Flea market finds

It was a great day at the flea market today. I’ll post tomorrow the nicest find, but these are also things that make me very glad.

A snake ring for my collection.

A silver button with enamel and a tiny rhinestone (I’ll use it on a charm bracelet) and another silver charm.

Two watch chains (I wanted one for a long time now). I’ll use the simpler one to build a charm necklace and the more intricate one is perfect as a bracelet. Watching them more closely, I have noticed that they are both marked “Murat”, which a a French jeweler. They are gold filled and probably from the twenties or thirties.

A strangely organic looking old brooch.

Another stick pin for my collection (unfortunately no more stones on this one, but I probably replace them with some).

An old  paper ring box.

A tin of colored pencils from the eighties, with some very nice shades.

A beautiful Russian tin full of interesting buttons (many of them bakelite). I think the tin is from the 1910s or 1920s.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays.

Dragons

I have these two dragons for more than 15 years. A friend of my mother found them at the flea market and gave them to me. I have no idea what they were used for or if they are parts of a larger object. But I have always liked their intricate enamel design on brass. They seem kind of old, but their age as well as their use is a mystery :).

Linking this to Idle Needle’s May’s theme in the Make, Thrift & Tell challenge.

Fed 3 camera

Sunsets, snow, storms and fog, all of these so exhilarating and mysterious, with their changing lights and the way they make ordinary things seem so special.

I took these photos with my Fed 3 camera that I have found for very cheap at the flea market a few years ago. It is in perfect condition and it is a great camera (actually the best I have), so reliable and good even in low light conditions. It is a Soviet camera produced between 1961-1979.

Dried flowers

I’m not sure how old are these brass and dried flowers in resin pendant and bracelet (found in different occasions at the flea market). Maybe they are from the sixties or seventies? The delicate silver ginkgo leaf is definitely older.

I’ve been featured! :)

On the very nice blog Thrift Core in the Thrifters around the world series!

High school girls

It’s rainy and stormy today, my favorite kind of weather but too dark to take any photos. So, I’ll post only this piece from my antique photos collection. On the back of it, someone wrote in pencil : “Souvenir from the fifth grade” (which was the final high school grade) and Arad (a town close to mine).

Old costume rings

I have found a new addition to my small collection of old costume rings. I have four of them already.

Postcards from my city

I’m not sure if these postcards are interesting from someone who doesn’t pass by most of these places almost every day, like I do, but they are definitely fascinating to me. They are from the fifties till the eighties.

Another version of this sixties card, from the same angle and printed in the eighties seemed so special to me as a kid. It is printed on silver foil and it was a very treasured piece in my collection!

Dorset style linen buttons

I have found these today at the flea market (among other great things). They have beautiful soft colors and I think they are quite old (maybe from the twenties?). The writing on the back is German, Hungarian and Romanian. They are definitely from before the war, but even if the graphics on the back seem from the twenties, sewing notion logos changed really slowly, so I can’t be sure. Anyway, they are a great find.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays Party.

A photo album

A few years ago, I have seen online this photo album. The vendor was saying that it contains photos from 1946 till 1958 of a group of friends traveling in different parts of Romania. The few photos that he posted with his add were really intriguing. My friends and I were (and are) really interested in that period, when socialism was built in Romania and we thought it could be a great material for our work. To see the changing cities and so on. We payed for it more than we usually do for our collections. But when it arrived, we were kind of disappointed. It’s true that the people in the photos traveled all around the country and they took beautiful amateur photos processed by themselves, but their images were somehow atemporal. There are almost no cities in their pictures, only nature and historical landmarks, like medieval castles and monasteries. When they visited one big city, Cluj, they took photos of a few historical buildings and especially of the botanical garden. So, not much material for our work.

But besides that, it is a really nice album, really serene with these young people traveling by train, hiking in the mountains, spotting rare animals and plants and taking beautiful, sometimes eery photos in caves, near glaciers and on mountain tops. The person who made the album even made funny little drawings for the chapter pages of each travel and wrote short comments for each photo. They seemed happy.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays Party.