My boyfriend found another great website that features all sorts of fun, vintage advertisements. I never get tired of flicking through them. Perfume ads are a big favourite of mine.

Another long time favourite little thing is of course vintage labels. Vintagelabels.org has a fantastic selection of luggage labels.

Oh, I made a lovely purchase yesterday. I was walking down the street on my way to work, thinking that my coat is way too warm for this nice spring weather and how I really need a new coat soon. Just about five minutes later I saw a beautiful piece of clothing in the window of this very cool shop Beamhill. The coat is from a danish label, Bruuns Bazaar and just now I found it on their website, here it is…

It’s not a very good picture (the colours look a bit lame here) but I’m so in love with this coat that I just had to post about it. The minute I put it on I knew that I had to have it! (This doesn’t happen very often, usually I think very carefully before I buy any clothes.) As I’m considerably shorter than this scary-looking model, the coat’s length is a little below the knee on me. It’s perfect with floaty skirts that I love to wear now that the weather’s warm enough. And it’s so refreshing after the dark winter months with nothing to wear except jeans, black boots and black polonecks. Welcome, fresh colours, light fabrics and higher heels!

Danish fashion labels have been very popular in Finland over the last few years. Bruuns Bazaar, Noa Noa, Day, Saint Tropez, Pilgrim and Dyrberg/Kern to name but a few. They are all very nice but if I had the power to bring one shop to Finland (or at least somewhere in Europe), it would no doubt be Anthropologie. I visited their stores in New York possibly five times in ten days, and now I regularly torture myself by going to their website. It’s a damn shame that although they have an on-line shop, they don’t ship internationally.

And before I shut up, I must mention that Ana Margarida makes fantastically pretty jewelry like in the picture above. Grande inspiracao!

Like I said in my last post, I was feeling a bit sad the other night. So, to make myself feel better I sat down to do a bit of beading. I came up with this light spring set made with silver, amazonite and pale amethyst beads, green czech firepolished crystals and a vintage silver heart.

I wasn’t happy with the photos I took so I just photoshopped (and I must add that I really don’t know much about that!) until the colours got dark and “stormy” like this. They somehow suit my night time-theme. It is also mainly at night that I do any jewellery stuff or blogging.

I am a complete night owl. Always have been, ever since I was a little girl. My brain just functions better at night! Getting up early in the morning is a nightmare for me. I was just watching Ocean’s Eleven on tv and caught a line that cracked me up as it was something with what I could totally identify. Matt Damon’s character Linus asks Rusty (played by Brad Pitt): “You suicidal?” where Rusty answers casually: “Only in the morning.” Dark humour, I know, but spot on!

Here’s a night time image that I’ve found from Agence eureca. There are just so many treasures in this girl’s wonderful picture-blog!

It’s 2 a.m. I should probably get to bed, read a couple of pages of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and then close my eyes. It has been a long day of work and study. But this post needs at least another picture so I’ll finish off with a favourite book cover from my Mika Waltari-collection. In addition to his acclaimed historical novels, plays and short stories etc Waltari also wrote ingenious detective stories. This one is a rare 2nd edition paperback of “Komisario Palmun erehdys” (”Inspector Palmu’s error) from 1952.

I thought I’d share some art that has inspired me recently.

I came across this fantastic site the other day, featuring absolutely to-die-for Art Deco prints. This one is by George Barbier.

Telefon Tel Aviv, whose music I enjoy immensely, has a particularly stylish website. You can listen to whole tracks at the “listening station” and “discography”. I only found this artist recently although I guess they’ve been around for a few years already. “I lied” from the album “Map of what is effortless” is one of my favourite songs in the world right now.

Now I’ll try to tackle my bead stash and see what I can come up with! I’ve been too busy with boring stuff lately to do anything creative. No wonder I’m feeling a bit under the weather.

Goodness me, I’ve been tagged by Kathleen!

Five is supposed to be my lucky number, so let’s see how I can manage this…

Five minutes to yourself: Well, it seems that almost every time I leave the house for work or whatever, I’m just about five minutes late and end up putting on my lipstick or earrings in the tram or elevator. If I could just have five more minutes to get ready…

Five bucks to spend right now: how would you spend it? I think that I would buy either a nice magazine (like Elle Interiör) or the Laura Ashley Spring 2006 catalogue to swoon over.

Five items in your house you could part with, right now, that you hadn’t thought of already: My closet is bursting with clothes and shoes that I shall probably never wear again. I’m sure that I could easily come up with at least five items to sell or to give away.

Five items you absolutely, positively could never part with in your house: This is difficult because I have quite a few things in my house that I really love. But let’s try…

There are two boxes under my side of the bed. One holds hundreds of photographs from the days when there were no digital cameras, so they can’t really be replaced. I would be devastated to lose them. The other box hides away my journals from the past twelve years. Every once in a while I take some of them out and read them through. It’s very important to me to be able to do that, to kind of re-live certain passages of my life through remembering how I felt about them at the time. So, in case of a fire those two boxes are what I would grab first!

Then there’s my mother’s old teddy-bear that she had received as a gift from a boy in the early 1950’s.

A very old chest that my grandmother had actually just found somewhere, abandoned when she was living in Kemiö with her second husband in the 1960’s. She knew that I had always loved it so she gave it to me when I was about sixteen years old. I could never part with it!

Our kitchen wouldn’t be the same without this vintage Nordmende Transita Deluxe transistor radio that we bought from a second hand store in Turku some years ago. It had probably been sitting in someones garage for years as it was horribly dirty and smelly, but we saw the potential in it and spent one afternoon sitting on the kitchen floor, scrubbing and cleaning it with old toothbrushes, toothpicks and cotton swabs. And it came out beautiful! It also has the best sound although it’s from the early 1960’s.

Five words you love: This is the hardest one. Argh!

lumous (finnish for “fascination”)

music

barmy (A word I’ve learned from P.G. Wodehouse’s books. This word makes me smile. If someone’s barmy, it can’t really be that bad.)

samba

taikahuilu (finnish for “magic flute”)

Ok, that’s done! Now I’m tagging… Tiffini.

I found some beautiful vintage sheet music the other day. One of them is this lovely blue Vintergatan (Winter Street in swedish) that functions nicely as a background for this wood/rose quartz necklace that I made out of my mothers old and broken necklaces from the 1950's.

Although this is a winter image, the spring is finally on it's way even to Finland. It's been raining cats and dogs for a couple of days which means that the snow and ice is melting fast! Welcome, Spring!