I wanted one for a long time now. This one is pretty old (I suppose it’s from the twenties or thirties) and quite pretty with its brass base and worn rhinestones. It goes really well with these other two vintage brooches.
Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays and Vintage Charm parties.
I have found these this Saturday at the flea market. Usually there are lots of postcards and antique or vintage photos to look through and I love just browsing through them, even if I am rarely buying some lately. I have a large collection of them and I don’t plan to add more to it, as they are so cheap and easy to find and so tempting. I would easily end up with them taking up too much of my limited space. But these four are really special to me.
This one is from Bucharest, Magheru Boulevard and it was sent in 1968. It is such a beautiful image. 
This is a birthday greeting card. On the back, it has a note in Serbian and it is dated 9th of September 1941. 
These seaside ones are from 1957 and 1958. The second one, says on the back “A morning at the seaside”. It’s such a beautiful and evocative photo, I think it’s my favorite from my collection of seaside cards.
We cooked versions of this dish a few times already and we really like it. I improvised this rice the first time because I had only a few ingredients in the house and I was too lazy to go shopping and we really liked the lovage in it (unusual for us to use in rice). Anyway, I really like cooking with what I have in the fridge and pantry, it makes cooking much more interesting and creative for me.
These are the ingredients (I don’t mention the quantities, because I just improvise those each time): rice, dried mushrooms, fresh mushrooms, boiled chikpeas,onions, green onions, lovage, salt.
For this rice, we cooked for half an hour some dried mushrooms (about one mug of chanterelles) with salt and then we added two mugs of rice to boil in the same water, together with the mushrooms. This gives the rice a very nice flavor.
Meanwhile, we stir fried two onions and 4 larger fresh champignons, with some salt. After the onions and mushrooms were soft and cooked, we added the rice with the dried mushrooms, some chickpeas that we have boiled with salt the day before and chopped green onions and chopped lovage. We cooked for 2-3 minutes, to let the tastes combine and this is it. In the photo, it is topped with black cumin seeds. It doesn’t take more then half an hour to prepare (besides the boiling time for the dried mushrooms) and it is very tasty and nutritious.
We went with our friends last Sunday to visit a place in a near-by village with a swamp and lots of birds. We have seen white and black egrets, some wild ducks, some storks and a hawk and we had a lazy Sunday afternoon siting on the grass and talking. Green spring grass and yellow flowers. Yellow rapeseed fields under cloudy skies. And above all these, not spoken but there, the ever present sadness at the sight of flocks of sheep with their beautiful lambs, the familiar grief at the thought of their fate.
These are digital photos taken by me and my friends. The analogue ones are still in the camera.
These are some new additions to my mismatched jewelry collection. I especially like the creepy bakelite and silver hands, very cheap finds. I’m sure the bakelite brooch is vintage, I’m not certain how old the silver pendant is, although it was looks like it was used for a long time by someone. When I bought it, I thought it might be antique, but I’m not sure.I like how the bead looks like an apple. 
I’ve also found these two beautiful old silver bands, an Art nouveau pewter ring and a celluloid owl ring.
This very small and detailed charm is for a bracelet I want to make at some point only with animals and birds. 
Linking up with Vintage Bliss Tuesdays and Vintage Charm parties.
I bought these two pieces of chalcedony these days from an exhibition of minerals. I’m slowly building a small collection. The bigger rock is from Hungarian mountains Érdohörváti, from Zempléni mountaintop and the smaller one is from Romania, from Baia Mare.
This very expired film, that also stayed a lot in the sun and heat at the flea market, has the perfect blue tint for this view of Bucharest that was always so interesting to me. A site were totalitarian power of the history and of today is made visible, while the architecture of the past is support for the present of all-encompassing consumerism.
Taken with Olympus Mju-1 camera.
It was so good and needed for me to take a long train trip. Just watching out the window and reading my book. From time to time, the train would be very slow, letting us see every detail of the trees and of the rays of light on the forest floor. Far away foggy hills. The Danube. And above all these the strange, ethereal sound of the rails, so long and high-pitched and melodic.
I took these photos with my Olympus Mju 1 camera and a very expired Kodak 200 film.
This scarab bead, carved in a very soft stone, is a flea market find from a while ago.
I’m traveling tomorrow and I’m looking forward to sit in the train and read my book. Hopefully it will be rainy, the nicest weather to be in the train.
From time to time, I remember that I would really like to draw more, even if it is something that I do quite rarely. One of the things that I would like to have till the end of the year is a notebook full of small drawings of things from nature. I was thinking to have 100 of them (till now, I maybe have 20 or 25). I took some photos of dandelions next to our building and did two drawings of them. I have always loved these modest flowers.
stories of objects 