I have found this chocolate tin at an antique fair. It is Romanian, from 1951 (the factories used to mark the year of production on tins). It’s in such a perfect condition for its age (usually these boxes have rust on the inside or outside). And the characters on the box, even if it was produced 30 years before my childhood, are so familiar, so very much the same as the characters from my own books and toys.
These are some old hand woven fabrics we have received as gifts from a ninety years old relative of my friend. Some of these fabrics belonged to her grandmother, woven sometimes around mid-nineteen century. Really fine, intricate hand woven and died fabrics that used to adorn the heads of these unknown women or were displayed in their homes. More than 150 years old. Made by women living in a different world.
Running my fingers through the different textures and hoping that there will still be someone around on the planet 150 years from now, trying to imagine my life, my time.
One of my friend’s aunts gave her some things a couple of weeks ago. These beautiful embroidery threads are aaall miiine :). She also gave my friend some antique fabrics (the aunt is ninety and she has hand woven fabrics from her own grandmother), but I’ll post about those some other time. This thread is maybe from the seventies or eighties. I clearly remember the labels from my childhood, but they could be older because the graphics of packaging use to change very little and very rarely in socialist times. There are so many colors and nuances in the box. The light was not so good for taking photos these days, but I got tired of waiting for both good light and time to take the photos. Today I had time, so here there are a lot of not so in focus photos of beautiful thread. I hope to use them for lots of embroideries this summer.
The school year is slowly coming to an end (there is only one month left) and even if these last weeks happen to be really busy (with some unpleasant aspects, too) still the thought of the long vacation days at the horizon make everything better.
I didn’t do so good this far on my goals for this year. I planned on reading more literature and on writing more often in my diary or just writing about my thoughts and feelings more. I do write a few lines everyday in my planner, but that is more an account of what I did that day, whom did I saw, what I managed to accomplish, etc with the occasional mention of some more private thoughts. This is quite good for me, to have this routine of writing down a few things about my day, but I miss very much that feeling that you get when you write endlessly in your journal. So freeing and comfortable. Â It’s not that I wouldn’t have the time to read and write more only for the mere pleasure of doing these things, it’s more that I don’t find anymore the mental space in which to be in order to do them. The interior space in which to quiet down the thoughts about all the stuff that I need to do, about the worries, about all the trivial things from my days, the space in which I’m not constantly refreshing my email, etc. Usually I can find this special state of mind in the train, when I’m traveling during the day and the scenery keeps changing outside my windows. But I don’t travel that often… Sometimes also the rain outside creates a good space for me.
Anyway, during my summer vacation I really hope to read and write more. Also I have the ambitious plan to finish 10 embroideries and 20 drawings. Not sure if this is possible, as both these things take a lot of time for me. But I’ll try.
Meanwhile, I made these two drawings in the last month. They are not big (I used A4 paper) but still they took, I think, around 4 hours each to finish. I used to be much quicker :). I plan on drawing more of these random aspects from our house, some self-portraits and maybe some images of my street and neighborhood, too, like another kind of diary.
We celebrated our dog’s Souris birthday a week ago. He turned 5. We don’t know of course the exact day of his birth, as he is a rescue, but our vet put in his papers 1st of May as his birthday. We made him a knot from old cotton shirts and he loves it :). His sisters got their knots too, for the party :). It was really funny to watch them enjoying so much such a simple thing.
I used another roll from some Kodak 400 films that I had picked up at the flea market two or three years ago. From time to time, I really feel like using a very unpredictable film and camera, even if I really enjoy our DSLR, too. I used my Diana mini camera with this film and the results are shaky and blury and underexposed, with some accidental double exposures, too, but they capture so well the quality of that day in the forest, as film usually does. One of the rare days when everything seems good and the future full of promises.
stories of objects 