USB 2.0Flash Driveas Memory First I took a standard USB 2.0 key (Ill list the prerequisites shortly) and plugged it into my machine. Upon plugging the USB key into my computer, I was greeted with the standard "AutoPlay" dialog box asking how I wanted to the operating system to treat the USB key. However, with ReadyBoost I get the additional option (circled below in the screen capture) of using the key to "speed up my system".
Once I click the "Speed up my system" option, the Properties dialog box for the device is displayed where I can specify to start/stop ReadyBoost usage of the device and how much space I want used as a memory cache. (Actually, according to one of the Product Specialists here, this space is used more as a flash-based page file than true RAM, but the impact is that the more space you choose here, the more benefit youll get in terms of overall system performance.)
(In order to return to this dialog box, open the Computer window, right-click the drive (F: in this case) and select Properties. From there, click the Memory tab (as shown in the previous screen capture and adjust the settings as needed).
For the inquisitive, opening the drive in an Explorer window reveals that ReadyBoost has created a cache file of the specified size.
Things to Know About ReadyBoost If you have a USB key configured to use ReadyBoost and then insert a second key, Windows Vista will display the Properties dialog box where youll see the message on the Memory tab as shown in the following screen capture.
While ReadyBoost will work with other devices such as SD Card, CompactFlash, etc. Ive only used it with a USB key and here are the baseline requirements the team gave me regarding what ReadyBoost will work with:
The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB Devices larger than 4GB will have only 4GB used for ReadyBoost The device should have an access time of 1ms or less The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 kB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 kB random writes spread uniformly across the device The device must have at least 235 MB of free space NTFS and FAT32 are supported The initial release of ReadyBoost supports onlyONE device
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