Oh, you CAN gild the lily
Come and join me in Tuscany while I gild actual lilies, paint the walls damson plum, and try to card alpaca fleece with a porcupine quill.I'm Fiona Cameron Tankard. I write, paint, and live in a farmhouse beside an ancient village, with a husband, a Maine Coon, a collie, four alpacas, some bees, and a life-size metal stag called Rudolph who has refused, on principle, to play football with the dog.Twenty years here have taught me that magic doesn't arrive on its own. You have to go and find it — in bees, old books, gold thread, and the unreasonable amount of joy to be had from a tube of gilding wax. Mostly I find it in small, slightly ridiculous places. I'd like to send you what I find.
The Wild and Gilded Letter Club
Once a month, an envelope turns up — handwritten on whatever beautiful paper I've hoarded lately (Florentine, handmade in Rome, occasionally gilded), faintly scented, and stuffed with small treasures themed around whatever's happening here: bees, a feral garden, a forgotten object, gold leaf, a story I can't stop thinking about.For five minutes, wherever you actually are, you're also under an olive tree with me, watching a swarm of bees settle on a branch as though they had somewhere rather important to be. Then the letter ends, you go back to whatever you were doing, and you smell very faintly of Tuscany for the rest of the day.
What Arrives Every Month in Each Letter
Each mailing may include:
* A themed letter
* Handmade or fine Italian paper
* Original artwork or illustrated sheets
* Recipes and traditions from Tuscany
* Language and folklore
* Small seasonal discoveries
About Fiona and Why I'm Doing This
I've lived here long enough that the Etruscans down the road no longer feel like neighbours as much as very quiet, very old colleagues. William, my husband, is a priest, which comes in handy more often than you'd think, mostly for blessing things that don't strictly need blessing.I started Wild and Gilded because I think letters matter and we’ve simply stopped writing them. It’s so lovely to get a letter, to actually hold beautiful paper that someone touched, to read words written with a fountain pen and ink that is not quite perfect and is maybe slightly smudged because a real hand wrote it. To pick up the energy and the magic of connection, even for five minutes. And to have something tangible to keep and to re-read.So that's the offer. Letters from Tuscany.