Food

Toast with garlic and olive oil. Mashed potatoes and spinach tasting of childhood.Locally grown rucola and green onions and cilantro and red radishes and lettuce leaves smelling  of spring. Humus and lentil soup and tahini. The warm smell of vegetable soup simmering on the stove. Luxurious cakes made of fair trade cocoa and bananas and nuts. Avocado sandwiches.  All the different types of mushrooms with their subtle and complex tastes. Miso and cumin and nutritional yeast and pink Himalayan salt and black salt and red paprika.
I love food. I love its smells and colors and tastes and textures. A good meal brightens up a bland day for me. It comforts my worries. I love the creativity of preparing the food, the communal feeling of sharing it with friends. The small rituals around it. Eating it from beautiful dishes. A glass of wine with your dinner.
I used to hate cooking, to be in consequence really bad at it. To consider cooking part of the infinite, repetitive and invisible work of women (even if I would do it for myself and for people who never took it for granted). I especially dreaded the sight and smell of raw meat and I would have never ever touch it or cook it, although I would eat it prepared by others. Still, I would eat the meat that bore almost no resemblance to the physicality of the living breathing animal that used to be. Shivering in disgust at the sight of bones or cartilage. My guilt unrecognized and transformed in a dread towards the organic. I would eat my foods extremely processed abusing my body to hide my empathy from myself .
Becoming vegetarian and then later vegan meant for me to finally access a free and exuberant pleasure for food. Meant never refusing myself anything. Allowing my body to feel energized and healthy. Allowing myself the joy and wonder at the infinite variety of tastes when you cook your food from scratch, when you are open to see cooking as an everyday, useful, modest and friendly form of art. Mixing tastes like you would  mix colors for a painting. A painting about a very small hope, about an almost impossible to envision- but still so important to envision- possibility for a better world for all beings.

Restraint

I am very proud of the restraint I’ve shown today at the flea market. I have only bought three small things (and we bought a boring but very practical and cheap sprouter for our kitchen, but I don’t count that ).

A very beautiful brass Art nouveau stick pin, in great condition. Not sure about this yet, but maybe I’ll convert it in a ring or pendant at some point.

An alpacca baby rattle from the forties.

And a gold plated brass ring for my collection of modest but beautifully made old jewelry.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays.

Wooden boxes

I bought this acorn shaped box at the flea market, thinking it was intended to be kept on the desk, holding the pen and ink bottle. Not that I would need such a thing, but it is so nicely made in beautiful wood, that I just couldn’t leave it behind (even if I try to reduce my buying and limit it as much as possible to small things). Searching it online, I realized the acorn is actually an ashtray (with a cigarette holder and a box for matches and stuff). But I also thought it would be very good for my ring collection. The ashtray is very practical to hold the rings I choose to wear, when I am deciding which ones to pick for the day. And it looks really nice on my shelf with the wooden and brass birds and the plastic deer.

This box, another flea market find, with its collapsible compartments was also something for smoking, a cigarette holder, I guess. Now, it’s a very pretty display case for some of my favorite brooches.

Collecting is an addiction too, isn’t it, even if much healthier and nicer than smoking.

Snapshots

Most of the antique and vintage photos I have are, of course, studio photos. But even in the ones taken outside, the people in them pose for the photographer. I like a lot these two photos, that look like the capture of an everyday moment. Neither of them has a date, but I suppose they are from the forties, judging from the outfits and hair stiles. Maybe the one with the woman walking on the street is staged, but it still has the unpredictability of the walkers by. It is definitely made by a professional photographer, obvious not just from the quality of the photo, but also from the sleeve  in which I have found the photo, with the logo of a studio in Liege. The one with the girl on the bicycle it’s an amateur photo, just a snapshot on a sunny day. It was much appreciated, though, I have found it together with some other photos of this woman in a small leather cover, made especially for holding photos. The cover was in a much too bad shape to be repaired, but I keep her photos together.

Contact print

I think this is a contact print photo from a large sheet film. It’s really beautiful and mysterious, a favorite from my collection.

It has an inscription in Hungarian on the back: “Szeretetten emlekul”, and the signature, Seiler Kato.  I understand some Hungarian and I always thought this means “I lovingly give you this as a souvenir”. (Or, “I remember you with love”). Still, I wasn’t sure which one of these two is the right translation and I was uncertain about the form of the verb, something didn’t feel right. So I typed this in google translate. Both in Romanian and English it is translated as “They have gained as a souvenir”. Much less romantic :)… to me this sentence brings the image of something gained at a country fair. Definitely google is wrong and my Hungarian is better :).

But still, I’ll ask a Hungarian friend about it and update this later.

Update: I asked my friend who’s mother tongue is Hungarian about the right translation and he said it is “I give you this as a souvenir with love.”

Animals, birds, fish and insects

My favorite type of rings to collect and wear.

Ambrotype

I have found these two glass sheet photos in a box at the flea market and I have bought them for almost nothing. They are quite beautiful (especially the one with the children and father or older brother looking down from a high balcony). I wonder what city that is. I tried to google the text, but I found nothing. It could be Brussels, maybe? The vendor told me they bring their things from Belgium and the writing is in French. I think part of the writing is covered by the black tape that protects the edges of the glass, and this is why it makes no sense, but I don’t want to unglue that tape. There is the year 1934 hand written on the glass.

I tried to find out how this process was called, getting a positive image on a sheet of glass. It’s ambrotype or wet plate collodion process. The images are very detailed and sharp, but quite difficult to scan or photograph.

Signet ring, brooches and dog

These are just part of the things I have found yesterday at the flea market.

My favorite find is this really small size signet ring, that probably was made for a child. It only fits my pinky from my left hand. It’s silver with a gold plated part, and it is kind of roughly made. I have not idea about the period, but it’s definitely vintage.

This rhinestone bracelet is from the fifties and it’s really well preserved, without missing stones. I really like that the stones are not that sparkly anymore. The marcasite brooch is not a perfect match but they look really nice together.

This brooch, from filigree brass, is marked Czechoslovakia on the clasp. It’s really nice and old (from the thirties or forties), but most of the rhinestones are missing. I’ll try to replace them with some matching old ones, when I find some.

A small celluloid pendant.

A copper thing that I don’t know what it was supposed to be (part of a necklace? a key chain?, although it’s maybe too delicate for that). Anyway, I liked all the details on this fifteenth century lady.

The vendor, which is my favorite at the flea market, gifted me this pretty silk coin purse to put all my finds in.

This dog is nothing special in itself, just a plastic toy, but it has the exact posture that my dog takes when frightened. “Better to look really menacing than afraid…” :).

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays.

Blooms

I have some blooming succulents and cacti :).

Needle pillow

I have this needle pillow from a former hat factory. We visited the building of the factory in 2009, two years after the production stopped leaving lots of women without a job. One of the very typical cases of corruption in the context of the dismantling of the socialist industry, one of the many factories artificially bankrupted. The women workers, as minor share holders, lost any control over the future of the factory when the managers sold off the majority package to another company interested in closing the factory. They protested and organized strikes but in the end, the factory was closed anyway. Today its spaces are offered for rent. When we have visited the space it looked like the women who worked there have just left. We looked at the traces they have left behind. I took home with me this black heart velvet needle pillow.