Neglected Treasures

The birds are singing, the days are getting longer - spring is on its way!! Made me want to redecorate a bit, so I changed the outfit on my dummy:

I love the hat, it´s so springy I think, with the vibrant pink and the flowers! It´s a fleamarket find from Germany and it´s very small, so I only use it for decoration purpose.


Even in the garden there are signs of spring, I´ll have to give the garden a good clear up over Easter.




I still fetch fresh vegetables from last years growing season, mainly green cabbage and leek. They are great winter vegetables - I didn´t even cover them over winter.



But let´s come to the neglected treasures.I had a little raid around my favourite vintage shops on Saturday, and of course lots of things made it home with me!

Some nice tins (again ;-) - but can you ever have enough??), an old sewing box like the one my granny had, a charming old mirror, lace, fabric and some small bits´n bobs.

In the second shop I found a whole box of sewing equipment - thread, embroidery yarn, crochet yarn, needles, fabric and these adorable needlecases!

I even found some unused stockings from the 60ies with the most delicate pattern! So naughty ;-)

Isn´t that beaded lace gorgeous? And the buttons will make beautiful centrepieces for a brooch or a pendant.

The woman who owns the shop where I found all the sewing equipment, some nice fabric, buttons and the stockings told me it all came from the same old lady. She had stored everything carefully, neatly wrapped and put away, there had even been old fashion magazines from the 30ies and 40ies and vintage slips but they were sold already (AARRGH - how annoying!!!). And although I was ever so happy having found such beautiful and useful things, it made me sad to think about the fact that this old ladies life now was for sale in a vintage warehouse, that none of her relatives appreciated the treasures she had collected and stored so carefully for many years enough to want to keep them. Well, at least some of it found a new loving home!

Home Sweet Home...

I recently set up my flickr photostream and my God, it´s addictive!! But I still found time for a little bit of shopping, bumped into this great flower-fairylights in the local shop and had to have them! They look nice draped around my tailors dummy with the vintage slip, don´t you think?

The cupboard is a fleamarket find that I´ve painted in a nice pale yellow shade and the scarf is a gift from my friend Tracy.

I made some more pictures of our home and my favourite vintage goodies for the flickr site.

Here you see a corner of our living room. On the blue cabinet a collection of beautiful ceramics made by my friend Laila Witt. The painting is the work of another friend of mine and the lovely vintage Chinese lantern was given to me by my generous and dear friend Tracy who had found it during a holiday in Brighton.

Some vintage goodies from my studio. The mirror is a fleamarket find as is the beautiful tin, the doilies and the vintage pearl necklace. The metal lace in the foreground is just stunning and comes from France and the other lace is a mix of ebay and fleamarket finds.

I have to show you this, too. It is a vintage angel from the 20ies and it comes from my home country, Germany. She looks like a beautiful fairy as she looks down from the top of my vintage Dutch mirror. I found her on ebay, the picture was quite bad so I didn´t really know what I had purchased befor the parcel arrived and oh so happy I was when I saw her! Look at the teeny tiny candle!! The seller had a blond version too and I´m so cross with myself I didn´t buy this one too!!! I guess I just have to enjoy the one I have.

The last two things I want to show you is recent work - I don´t want you to believe I´ve been lazy! The picture above shows my latest cuff. It´s built around a piece of vintage jewellery and made of layered silk and lace and embellished with a vintage appliqué, pearls of an old necklace, glassbeads and hand embroidery. The cuff was inspired by Sophia Coppolas film "Marie Antoinette" which I recently saw again.

This brooch is inspired by "Marie Antoinette", too. It´s made of a lacy vintage serviet ring combined with hand dyed tulle and embellished with lace, sequins, trim and beads.

If you want to see more, check my flickr photostream. See you soon!

Waiting for the spring....

I am so proud of myself - spent the whole afternoon yesterday cleaning our lovely conservatory and getting it ready for the spring.

We don´t use it in the cold wintermonths as it is very expensive to heat, but from the middle of march the sun is powerful enough to warm it up and we put the floor heating on, too. So I spent a wonderful sunny afternoon getting everything ready, I haven´t put the blankets and cushions out yet as it is still quite cold and I don´t want them to get damp, but apart from that everything is ready. I´m so looking forward to sitting out there drinking tea or a glass of wine, it´s my favourite room from march to octobre where I spend most of the time when I´m in the house and not in the garden. If you want to see more of our conservatory and the rest of the house, take a look at boboho where our home is featured and take a walk around our Danish farmhouse ;-)

The other thing I want to show you is this - I love flowers, so what more can I ask for?

I bought this gorgeous bracelet and the matching earrings on etsy from moonlilydesigns and oh how thrilled I was when I opened the parcel this morning!! Such delicate beadwork! Check out her shop.

So - I am definitely in the right mood for spring!

Furry Friends and woolly bits ;-)

Oh oh I have been a lazy blogger - maybe someone missed me out there? Yes? That´s nice! This time I want to show you pictures of my furry friends - our gorgeous cats and dogs (the horses come later!) For us they are dear members of the family and they enjoy quite a lot of privileges - like drinking out of the vases with flowers and squashing them... which sometimes leads to nice pictures though!

Here you see Kveiting, our 10 year old white Norwegian - he adopted us when we lived in Norway and what a great cat he is! Always gentle and calm but still incredibly confident.


And here we have Frasse, 13 years old and a lovely little stripy tiger. He moved with us from Germany - we are a truly international family with me, Frasse and our dog Snuff being German, my Partner Bjarne, Kveiting and Forest Cat Frida being Norwegian and last not least our Dane, Border Collie Mix Gustav.


No, this is NOT an enormous beaver with very small ears but our 6 year old Norwegian Forest Cat Frida. We got her from the animal rescue centre in Kristiansand, Norway and she is quite special (read: she´s lost the plot a bit), but a real beauty and obviously the picture doesn´t do her justice - I am going to post another one later, I just think it is so funny I had to share it with you! So sorry, Frida ;-)


Well, how many dogs have their own bed, boudoir style with tons of cushions... Ours do! They love it - and we have the big corner sofa for ourselves, at least sometimes! The daybed from the 20s is a fleemarket find and the cushions are of course my own design! The lazy furry creature to the left is Snuff, our gorgeous Collie/Shepard/Retriever/Elkhound/Husky Mix. He is such a great dog, self confident, patient and always friendly. He is 12 years old but still going strong! The other doggy is Gustav, our 6 year old Border Collie Mix. Do you know the New Zealand comic strip Footrot Flats? Dog, the protagonist - that´s him! He loves herding the cats, and we even caught him herding snails in the summer, it´s true!! He is quite demanding, but his love and devotion are immeasurable and I´m so happy he is part of our family, he makes me laugh all the time with his crazy ideas and naive enthusiasm for the world around him.


So far the furry friends, let´s come to the woolly bits! I want to show you some of my crochet pieces, first two lamps I made a while ago. The red one you see in the picture to the left is quite quirky and a little bit over the top, but I love it! I stripped an old lampshade and crocheted a new cover in a lovely raspberry red. The foot is vintage and a carboot-sale find and the pink, blue and green flowers add to the kitsch appeal of the lamp.

The other lamp I want to show you is kind of oriental inspired. I actually started with the beautiful beaded trim in eau de nile and purple colours, chose a matching cotton yarn and combined the shade with a vintage metal foot. This lamp is more elegant and gives a very nice light.

What I especially like with crocheted lampshades is their great texture and the pattern that emerges when you switch on the lamp. Everyone should at least have one crocheted lamp!!

It´s quite late now so the rest of the wooly bits follow soon!!

Creatures of Comfort

We had such a lot of snow in the weekend, it was amazing! Went for a walk with the doggies on saturday and it was all so beautiful and calm with the forest covered in snow. And then... saturday night.... it suddenly became 3 or 4 degrees above zero and today everything has gone!

If I can´t have snow I want it to be spring! We have a lovely conservatory that we do not use in the winter because it is quite expensive to heat it up during the dark wintermonth, but from March onwards we can sit out there on sunny days and oh what I´m looking forward to it! It´s like being out in the garden, everything is flooded with light and I love sitting there with my embroidery or crochet work!


Talking about spring and happy days, I want to show you one of my favourite artpieces, this lovely creature made by the British artist Julie Arkell which truly makes me happy every time I look at it! I purchased it some three years ago when Julie was exhibiting at my friend Tracys gallery, and it is safely placed high up in the shelves between my merry vintage English china as Gustav, our Border Collie Mix, has a sometimes unfortunate love for everything made of paper.... I even had the pleasure to meet Julie and her lovely husband as she was staying here in Denmark to be present at the opening of the exhibition, and what a great and inspiring person she is! She works with paper maché, knitting, embroidery, vintage fabric, ephemera, buttons and beads and her intriguing work employs naivity, sentiment and nostalgia. She really creates a universe of her own with her part human, part animal creatures and I find her work both very eccentric and very English - in the best imaginable way.


A book about Julie Arkell and her work has been published in 2004 by The Gallery, Ruthin Craft Centre and it is not only a fantastic visual experience but very interesting reading, too. The book is called "Julie Arkell: Home" and it is packed with pictures of her amazing work and her cosy studio. I regularly flick through it because it is a never ending source of inspiration. Julie does not have her own website, but a lot of sites have featured her work so you should be able to google her if you want to see more!
The picture also shows a collection of my vintage buckles and the dusky purple belt I made a couple of weeks ago - the colour goes perfectly along with the book cover I think ;-)


I even want to show you some of my own work, I did these embroideries before christmas and it is the first time I have incorporated mixed media techniques in my work. I was inspired by Beryl Taylors book "Mixed Media Explorations" that I had found while surfing on amazon and considered interesting enough to order. And what a good decision! Beryl is an English artist who moved to the United States a couple of years ago and her work is very detailed and combines lots of different techniques that inspired me to do the pieces shown in the pictures.


The embroideries are based on paper that I have either painted or ironed metal foil on and consist of many layers of organza and tulle fabric combined with cut out details from vintage doilies, waxed paper, vintage buttons, beadwork, some gold glimmer, metallic rub-on and hand- and machine embroidery. In the piece shown in the picture above I even used puff up paint and medallions made of friendly plastic imprinted with a stamp. I enjoyed so much working with these different techniques and I plan to make a whole series of small embroideries based on those techniques using details from vintage doilies, buttons and maybe jewellery findings. The problem is as always - time!!! So many projects and ideas buzzing around in my head it´s hard to get everything structured not to talk about getting it realized!! Some of you might be familiar with the problem.....

Treasure

Today we went to Ebeltoft, a small town nearby, to do the weekend-shopping. I popped around my favourite vintage shop and how lucky I did so!! As you can see in the picture, I found treasure! A whole stack of beautiful doilies, four fantastic old tins (I specially love the small square one in the foreground), a rhinestone buckle and some nice buttons, beads and pearls from a vintage necklace.
It is such a nice shop, and the owner is so friendly and cosy to chat with. What a great start to the weekend!


I have been a busy bee this week and continued
working on my different button projects.
We have a big dining table and it is a
complete creative mess at the moment, as the picture illustrates ;-). The workspace in my studio is simply not big enough for this kind of work where you need so many materials at hand all the time.


I have almost finished my seafoam breeze cuff and only need to line it, I´m really happy with the result and of course I want to share the picture with you! The subtle shades of aqua and turquoise combined with splashes of pink, yellow and orange make me think of relaxed summerdays on the beach - I´m looking so much forward to it! But right now we have temperatures below zero so the prospect of jumping into the cool water seems very far away....


While I have been working on the cuffs suddenly visions of kitschy, candy button rings emerged in my head, and of course the idea had to be carried out immediately! I think the rings are very funny, they have a fabulous kitsch appeal to them and they make quirky and eyecatching accessories. Three of them are for sale in my etsy shop, the other ones are going to be sent to a craft shop in England that is interested in stocking my work. I even have to finish some brooches that are going to be sent to England, but I am waiting for the broochpins I have ordered. Good thing is, if the rings should prove to be popular they are not as time-consuming to create as many of my other work and I should be able to make some money on them ;-)

Apart from all this I am working on an art event together with my friend Tracy Nors (check her blog tracy-boboho.blogspot.com for her great artwork and her website www.boboho.com to see and read about the hottest interior trends). We want to launch a pompom project, inspired by Elvis Robertson, and after having contacted her we hope to be able to turn it into an international event. I am going to write more about it next time, maybe someone out there wants to join in? In the meantime, check Elvis` blog www.pompomproject.blogspot.com

More buttons... and doilies!

Yesterday I got another parcel filled with the most scrumptious vintage buttons, so I spent the last two days making this merry cuff. I first layered pale purple wool-fabric, tulle and hand-dyed lace and then embellished the cuff with lots of buttons and glassbeads. The lining is made of vintage liberty fabric. It was a lot of work but I enjoyed every moment! I called it "Purple Rainbow Cuff" and I have actually decided to keep it for myself - I just love the purple and pink shades and think we will have many happy hours together!

I am now working on another cuff in blue-green-turquoise shades that is going to be called "Seafoam Breeze Cuff". This one will be for sale in my etsy shop, so keep looking there if you are interested!



I even made another piece for myself a couple of weeks ago, the scarf you can see in the picture on the left. I dyed vintage doilies in shades of green and pink and crocheted a black edging around each of them. Afterwards the doilies were sewn together by hand. I used mohair yarn and the fluffy effect creates an interesting contrast to the cotton doilies , but I have to say that cotton yarn works better and gives a stronger scarf.

It is incredible how the doilies change character when dyed and used in another context. They make a truly bohemian accessory and the scarf is my favourite right now!



If you like vintage stuff and bohemian style, also in interiors, you have to take a look at one of my favourite websites: Lyn Gardeners Empire Vintage, www.empirevintage.com.au/

Lyn is an Australian stylist and her home and shop have been featured in several interior magazines like Elle Interior. To me she is a real style ikon with her characteristic big hair and unique style. Her vintage universe is very feminine and sophisticated and she uses nothing but authentic vintage furniture, fashion and curiosities in her work.

I love her big hair and still try to figure out how she styles it, having dark curly hair myself I would love to adapt her hairstyle!! I think she uses a hairpiece and her hair is only just below shoulder-length whilst mine is waist-long which makes it harder to create that fluffy "bird nest" of hers!!