A Victorian Tea Party

I love this photo. It´s well over 100 years old and it makes me feel nostalgic for a simpler era in which children´s toys weren´t powered by batteries but by imagination and little boys could take part in their sisters´pretend tea parties without feeling foolish. It doesn´t belong to me but to Linda who´s a cousin of my own – and her – cousin, Neville, and these 3 Victorian children aren´t related to me but to Neville´s father´s side of the family. They were first cousins to Linda´s mother and are from left to right Marjorie Ethel Lawson, known as Madge, Frederick Charles Lawson, known as Charlie, and Anne Mabel Edwards Lawson, known as Mabel. Linda says that she loved them dearly and remembers them with great affection. She is still in touch with Charlie´s children and grandchildren.

I decided that Madge, Charlie and Mabel deserved a layout created from a kit designed especially for them and this is what I´ve done so far. To highlight the whimsical Alice In Wonderland feeling of that long ago tea party I´ve included several Victorian scraps and kept the colour scheme fairly simple using touches of orange to complement the warm sepia of the photo, and teal and turquoise as a cooler contrast.

I hope Linda will like it. Neville too although, judging by what my mother has told me about him as a child, he wasn´t at all like Charlie and if he´d ever had any sisters he´d have been likely to have played The Mad Hatter and tried to stick someone´s head into the teapot! Probably the photographer´s...