ABOUT SOME STUFF

(Yes, I know, I am among the more creative out there when it comes to headlines.)


We actually have two more rooms in our flat; the study and the kids' room, but they were not tidy enough to snap pics of.
(They are to the right in the pic, before our bedroom. The birdie-bathroom is to the left.)

Anyway, I intended to write about the armchairs and the wallpaper and other things quite many of you have asked about in the previous post about home already , but wasn't up to it then. So here goes now instead:

The wall paper is called Ken Kiuruista Kaunein ("Who is the Fairest of the Nightingales") and was designed by Birger Kaipiainen in the 1950's. It comes in a four colour variations and has a sister design in Kiurujen Yö ("Night of the Nightingales"). You can get it at Tapettitalo. They have an English translation of the site, and maybe, maybe, it could be possible to order abroad also.


My make up table cost me 20 euros from the finnish auction site Huuto.net, along with the stool. I also got our living room table trough that site. The stool was just a frame to which I build a seat of some left over wood from the renovation and a piece of foam, some fabric and ribbon. The lace is cut from a waxed cloth. The string shelves in the living room I spent a small fortune on, but the one here in the bedroom and the one in the study I got from my grandparents (they left one here in the flat for me) and from my mom and dad's garage.


I have the same waxed lace cloth on the shelves in the wardrobe too. I have received a lot of request to show pictures of my wardrobe during the years. Here's just a tiny sneak peek; I keep my clothes in here but also on a rack and then in the mini walk in closet in the study (among with lots of burlesque outfits and props, winter clothes and summer sandals, tools and other more undefined items…). The bedroom closets are original; I repainted them white on the outside and painted them soft pink on the inside and changed the old not-so-functional shelves into an Elfa drawer system.


(Bonus cat and cabinet radio-pic.)


A lot in our livingroom happens to be old and vintage, but the arm chairs are in fact not. They are a classic model from Finnish furniture comapy Asko that has been produced since way back. I am not sure if it has been in production constantly, but anyway, it is at least now. The chair is called Helena. It comes in a wide range of fabrics; I originally wanted a pair in a soft woven gray fabric, but one such would've cost more than the two deep red together so red it was. And better that way actually. There is also a similar chair called Richard in a classic fifties design with more patterned fabrics.

HERE'S WHERE I COME UP WITH A SMART HEADLINE IN FRENCH OR ABOUT SPRING

But not this time.

Winter is not quite over yet, but we're getting there - the days will soon be longer than the nights and the wonderfully bright light tells us that warmer days should be arriving anytime now (and also that I should wash my windows).

A high ponytail and striped shirt is a combination that not only has spring all over it, but also screams Capris! Ballerinas! Bicycling in the sunshine! French 60's pop! The last two I can fix but I do not own any capri pants nor ballerinas. Not sure about flats, but I would like a nice pair of cropped pants, only there are none to be found here and with my amount of derrière it gets a little risky relying on the internet to deliver.

Also, a nice way to pimp a basic striped tee (or just any basic shirt) is to add bait of lace to it, as a collar, or just as part of the blouse. While I let some people in the third world do the work for me on this one it should be pretty easy to do this little kind of revamping oneself.

The blouse is H&M and the bangs are not real, as you know.
EDIT: yes, the blouse is from H&M this season, the ecological cotton line. It however has an annoying zipper in the back but it's easily removed, in my opinion it serves no function (but then if you remove it you need to sew it together or add a little hook).

CANDY DRESS TRANSFORMING

Muahahahaha! Old eighties pastel dress goes in, new fab one comes out!

So I finally made it to colour this dress, which also means it will finally be worn, instead of just hanging on the rack looking sad and lonely! Can you guess which colour?

You will see the result on Christmas Eve, I think.

SOME LIGHT KITCHEN PIMPIN' IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

Those of you who read this blog know that Eddi has a house out in the countryside; at their family farm he and his brother run besides their normal jobs now that their father has retired.

At only fifitly minutes from the Helsinki city centre (and forty from where we live) it is still way out in the country side, where the snow stays white in winter, the roads are dark whitout any street lighting and people leave their doors unlocked at night (crazy people! Haven't they ever seen any horror movies?).

The wooden house is big, built in the late twenties and will be great once it is renovated - right now it has nice features but contains the worst of the seventies, eighties and nineties. It seems most of his relatives have been living there at some point, the interior isn't really in any style, but items have been bought and left there sporadically over the years.

The plan is to at some point bring out the old ceilings and dig up the old wooden floors and fix each room, but as we just fixed our flat here in the city there is nor the time, money or spirit for it for a few years to come. Or, shouldn't be. But the itch is there -so, we decided to do a little quick freshing up in the room one spends the most time in; the kitchen. A small make over, some light pimping so to say; but you can do magic with some paint and new details during one weekend.

The kitchen before:

The walls were in what I called baby poop brown, the cupboards old and worn from the eighties.

The room was full of extra stuff that had no practical or aesthetically purpose whatsoever, like an extra sink out of use. Eddi had removed most of it though, including the fugly curtains that were hanging there before I managed to get pictures...

We removed some of the cupboards on the wall to lighten the room up, reveiling a mint green colour that had been on there earlier. Not that far from the colour we had in the cans, waiting to get up on the walls!

Afterwards! A huge change.

We re-painted the ceiling white, painted all the walls robin's egg blue and changed the door knobs and handels.

And put up some shelves instead of the old cupboard.

I made us some new curtains.

At some point I intend to find us a big nice old cabinet for the china, but for now a trip to IKEA was enough. The cabinet can be used for other purposes once the perfect vintage piece comes along; I am not one of those to keep the plates and cups in a plastic bag to wait for that perfect piece to show up, I go for compromises until that.

We still intend to paint the door- and window frames, as the tree colour does not really match the pale blue walls - I am tempted to paint them in a dark red shiny colour but we will most likely go for white though. We also intend to paint the table and the chairs and get ourselves a new lamp. And a new fridge also. Perhaps another Smeg, but in another colour. Cream, or red.

(Please ignore the microwave there on the table waiting to be hidden). It feels a lot more nice to spend time in the kitchen now. This little project took us one weekend.

CANDY DRESS IN WAITING

Here's the other vintage dress I bought during my Berlin trip. It looks quitehome made, 80's goes 50's I'd guess, and has a very nice model with a big skirt with hidden pockets, a round collar and a beautiful neckline in the back.

The only thing is the colours are a bit too much in my opinion. A little bit too much candy, kind of like tutti frutti bubble gum, which I can't stand.

The colours might still work if I'd actually go for the Snowhite look and colour my hair black but as I won't I thought I'd colour the dress instead.

The stripes will still show trhough but that does not bother me (in fact it will be nice) I just want it in a shade less tootache, less eighties.

I was thinking red or purple perhaps. The zipper is pink but I can change that, maybe even to a metal ine for a more old-vintage feel. But it would be nice to get some other points of view on the colouring too so what do you think?

FLAT-TO-BE phase 4; DETAILS

I've been running around on meetings and doing errands and renovating. In other words, I've been way from the internet most of the time and that makes me feel terribly isolated.
(Such a 21- century problem, getting all anxious after couple of days away from the internet!)

But with the flat; we're getting there. (There's not too much else to blog about this week I'm afraid :)
The living room is getting it's wall paper and I've put the old, cleaned light switches back on.


A lot of thing s will be in my favorite color combination, pearl grey and white (as seen in my header among other things). The door frames for example.


My mom was cleaning out one of the closets and saved this tin jar for me. Fazer is the biggest company (and also and one of the oldest) of bred, biscuits and most of all sweets, in Finland.


We are also keeping the original wardrobe closet. I planned to paint the closets sky blue but there was a lot of pink over from the kitchen. Alas, closet is now pink.


And the kitchen is coming up. We're making it pretty much the same as the original kitchen, only with some modern benefits. Some parts were bought ready but we have also ordered some items handmade from a carpenter. We've kept the original door handles from the old kitchen.


Eddi put up the tiles yesterday. Kitchen will be ready today and I'm off now to pick up some more wall paper we've ordered!

FLAT-TO-BE, phase 1.

Or, what I've been up to lately.


Here are some pictures I took just before we started the renovation, which have now been going on for two weeks. I feel I've done nothing but renovate lately.
I hate renovations.
But I love the result.
I aimed to do as little as possible and hire as many professionals as possible, but still, in some strange ways, we see ourselves doing a lot of work all the time. Well, I guess that's the way it goes.

The flat we are moving to is my grandparent's. They moved out this winter when the whole building was having the plumming changed, into a more suitable building for those 90+. (With like, well, you know, elevators and such. Ovens that are not electrically damaged and dangerous and so on).

I spent a lot of time in this flat as a kid, and grew up just behind the corner myself. So its kind fo like going back to my roots then I guess :) Which is not a long way, only across town; barely 10 km from where I am now. But since it's at the other side of the highway bridge into -or, out of- town, making it another city, it is considered far away.
And sometimes feels like that too.
Sometimes just like home.

It looks so different now already!

We'd love to have kept the old stove, but like said; it has become kind of life threatening.

There was a lot of my granparents' stuff around. And still is, only hid in the closets for now. Tons, really, tons of books.

There hasn't really happened much in the past 40 years since they moved there - or 50 since it was built either, so there's quite a lot to do. Like taking out ugly carpets. Which I'm not doing in this picture though. I'm just pretending.

But I did break a lot of stuff! Stuff that had to be broken to get out. I felt very strong afterwards. Me and my crowbar were like this: X

The view is nice -

-you can catch a glimpse of sea from behind the trees.

More phases coming up.

TO TALLINN AND BACK

This morning I put on my blue bow shoes and bicycle dress and headed south with Eddi and Ina (who this time left her Mr.T at home).


We took the ferry across the Finnish Bay to Tallinn. ( It's not as serious as it looks :)


Eddi taking picures with his iPhone.


The result (hipstamatic for ze iphone. Works quite well, even though it gave me zombie arms here). The whole scenario to be seen here.


...And some more results. As you can see from me and Ina, the sub-theme of the day was taking photos.


The actual theme of the day was the Tallinn vintage and retro culture fair! Evergreens in Estionian, free Martinis and a lot of desireable furniture. I'll get in on that some more a bit later. You can also read more about the fair on Ina's blog.


Afterwards we went to Kompressor for stuffed pancakes and cherry juice (Cherry juice! That's something they don't sell at home!). And btw as you can see I cut the sleeves of the dress into cap sleeves as planned.


Mushrooms, blue cheese and garlic sour cream -they sure now how tho make pancakes in the Baltics! (and in Hungary too btw, even though different there).
I go to Tallinn about once or twice a year and have the pancakes at Kompressori on almost every visit. But I still always forget how to find the place, almost give up and then bump in to it by accident. Every time.




Coffee.



And then it was time to take the boat home. View from the window.


It was a fun day! (And we were almost colour-coordinated. Bring in the tuulipuvut! ;)

(my dress is vintage, the shoes from ModCloth and the small beret form Molla Mills, Eddis shirt is from VintageEija's and Ina's vintage dress is from Sivletto, if you're interested in those facts.)

WINTER JACKET

I have been in need of a new winter jacket. The black one I've been using for some yeas already has lost it's form and become soggy and less warm during this year's heavy cold. I browsed second hand- and vintage stores earlier this winter but didn't find anything suitable anywhere and kind of gave up. The other day I realized that the sales are still going on and stores are filling up with spring clothing as usual this time of year. Which always is a bit too early but worked pretty well a couple of years ago for example, when it was warm and dry enough for open heels, but this winter, with the most snow for decades, it definitely makes the consumer a winner. The winter is at it's peak now and will certainly go on for weeks still and winter clothing go for 70% off (haha!). I entered one shop and got myself a new jacket feeling content and like having fooled some sort of system here.

I got myself a straight wool jacket with a sort of slightly 40's inspired box like shape. It didn't have much of a collar though which is sort of a must for me since I hate few things more than wind sneaking upon me, so I made myself an attachable one!

Ta ta! I also got a bit of matching wool fabric and sewed myself a belt, as that might come in handy at some point, we'll see.

And yes, here I am posing in my new winter jacket, ready to take on the cold.