summer break

Even though the weather is not the postcard summertime weather we are wishing for, and we are only spending summer at home and around town, life is happening with full force and all of me and all my time is with it.

The blog is taking a little summer break - hopefully all will be back soon with renewed energy!

paper things

Let me show some paper things I magpied this month.

A book was bound to be in the mix - one of my Achilles heels when trying to thrift in a disciplined fashion is nice picture books. The one I got is full of stunning colour illustrations of the wonders of nature. The book is from the early 60s and the illustrations are by Rudolf Engel-Hardt.

I've been after a stamp collecting book for absolute yonks, to house the stamps I have waiting in envelopes to be organized. Got this perfect little vintage book that's not full at all - plenty of space for my own homeless stamps - but what's in there already is really rather lovely. Most of them are from the 60s, plus a few older ones too.

Also came across half a block of artist's tear-off paper palette sheets. I bought it to write letters on.

an elegant vintage clock

Once upon a time I rescued a gorgeous green ceramic wall clock from the faded shelves of a junk shop. Its glass dome was missing but that didn't affect its appeal, so it's been ticking away happily on our kitchen wall ever since.

Until now... because we've found another ceramic beauty recently. An off-white one with a little grey detail and some gilding. This time the glass dome is there, but on this one the movement has been replaced. Hence the three holes where the winding would have happened before, and the style of the hands doesn't really go with the style of the actual clock. One day I might get some gold or brass colour hands that have an elongated diamond shape - that would be more suited.

The make is an old Finnish one - Valmet. A company that made (and maybe still makes) tractors, rifles and clocks. Crazy, no?

The green clock has been assigned to have a vacation and is wrapped up carefully in the cupboard, while we are enjoying our new to us timepiece. Together they made too much noise in this tiny apartment...

I'm also on a bit of a vacation too - in my own home, but with my mum visiting. I'll return to here soon with more posts - this blog needs a bit more writing, replying to comments and a bit more attention in general especially that it will be 3 years soon since I began!

Hope everyone is having a nice June! See you later on!

owls on a log

Owls are not my favourite kind of vintage find - usually they strike me as quite creepy. These twins were different somehow, they come across quite cute, don't you think?

They are a salt and pepper set with a log shaped cruet. The material is silver plate on steel, plus a lot of tarnish.They will be shinier one day; I'm sure I'll clean them up at some point, although I wonder how much the tarnish might have eaten into that whisper-thin layer of silver...

I'm not filling them with seasoning - sorry owls - although they are in perfectly functioning condition. Instead I've opted for them to be in a decorative function, to keep a little plastic cactus company on top of a little shelf.

a hand-stitched letter

The other week a bubble envelope dropped through my mailbox. It revealed Anca's hand-stitched envelope which contained her reply and lots of little treats.

Vintage needle booklets were among them. I just love old needle booklets. They always come in such charming designs. I especially like that red inner with the line-drawn animals and the golden foil with the embossed spiderweb pattern.

And the extra bonus to getting a nice letter is - the stamps! There was even a stamp made out of textile in this one. Thank you Anca, it's been lovely to receive and read your hand-stitched letter!

fat lava times two

When I was a secondary school student I loved literature class. I loved the analyzing and interpreting of poems, novels and plays. There was one poem that left me totally baffled: Ode to a Grecian Urn by Keats. How weird to get inspired by a vase to the point of daisy-chaining so many words into such a poem?

All I can say now is, that I feel the same way about fat lava vases - I feel like I probably could throw together a few adoring rhymes about their bubbling high/matt glazed beauty.

These two lovelies joined my growing collection recently, both found in the same Red Cross Store, both so cheap I turned them and turned them to see where was the chip or the crack (none found). 

The slimmer vase is made by Scheurich, the tubby blue one is by Haldensleben.

Not trying to compete with Keats here, but in fact I did think of a couple of rhymes when I wrote down that previous sentence further up:


The glaze of fat lava oozes and bubbles,
How sweet when these vases turn up in doubles.

The glaze of fat lava bubbles and oozes,
Long may West German urns be found in twos(es).

(Wow, I think I really outdid myself there *facepalm*)

dusty

It's been so quiet on this blog lately that I can almost see the dust that gathered on things in my little corner of the cyberspace.

Life is like that sometimes, it just takes over. I miss blogging - I miss the thinking process, the always running thread in the part of my brain that's allocated for writing and weaving creative thoughts. Nowadays I'm living more in the immediate present, all of me is required to be with this little boy, and to take care of other rather basic things for myself and boyfriend.

Like I told about in my previous post, there is a lot to explore. He is at such a special age, everything is new, it's spring turning into summer soon and I just want him to experience all of it, as much as our surroundings and this town can offer.

Then there is the milk allergy, which we need to prove, which means a lot of trips to doctors and the hospital. Then the trying to introduce more solid foods, which is a delicate and very messy business, but the more nutritious solids he eats the less we need to think about milk.

While making all that mess, there is also the trying to keep a sane home environment. Which means an all-day-long wet cloth in one hand, or cleaning in the night after his bedtime. When he naps, it's alternating filling the laundry basket with unloading the washed laundry from the machine.

There's a lot of hands-on stuff when he's awake; dancing, bouncing, upside down somersaults, grooving sitting up, trying to avoid banged heads, and the obsession with daddy's hat, headphones, keyboard, pulling on ears and long hair, chewing on phones, silicone covers, books, socks and so on....I wouldn't switch with anyone but it is full on.

I know, I know. This post is full of baby pictures, which I kind of told myself not to do. But that's exactly it: my days and weeks are full of baby at the moment, not much else is on my mind either.

However, there's got to be a few more other kind of posts before May finishes - I received a beautiful letter, I made some sleeping bags from scratch, I ate a really nice vegan choccy mousse, and I also picked up some double scores in the thrifts (a while ago, I have to admit).

So here's a couple of fingers crossed on my free hand that I'll endure to post about them. For now, a sticky high chair and a hot cup of tea is waiting for me in the kitchen! Bon nuit!

warmer

Finally it feels like spring is really here. The threat of returning snow and cold temperatures seems distant. There's warm sunshine and signs of new life, and colours in the world again. There're thousands of little buds on the trees and they look to unfurl any minute.

It's gorgeous to wake up to another sunny day in the morning. Oh yes, we live in the realm of light again: daylight breaks at around 5am and goes on until 10pm when the sun sets.

After getting up, baby and me usually play in the sunny living room, then after the morning nap we head out - to the park and to the swings.

There are so many new things he's encountering for the first time and I love looking at everything with new eyes, noticing little things from his point of view. One of the best things about being a parent has got to be the reliving of your own childhood through helping your kid discover the world around him. 

The rest of the short spring and the whole of summer is ahead of us. It's a lovely, reassuring, expansive feeling full of promises and excitement. I hope we'll be able to get out there close to nature as much as possible. This little boy and his mommy have a lot of exploring to do!

a tiny mascot and a tiny shoe

A couple of tiny mini discoveries from the junking grounds. I don't quite know how I managed to spot them; they are rather small indeed.

The first tiny find is a little bear pin and he's is pure nostalgia for me. He was the mascot for the 1980 Olympic Games held in Moscow. I remember Misha well, even though I was too small to remember the event, but he got quite popular and my little brother and me had various forms of him around in our shared room even years later.

The second ickle thing I picked up is a key ring shaped like a little shoe. It's made with such lovely attention to detail and the leather is so nice it totally charmed me.

knitted dishcloths

Nimble-fingered crocheters know that do-it-yourself dishcloths are fun and easy to make. I always fancied making some, but just cannot make it beyond the long chain stage with a crochet hook.

Having noticed how simple they are, I thought about some sturdy, textured knit stitches that could emulate crocheting. I picked moss stitch - it seemed like the best candidate. It's chunky, it's bumpy, and the fabric edges don't roll like other types of knitting. So I sought out suitable cotton yarn on my thrifty rounds - each ball for a few cents - and cast on.

I was aiming to produce something like a swatch square, so I tried out 20 stitches by about 24 rows (then less as I decided to go smaller). The first square in turquoise shows that years spent without knitting a single row made me forget how moss stitch is done... I ended up with a mystery pattern that's like a strange version of garter stitch. Not the kind of texture I was looking for at all.

After I refreshed my memory by looking here, I did knit two squares in moss stitch in white cotton. I find them quite pleasing, especially the smaller one, which I might give to the baby to wash and play with at bath time.

I crochet-chained a hanging loop in one corner to each dishcloth square to hide the cast-off end of the yarn. Can't say that knowing as little as this simple beginner's step of crocheting wouldn't prove useful every now and then. I can only imagine what I could do if I could progress beyond that stage...

Anybody else out there who learned to knit first and can't seem to learn how to crochet?

old tea towels and linen cloths

It's one of those emerging collections. I noticed that I've stopped picking up Zik plates (I've got so many...) but lately nice old linen towels or kitchen cloths started to sneak into my thrifting basket more and more often.

This new collection is fairly quick to build, and it certainly doesn't break the bank. The tea towels tend to be cheap and crop up often in the thrifts, which is already two things in common with the Zik plates. For yet another, the good old tea towels get to be just as useful in the kitchen.

 

I try not to use them too heavily though, they are so pretty! 

Certain ones - like the plain cloth with the red edges - look more like sauna cloths. These look lovely in a freshly laundered, neatly folded pile but I'm not sure I'll be putting them to use for us. In the case of sauna things it's best to have your very own.

Sometimes I wish I was a stylist of some sort, it'd be nice to use them in pictures rather than just piling them high in cupboards - I'd love to photograph these old things with a good camera to examine their beauty properly.

I almost wrote it down but it wouldn't be entirely true: they don't make tea towels like these any more - in fact they do. Yet I'm so certain I'd never use the expensive gorgeous ones in our messy kitchen. So let me have an armful of old ones for the same cost and I won't cry if I ruin them. I love their designs though, so maybe I'd cry a little...

Look at these two chunky linen twill cloths below - they look like they had a hardworking life, but not a stain on them... I admire people who can look after their kitchen textiles in such preservative ways! One day I'd love to be able to move into an old cottage flanked by a lake in the middle of the forest, to match these two rustic towels...