A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 2 November - T for Tea party, Grand duchess and second on the 2nd.

 Hello lovely girls,

It's November! This year has flown by. 

Today i have a painting of a tea party, very appropriate for today. And some lovely stamps as well as a samovar sticker. Then today is the second of the month so I'm going to combine the two today.

Here is my postcard that comes from Russia.

It is a painting by the Grand Duchess Romanova (Olga Alexandrovna). It is entitled The Tea Party. So of course I had to feature this one so that I can join Elizabeth and Bluebeard's T-Party with a beverage.

Wikipedia writes:

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia ( 13 June 1882 – 24 November 1960) was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia and younger sister of Emperor Nicholas II.

She was raised at the Gatchina Palace outside Saint Petersburg. Olga's relationship with her mother, Empress Marie, the daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark, was strained and distant from childhood. In contrast, she and her father were close. He died when she was 12, and her brother Nicholas became emperor.

She had a very varied life having lived through two world wars and having lived in different countries after she fled Russia.

In 1901, at 19, she married Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenburg, who was privately believed by family and friends to be homosexual. 

Their marriage of 15 years remained unconsummated, and Peter at first refused Olga's request for a divorce. The couple led separate lives and their marriage was eventually annulled by the Emperor in October 1916. The following month Olga married cavalry officer Nikolai Kulikovsky, with whom she had fallen in love several years before. 

During the First World War, the Grand Duchess served as an army nurse and was awarded a medal for personal gallantry.

 At the downfall of the Romanovs in the Russian Revolution of 1917, she fled with her husband and children to Crimea, where they lived under the threat of assassination. Her brother Nicholas and his family were shot by revolutionaries.

Olga escaped revolutionary Russia with her second husband and their two sons in February 1920. 

They joined her mother, the Dowager Empress, in Denmark. In exile, Olga acted as companion and secretary to her mother and was often sought out by Romanov impostors who claimed to be her dead relatives. She met Anna Anderson, the best-known impostor, in Berlin in 1925. After the Dowager Empress's death in 1928, Olga and her husband purchased a dairy farm in Ballerup, near Copenhagen.

 She led a simple life: raising her two sons, working on the farm and painting. During her lifetime, she painted over 2,000 works of art, which provided extra income for both her family and the charitable causes she supported.

In 1948, feeling threatened by Joseph Stalin's regime, Olga and her immediate family relocated to a farm in Campbellville, Ontario, Canada. 

With advancing age, Olga and her husband moved to a bungalow near Cooksville, Ontario. 

Colonel Kulikovsky died there in 1958. Two years later, as her health deteriorated, Olga moved with friends to a small apartment in East Toronto. She died aged 78, seven months after her older sister, Xenia. At the end of her life and afterwards, Olga was widely labelled the last Grand Duchess of Imperial Russia.

Read more about her here.

The stamps are lovely. Here is another one from the iris series I featured last week.

And then there was this cute sticker on the card too. It is a samovar, that is a metal container traditionally used to heat and boil water.

Well, what have I been doing this week. It has been a very non-descript week really.

People tell me that my blogs make them hungry as I always feature so much food. I'm not going to this week. Let's talk about the weather!

It has been very warm and sunny up until a few days ago. We have been eating out on the terrace almost every day (Oops, food again!):

Even my fuchsia thought spring was coming and started to flower:

In our village they are trimming the palm trees (Elizabeth might like to see this):

But the evenings are getting cooler and a few days ago hubby lit the stove for the first time this season:

 

This is a stove that works on almond shells (but also olive pips or pellets). I have another stove in my craft room (We don't have central heating). So when I went to make a card for my grandson's birthday, I lit the fire:

This is a lovely 'parlour' stove. I bought it second hand several years ago and it is a wood burner (No almond shells and the like, only wood).

The weather turned nasty  and I just managed to dry my washing before the storm (no rain unfortunately. We really do need rain).

On Saturday we drove through the village and saw this:

Black clouds with a bit of sun poking from underneath.

Five minutes later we saw that sunny bit had a rainbow:

Then yesterday it started to rain (at last)

 

It's the sort of weather to go and bake a cake:

It is called a Bara Brith. Here is the recipe:

That is it from me this week.

I am aware that it is also the second of the month, in which we share an old blogpost. As this one is already very long, I am only sharing a small part of a blog from November 2015:

Here is a photo of our little Precious. She has turned out to be a 'he', but we still call him Precious. 

 And finally, this is my 'funny' for this week. It's a bit disgusting really, but it did make me smile at the same time....

 As I said before, my husband and I will be celebrating our 23rd wedding anniversary this Sunday and we will probably go out for lunch somewhere. It doesn't matter really what we do. As long as we're together.
We married each other later in life, but these have been the happiest years of my life. (My husband will be 69 next week).

This says it all....

You can see the whole blog post here.

Well, my dear friends, I hope you have a very happy T-Day and I'm sending virtual hugs to all of you!

Hugs,

Lisca