Retro heaven

I love 60's teak stuff. This lamp was without a shade but we found a perfect fit from Hemtex. Even my husband liked the pink colour as it goes very well with the brown and bronze.

Is it time already?

You'll always have a minute to spare if you just choose the right clock to check the time on.

Not quite in season

I love mushrooms and the 50's so of course I just had to buy these paper borders. I don't know yet where to put them but they are pretty as they are, even on a table (or on the floor as they are in the photo).

Cows banned

We used to have our LP's in an old potato measure. As it happens, we now have a lot more LP's than before and the old measure wasn't quite big enough anymore. Luckily we found an old wooden cattle drinking trough that is perfect for holding records.

On the cutting edge

Nowadays I love cut flowers. My husband is a bit amazed that now we have tens of vases when we used to have none. As we had a four day stay in the country I splashed out and bought cut flowers for two large arrangements. One below is in the sitting room, the other (same flowers) is in the kitchen.

Who knows

What do I do with an old traffic sign? I don't know, but it looks rather good. I am not much into blue anymore (the eightie's ruined blue for me), but the sign was rather cheap and how often do you see these in flea markets? Never, is the answer! So of course we had to buy the only one and now it decorates our living room at home.

A great foursome

I got the big white Arabia platter from my mum. It has been standing on the living room table by itself. After looking at it for a while I decided to spruce things up a bit and put the table lamp on it. The vignette looked still a bit boring. After adding the two H&M apes, I was satisified. The brass apes go well with the brass rod of the lamp.

Pretty (or) useful

There made a lot of small holders of all kinds in the fifties. I don't know what they were used for (candies, keys, peanuts?) but I just love them. The latest find is this rattan one with a glass tray with red/clear stripes.

Hang on

Everybody needs a metal match box holder, don't they? Well, we do as we wanted to show off our "own" match box. The box is an exact copy of the ones that were sold in our shop. Ingelins owned the shop before us and they had created an own label. One collector had published the label on the internet and we copied the picture and printed a set and glued them to new boxes.

And the living is easy

Today was a bit hot to clean the windows/rearrange the garden furniture etc but who cares, it is summer! This year I managed to change the hall door curtains for summer. The thick curtain is great in winter as it keeps the cold out and the thin curtain even greater in summer as it keeps the flies out.

Grey matter

I found a small table from the flea market. My husband wasn't so keen on it as it was painted gold. I told him not to worry, the table would look great after I paint it. I chose a matt grey-brown colour and think the result is good enough (I used Jeanne d'Arc Living's mat grey and brown paint - mixed a bit of brown with the grey). I might still wax it to get a bit of a shine but I am not quite sure yet.

More and more

I guess you are already bored with my tins but here are a few more. I just love orange and it seems that people loved it in the fiftie´s and sixtie´s, too.

Just saying hello

We have several old globes and decided to paint one of them with black chalkboard paint. My husband first soaked off the paper (map) and after the globe had dried he painted the globe without priming it first. This globe is plastic and the finnish was perfect with only one coat of paint.  Thanks to google we found several translations for the word hello - and my husband wrote the words on the globe roughly where the language is spoken. Neat, eh?

Flowers that don't wilt

We have a "temporary" (not so temporary really, as it has been in its place for years) wall in the living room. The wall and the door are of boring brown paper. As it happens, we went to Ikea last week and found a poppy wall decoration for 12 euros. Now the wall looks a bit less dull and poppies suit our house really well as there are a lot of real poppies growing in the garden (not yet, though).

An Italian bistro

On Friday we had a Mexican feast (link...). As I was reluctant to take out all the decorations, we tuned the decorations a bit and had an Italian bistro dinner yesterday. There was spaghetti bolognese on the menu.

Have a nice Sunday!

It is not very colourful outside so once again the carnations save the day.

Side effects

We oiled the kitchen worktops last weekend and it seemed a good time to rearrange the stuff I have in the kitchen. The plate rack got a new spring look with pastel colours. And as we have a new glass cabinet in the living room I moved all the glasses from the rack to the cabinet and got room for my star copper pot collection.

Hiding behind the curtains

We have a really ugly window in our bathroom. It is from the sixties, it has been installed too low and it is simply just ugly. We have tried to find a new (I mean old but new to us) window but there seems to be no small windows to be had anywhere in Finland. At least not the kind we would like and that would suit our house. So...I had to solve the problem somehow and the curtains were the answer. I bought a dark grey fold curtain from Ellos and then some thin full length curtains from Indiska. We installed all the curtains about 40 cm above the window frame to hide the fact that the window is installed too low. And what do you know, it worked! At least when the sun isn't shining, the dark fold curtain does the work rather well. So now I can breath again while trying to find a new window. By the way, the Indiska curtains were a find...they cost in total 14,95 euros and the colour is a perfect match to the paintwork, wallpaper and wooden details (and the best thing of all: there was no need to sew, I just folded the curtains to the tassel tiebacks).

Curtains down

I hate sewing (and cutting and ironing) so last weekend was rather stressful. Luckily my husband helped me with the sewing so we finally got our hall curtains in place. Now somebody (=my husband) needs to paint the window frames and the hall would look rather nice. Oh, and we still need to change the curtain rods from white to dark ones, the white ones don't look too hot. The curtain on the door was bought at the same time as the fabric for window so they go well together. The tassels were bought separately but match well, too. I am rather proud to say that I have a really good colour memory and usually manage to buy an exact fit without samples. Don't try this at home as a good colour memory is rather rare...

Pillow talk

I love hares as pillow decorations but don't much love them in the garden (we had three hares running around a week ago and I fear for my newly planted trees and shrubs).