Spring

This peaceful saturday afternoon, my friend planted in our urban garden  the spring flowers that kids in school gifted us for 8th of March. We are three teachers in the house, so there were lots of flowers :).

Memory

My school finally moved to its new location. The kids showed such a contagious excitement! It was built in the seventies, especially to be a school, with large hallways and lots of light. A huge courtyard full of pine trees.

I saw these prints in one of the hallways. A dog has wandered in on the wet cement, sometimes when this school was built. You can tell it was a big dog. I ran my fingers on the marks of the paws of this dog from the past, thinking about him or her, feeling such sadness and such love for all of his/ her species, for all animals…

My birthday gifts

My birthday was almost three weeks ago, but these days seems very difficult to do things just for fun, so I kept postponing taking photos of all my gifts this year. But I really wanted to have a post about my birthday haul, because I enjoy looking back at these sort of things and I always like reading about other people’s gifts, too. So, finally I post about my gifts, even if most of the photos are blurry phone pictures.

For one year already, I have a closet for my art and embroidery supplies and other such things where I had only one shelf. The rest of the closet was one huge pile of stuff, of boxes built on top of each other. I was ok with it for a while, but lately it was driving me crazy. When I needed something in a box below, I had to take out the whole pile of things and then put everything back. So, one of my birthday gifts this year was shelves for my closet. I don’t have a before photo, but this is how my closet looks like now (even with the shelves it looks kind of cluttered, but now I know where everything is and I have easy access to all my things.)

And here it is my friend Maria installing the shelves for me.

She also gave me a nice, vegan and organic hand cream (that I didn’t take a photo of) and this great black Dala horse for my collection!

And tiny succulents. 🙂

The fluorescent nail polish is from Oana, who also gave me this bunny watch that I am wearing these days.

Rodica made me this beautiful pencil wrap, were I keep my Policromos pencils. Souris likes it, too.

I also got a lot of clothes this year (from Rodica and Alina).

Oti gave me this nice notebook, with drawings of flowers inside.

I kept watching online this Edwardian bangle for a few year now. It is hallmarked for 1911 and it’s really beautiful. I bought it with birthday money from my mother. I think it belonged to the same person as my other bangle from the same period (I bought it from the same seller).

And finally, my uncle bought me these very expensive watercolors. I already started using them a bit, but I hope to find time in the second half if November to really paint with them. The colors are so beautiful and vibrant. The pocket brush was included and I was relieved to see the hairs are synthetic.

I was got chocolates from my friend at work, but those are long gone before taking a photo of them :).

 

Evening

This is my favorite thing to work on these days.

 

Shrink plastic

My friend made for me these portraits of our dogs out of shrink plastic. She used a disposable food container made out of plastic marked #6. These containers are kind of rare, but we discovered that they have them at a vegan restaurant when we took some takeaway cake. We look up for them and save them when we find the #6 mark.

Probably the “real” shrink plastic works better, but it is nice to make these cute things out of recycled plastic. I took some photos of the process. My friend draw our dogs with sharpies.

Here it is the real size of the initial drawing, before going into the oven.

In the oven (in a non-stick pan) it curled up a lot at first, but the plastic is flexible enough while warm and it can be flattened down with a spoon.

And this is the first portrait of our dog Souris. I will glue a brooch fastener on it.

Here they are the three of them. Lulu, the black one in the middle is drawn using as a reference a favorite photo of mine in which she looks so funny and silly, but maybe it wasn’t the best reference photo for this drawing :).

She also made me these even smaller versions with holes that I transformed in a necklace that I wear a lot. Although they seems delicate, they are quite sturdy. And Lulu looks closer to her real self in this one :).

 

New old things

It’s summer and so hot these days and it seems hard to me to find the motivation to do much. I almost finished some job related things and now I am free to do whatever I want, but somehow the days pass and I don’t do much. Summer is often like this to me, I feel locked out from myself, with a foggy and scattered mind. So, for now, I will only post some new things I have found, in a rare visit to the flea market, online and in a vintage shop I visit quite often.

This is a pretty needlepoint bag, in a really good shape. I’m not sure if it is from the twenties or thirties or it’s something newer (the sixties?) made in that spirit. I am actually inclined to believe it is from the twenties, but never really used or something. I will keep it in my bag, holding embroidery stuff, when I go to work in the park (I do this sometimes, meeting friends in the park and stitching while we talk and it’s one of my favorite things to do).

This is a lucky flea market find, an Egyptian scarab ring, something that I kept hoping to find. It has Egyptian hallmarks, but I didn’t research them yet. I think it’s from the forties of fifties.

Another pretty ring, made of bakelite and some sort of silver alloy.

And a snake, found online.

I added another piece to my Art Nouveau collection. This is a brass necklace with mother of pearl (a very cheap flea market find).

And a cute brass dog ring.

Souris’ birthday

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.

They are so helpful

I’m in vacation these days but I took this time to work on some school assignments for my textile arts M.A. Some of them were sort of interesting to make, some kind of boring, but still I had a relaxing time working on them. And I can always count on some help :).

Yoga :)

 

The dogs were really into it :).

Learning how to sew

After a very long time of planning this, I have finally started to learn how to sew. This is the first thing I’ve done, a shirt in a funny cats in outer space print, using a simple Burda magazine pattern. I was really motivated by the fabric (that I have found in a fabric outlet store), otherwise I would have probably just stopped after making several mistakes and having to rip out the thread for at least five or six times. I found especially difficult to finish the neckline hem and in the end it didn’t come out perfectly, but it is totally wearable.

It was really funny to wear this top in school. Several kids stopped me on the hallways to compliment it or to ask from where did I bought it. I could proudly say : “I made it myself.” 🙂