MFT Guest: Kate Pearce Guest Post and Giveaway! (INT)

Today I'm very excited to have Kate Pearce on the blog for My Favorite Things.  She's been on the blog before and I've reviewed Kiss of the Rose HERE, and Blood of the Rose HERE and interviewed her HERE.  I loved Kiss of the Rose and Blood of the Rose and can't wait for Mark of the Rose (out September 6th, 2011).

Her books are some of the best historical paranormal romance's I've read and have the most gorgeous covers!  

Make sure you read to the end because there's an awesome giveaway!

For those of you unfamiliar with The Tudor Vampire Chronicles here's the description for Kiss of the Rose:

First in a sexy new series that takes a bite out of the court of King Henry VIII 
Desperate to defeat King Richard III and gain the crown, Henry Tudor made a pact with the Druids binding him and his heirs to the Druids' struggle against vampires. Ever since, the Llewellyns, a vampire- slaying family, have been in the king's employ. Now Henry VIII reigns, and his father's bargain has been almost forgotten-until bloodless corpses turn up in the king's bedchamber. To save the king, Vampire hunter Rosalind Llewellyn must form an uneasy alliance with Druid slayer Sir Christopher Ellis. But soon, Rosalind must face an unthinkable truth: that her sworn enemy may be her soulmate...

My Favorite Things.

Kate Pearce

Seeing as this is historical week, it is lucky that most of my favorite things happen to be historical. I grew up in a big family just outside London and on Sunday afternoons, my poor harassed parents, (six kids-all girls) used to take us on the Underground (the tube) up to Bethnal Green, which is in the East End of London, to the Museum of Childhood.

I loved that place. It was full of past generation’s childhood memories, toys and clothes. It was also very quiet, but you could still run around all the galleries at breakneck speed, as long as you didn’t shout too much. One of my favorite exhibits were the Victorian dolls in their incredibly fancy outfits, with their real hair and their strangely life-like eyes. Now my daughter, who is nine, hates dolls, and we’re not allowed to say the word in our house. She says the eyes are scary, and she does have a point. LOL

The other thing I loved at the museum was the miniature Victorian garden set, which was like a pre-Lego construction set with metal flowerbeds and paving stones, and little flowers on sticks that you could put in the holes in the beds. I suspect that these things had quite a lot of lead in them, as they were very malleable and probably totally toxic to small children. As kids we were actually given a set of these by an old neighbor who didn’t have children and who had them as a child in the early 1900’s. Of course, we played with them so much, we broke most of the flowers. (Which is how I know that they were very fragile.)

As an adult, I can’t collect dolls, because, well, my daughter would freak out, but I do collect fashion plates from the 1800’s from journals such as Ackermanns, which were the Vogue fashion bibles of their day. I love these prints. They were engraved and then hand-painted, mainly by women, so each one is slightly different. Apparently many of the painters couldn’t read, so they had to follow a pre-painted version of what they were trying to copy.

Do you collect anything that reminds you of your childhood, or something that is special to you?

Find Kate Pearce on her website:  http://www.katepearce.com/

The Giveaway:

Kate is giving away paperback copies of Kiss of the Rose and Blood of the Rose as well as some perfume (which I have some of and it smells lovely!)

Open Internationally!

Must be 18 or older.

Ends July 5th, 2011

To Enter: 

Answer the question Kate asked in a comment and leave contact info

 

This is just one giveaway of this great event!  For the schedule of The Favorite Things event check out the schedule post.  And make sure you head over to My Bookish Ways to see what she has going on today as well!