Some new finds

These are from yesterday. I have found an Art deco pendant that is very similar to one of my rings. The pendant has a hematite stone, one of my favorite stones. It is very well made and heavy.

The bow ring is from the forties, I think. I have showed it to my mother and she says she remembers this pattern as something that older ladies would have in her childhood in the late fifties.

The other ring has two hallmarks, but I didn’t find anything about them yet. I’ll update later, when I’ll have the time/patience to search more. But it has such a beautiful, luminous stone, like a pool of sunset light.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays and Vintage Charm parties.

 

 

 

 

Flea market at home

Lately, I went very rarely to the flea market, for different reasons: being sick, being busy, too tired, raining or snowing or being too cold, etc. But yesterday, my mother told me she bought a grab bag for approximately 1 Euro and maybe I would like to check it out. But I didn’t expect a home flea market :). Apparently, it was a huge grab bag and she spread everything out on her sofa. A really absurd and unexpected image :). She had even sprayed everything with disinfectant, so I could safely brows through the small objects. I didn’t have the patience to look through everything (there are mostly uninteresting things from the eighties and nineties, that my mother would sort before throwing out the mismatched plastic earrings and spoons and forks and even one old tv remote control). But I did find 3 interesting, older brooches, one very eighties plastic marbled backed mirror, a metal pencil sharpener and a small pocket knife. The pocket knife was a commercial to chocolate and seemed older to me. Searching it online, it seems it is from the twenties or thirties. Not in perfect shape, with the rust and all, but quite interesting.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays and Vintage Charm parties.

Fairy tales

I have first seen these books in the house of one of my mother’s friends, sometimes in the mid eighties. Her kids were already college students, but she kept these special books that they used to have as children. They were published in collaboration with a Prague printing house in 1974 and they are short version of Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. What made them very special for a kid in socialist Romania was the fact that they were pop-up books. I imagine these were published in quite a small number, because I have never seen anything like them till that visit to my mother’s friend. They were something quite different from the usual idea of socialist design, that wouldn’t use so much  elements that are not really necessary for the understanding of the text.

A short time after this visit, I got pneumonia and stayed in bed for a while. There were miserable and boring days for me and my mother asked me what gift would I like for her to get me to cheer me up. I asked for books like those I have see at her friend’s house. My mother searched every bookstore in the city, but no one ever heard of such books. So, eventually, she asked her friend to borrow us the books and she kindly gifted them to me.

Even if, for my grown up eyes, I had much more interesting books, with illustrations that are closer to my present taste, even if these classic fairy tales were not my favorites (I  preferred much more stories of contemporary children that I could relate to and that had a less bleak atmosphere), still I have always kept these books with care, like the curious specimens that they are.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays  and Vintage Charm parties.

Leningrad slides

These slides are a flee market find from a while ago. I think they are from the sixties or seventies and they were used in schools, for history class. They are about WWII. Images of war in the city, tanks, ships, people looking at the lists of dead and wounded, poverty. I don’t understand what all the images represent, besides the general horror of war. The meaning of some of them is completely mysterious to me.

I think I would have looked at these images with a totally different state of mind as a kid, when all these were sad and heroic history that led to a safe and stable present. (Of course that this safety was not everyone’s experience back then also). These were images of the war against fascism, part of a history of heroism and sacrifice that led to a better present.

Now, images of war and destruction are so much part of a hopeless present (even if not in my immediate vicinity).

I photographed a few of the slides, choosing the ones that are the most enigmatic to me, the most indirectly bleak, the ones that still hold in them a hint of hope.

Saturday afternoon

So sunny and quiet but with the usual worries lurking underneath…

 

Imperfect

This was a very cheap second hand store find. A gold plated old bracelet beautifully constructed and with an interesting clasp. It has a hallmark on the clasp, but I couldn’t decipher it yet, so I’m not sure how old it is, but I would guess it’s from the forties. It’s broken in several places, but still wearable for me. I like imperfect things.

Linking up with Vintage Charm party.

 

Recall

I took these photos in 2001, in my first year as a teacher. These sunny hallways were in the building of the Art High-school, were I was a student and then, later, a teacher. A building in the center of the city feeling so stable and safe and permanent when I was a teenager dreaming to be an artist, imagining my life always connected to this place. This building will be torn down soon. The valuable land it stands on is more important than the building and the institution itself, as capital and profit is considered more important than public (art) education. The Art High-school functions now in a different location with a different, not necessarily better, vibe. In the place of the old building, will be built something more lucrative, like a luxury hotel maybe. The courtyard, where I used to sit in the grass with my friends in the last days before summer vacations is already a parking lot. In the last years before the Art High-school finally moved out (after years of protests from teachers, students and parents) the building was more and more dilapidated, crumbling under the pressure of under-funding and, in the end, complete lack of funding from the city. Now, the building stays empty and quiet, with its blue window frames, with its entrance that is so familiar to me, with its black and white checkered hallways, with the sun seeping in through its windows in thick rays of light. Flakes of dust glitter in the rays for no one to see.

A colleague gave me a piece of linoleum salvaged from the building before we moved out. I cut in it a ginkgo leaf, for memory.

 

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays.

 

Rainbow

Today, early in the morning. It lasted maybe for a minute or two, before becoming a faint, pink line.

Seaweed and ginger soup

This is such a comforting soup, especially if you have a cold. It is a soup that we liked to order at a vegan restaurant we go to. We had this soup while out with a friend and my friend Rodica decided to try to make it at home. This is the version we had at home yesterday evening. It’s really simple to make and so delicious and good for you, too.

These are the ingredients:

3 chopped onions

5 cloves of garlic

2 pieces of ginger (approximately the size of an walnut each)

30 grams organic seaweed

approximately 70 ml coconut cream

salt

We boiled the chopped onions with the salt. Meanwhile, the seaweed was hydrating for 30 minutes, after we washed them well. The garlic and the ginger were blended. After the onion was boiled, we put in the same water the seaweed and the water in which it stayed to be re-hydrated. We let it boil for 5 more minutes and then we added the blended ginger and garlic. After 1 minute, we added the coconut cream and this is it. I had two big bowls last night and I couldn’t wait to get home from school to have the leftover soup for lunch.

Art Nouveau fly brooch

I have wanted an Art nouveau insect jewelry for a long time now. I have found this bar pin online, while being sick and bored at home. It was listed as being from the fifties, but it is definitely older (I think it’s from the first decades of the twentieth century). It has a hallmark, but I can’t deciphered it right now, with my aching head and teary eyes and all. It’s in perfect condition and the rhinestones catch the light in a very pretty way.

Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays and Vintage Charm parties.