Let Me Introduce You to Someone Special

Violet, the queen of Wild Wood!

If you happen to be one of those wonderful people who subscribe to The Tea + Toast Club, then this really is no introduction. You will have met this dear character on a couple of occasions now. Firstly, you would’ve met her in the Henry Winter + Co box. The next meeting would’ve been in the Wild Wood box. But, but, but, there’s more to her than you have realised.

Eek! I’m so excited about telling you this!

For you who have yet to be formally introduced, and to The Tea + Toast Club subscribers who have only met her in stationery form, have I got a treat for you!

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Oh, hang on!

…….

OK, OK, OK. Yes, you are so right.

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She’s been tapping on my shoulder this entire time, desperate to talk to you. The poor thing. She knows how difficult it is to grab my attention when my fingers are near a keyboard and I’m writing to you!

She’s just convinced me to do this introduction in a different way to how I had originally planned. She feels that she’d like to be the one to do it. What a great idea! So, I shall stop the rambling, for just a moment, and hand you over to her.

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Hi! I’m Violet and I’m so pleased to meet you. I ….

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Oooh, Kim, now I’m feeling rather shy and nervous.
That’s OK, perfectly normal, Violet. How about you start at the beginning and tell everyone where you are from and how you came to be?

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I’m sorry about that. I’m not used to talking about myself, and I tend to freeze if I’m feeling anxious. Kim says I should tell you where I am from and how I came to be. I can do that. I’m sure I can.

I’ll start again.

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Hi, my name is Violet and I’m from Wild Wood, a tiny town amongst the hills.

I’m originally from England, a writer and traveller at heart.

Since settling in at Wild Wood I have made the most fabulous group of friends. Some of you might remember them - Henry, Elsie, Herb, Florence, George, Felix, Walter, Rupert, Rosebud. They are the loveliest of folk and have made me feel as if I’d been born here. Apparently to be considered a local you need to have been born here!

We have a special get together every Sunday at the Wild Wood Community Gardens. We make a day of it - Herb brings his soothing tea, Florence brings lamingtons, Felix is the master of soup, Elsie brings her kind caring listening ear, and everyone just has the most lovely time pottering about the garden, planting and harvesting veggies and fruit and flowers, and most of all, chatting about life.

As someone who has travelled most of my adult life, I hadn’t had the opportunity to make a steady group of friends. Acquaintances, I’ve had in abundance. But friends who feel like family, that’s been lacking. I didn’t even realise, you know? When you travel all of the time and your entire life is the not much more than the contents inside a smallish leather suitcase, it can become quite a lonely existence.

Now all of this talk might make you think I’m not aware of my real foundations, so let me reassure you by explaining how I came about.

I started out as an idea. A glittery thought in Kim’s imagination. She gets extremely nostalgic whenever she thinks about her childhood and the books that she read and the stories she created in her mind about cutesy animally peopley folk in clothes, doing peopley things and creating lovely little homes for themselves. She’s a nostalgist to the enth degree.

One day she let her imagination go a little wilder than usual, and she asked her son, Lew, if he might create something, on paper, to represent her glittery imaginings. And so, Kim and Lew became my Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, only with a much more lovely outcome. Well at least I think so;)

Lew drew and painted me in one sitting, and Kim instantly loved what he’d created, as she often does. That was the day I was born, so to speak;)

They had already created Henry Winter and a few of our friends, so it was ever so lovely to be born into a ready-made gang who lived in a delightful town called Wild Wood.

Kim then set about creating a bundle of stationery which we all posed for, and the Tea + Toast Club box: Henry Winter and Co went out to her subscribers.

I was stunned when her inbox became flooded with message after message. So many happy letter writing people declaring their love for us all. So we agreed to partake in a second box: Wild Wood, to give us an opportunity to share our beautiful town.

In the midst of all of this, Kim’s best friend, Lynda, was busily making a special gift for her. Lynda was trying to keep it as a surprise but she knew how terrible Kim is with surprises and secrets, so in the end, after many weeks mind you, Lynda decided to tell Kim what she had been working on.

Kim screamed down the phone when Lynda explained her gift. I could hear her from Lynda’s work desk! It was worrying, to be honest, as I am a quiet type who whispers most of the time, and I wondered how on earth I was to survive in such a rambunctious environment, but Lynda reassured me that although Kim has outburts of excitement, she spends most of her week in relative peace and quiet. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to hear that.

Nowadays my polymer clay form sits on Kim’s sideboard, where I get to watch over the household. Sometimes she takes me out for walks in the garden, and I have even been on a long car trip. It has made me feel more alive than ever before and now I am patiently waiting for a few of my friends to jump off the stationery and into this very much living clay form! Oh, that would be a happy, happy day!

Wink wink, nudge, nudge, Lynda;)

Thank you for taking the time to hear a little bit about me. It wasn’t so scary after all.

Love from

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Well, thank you Ms Violet for introducing yourself and sharing Lynda’s beautiful creation of you. I hope you might come back and write some more here, from time to time. Beg, grovel Plead. That would be lovely.

I really am absolutely stoked to have Violet in her multiple forms. She has added much joy to my life and the fact that my best friend has been able to bring her to life in the way that she did is just the icing on my Violet filled cake!

Stay tuned for more Wild Wood goings on. I don’t think it’s the last we’ve seen of that gorgeous little place and it’s precious characters;)

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Speaking of The Tea + Toast Club subscription …

The Bloom Tea + Toast Box will be heading on out to subscribers letter boxes this week! There are still a few spots left so if you are quick sticks, you can grab yourself one here.

Oh, and if you’d like to join in on our monthly snail mail exchange, and get back into the loveliness that is writing and receiving letters, then please join The Lovely Letters Project with a gorgeous bunch of women from all over the world!

It’s so much fun and it really does bring a sparkle to your day when you peak inside that mail box and find a letter addressed to you! Tea + Toast Club subscribers love to use their stationery goodies for writing letters to their penpals. It’s a way for Violet to have the occasional trip to her beloved England. She loves those adventures!

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This month, over at Dear Nan I will be sharing letters about how my Nan and Grandpa met, along with a sneak peek into their early married days. Oh, and a little spoiler: Felix, the black pom in the photo up there, features;)

I will also be sharing another favourite recipe from Nan’s recipe books and some lovely old photos from her wedding album. Oh, I love flicking through that old album so, so much.

If you haven’t subscribed to Dear Nan but you’d like to check it out, you are more than welcome to use your ‘free read’ option to check it out. There are multiple posts each month, plus a piece of downloadable writing paper in a very Nanna-ish design which I know she would have adored. (A big thank you to Lew for creating the illustrations).

To read the free stuff, you’ll need to make sure you are subscribed to this Betty Mae Wrote newsletter:

If you’d like to jump right in and subscribe to Dear Nan, you can do that here:

That’s it from me. I’m writing this on the weekend and I’m off to continue packaging up the Tea and Toast boxes (aka face the messy dining table!), make some sausage roll scrolls for afternoon nibbles and drinks with my sister, and then listen to some live music in town this evening. Woah, that’s all sounding rather social for this homebody. Sunday will need to be a very quiet affair;)

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