Heritage Square Fashion Show and Tea

 

Period dressers and Natalie Meyer (right), 

who created most of the show costumes

 

In 1969, the L.A. Cultural Heritage Board created Heritage Square, a living history and architecture museum, where local Victorian-era houses and other buildings are collected and preserved. Visible from the Arroyo Seco (110) freeway, the colorful two-story homes are hard to miss as you're driving from downtown L.A. to Pasadena.

As attractive as Heritage Square is, I had never been. So when I got an email about a fashion show happening there yesterday, I contacted my friends Karen and Vicki, who had also never been, and bought tickets.

Sponsored by the Costumer's Guild West, the show featured fashions from the 17th up to the mid-20th centuries. Most of the outfits were created by Natalie Meyer, costumer for the Heritage Square Museum. Many audience members also dressed-up, making for quite a festive day. Tea and scones followed the show, before we toured two of the museum's restored homes. A third house, currently undergoing renovation, was stripped down to its slat walls and wood floors—fascinating to see.

Heritage Square Museum is open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and most holiday Mondays, 11:30AM-4:30PM. Highly recommended if you're interested in L.A. history and/or late 19th-century architecture.

The day's fashions:

The homes:

 Mt. Pleasant house (1876)

Hale house (1887)

Lincoln Ave. Methodist Church (1897)

John J. Ford house (1887)

Theodore Payne Foundation tour 2016

After a three-year hiatus, we agreed--once again--to be part (house #11) of the Theodore Payne native plants garden tour, April 2. We hired a professional pruner to shape-up our gardens and filled in all backyard gaps with new plants and a small path of up-cycled concrete stepping stones. If I say so myself, our yards look especially glorious this spring. See for yourself what a little bit of rain can do:

 

 Ready for the hordes to descend--some 80 people

visited our gardens on tour day

 

Backyard: the calm before the storm

 

 Luckily, our octopus agaves (two!)

decided to bloom in time for the tour

and were both magnificent

 Close-up

 

Top of the blooming agave in the backyard

(note bees enjoying the blooms)

 

Base of the backyard agave, surrounded by burberry,

manzanita, and poppies

 

Backyard view through our leafing redbud

 

Wildflowers

 

Baby blue eyes (detail)

 

Happy homeowners! (Yes, that's a brace

on my knee--long story . . .)