Sorting some vintage treasures...

A few of my finds from the Vide Greniers are settling down into new uses. The tiny Japanese holder is just right for one of the flowers from Ben's self-seeding 'meadow'. The lustres came up beautifully in the dishwasher and I'm displaying most of them in a crystal vase until I have enough to make a real difference on the chandelier. This one is the exception, because the chandelier was missing a colourful plastic lustre when I bought it, so I've just filled the space with a vintage crystal one. It does make the others look a bit down-market, but it's a start!

This isn't vintage at all, but it's a real sign of spring in our house. Our patio window doors have shutters, so no need for curtains, but I like to hang something in each window to break up the expanse of glass. I like to put these felt leaves in there once the garden is full of leaves - it seems to link the outdoors to the indoors perfectly.This is just a top I bought at the Troc Broc Sold this weekend. It's not a good style for me, but the fabric is great and I'm sure it's going to be used for making something...We never quite got Son 2's bunting finished this hols, so for now the rice sack bunting I bought in Edinburgh is filling the gap on our balcony.

My mum's vintage candlesticks look great with these tall candles I picked up in a garden centre. Thanks for the gift!Here's an older gift which comes out once the sun starts shining - my dad brought this rug from India when I was in my teens, and it looks lovely in our living area in the sunny weather.

I've started to tease out the squashed petals on these little millinery flowers I bought - they're going to come up very well, I think. Yesterday I found an absolutely wonderful post about French millinery flowers on the French Garden House - do click on the link if you're interested to see and know more about these little works of art and their place in history (including the inauguration of President George Washington)!Thanks for your comments on my last post - I had such fun creating it that it's great to know that other people enjoyed it too!

Vide Grenier at Bonrepos

'Empty Attics at Good Rest'! The charmingly named 'Bonrepos', which truly does mean 'good rest' had a Vide Greniers today (the literal translation is 'Empty Attics').

A Vide Greniers is pretty much like a car boot sale, although with fewer cars. For Americans, I guess it's a huge collection of garage sales.

There were a lot of 'brocante' sellers there - small sub-antique type collectables.

I only filled this much of my bag - does this mean it was an unsuccessful visit?Not at all! I felt positively like Kaari Meng at times with the things I was finding. I've no time or energy to photo them all or blog about them now, but I'll aim to give you the full report of my experience and finds tomorrow!

Something old, something new, something borrowed and a search for blue...

No, no-one's getting married - the title just seems to sum up the varied things I have to post today!
When I was searching for a background to photo Juanita's lovely necklace, I turned up this charming little hand-embroidered bib.

Can you imagine any baby actually wearing it? Surely it was for a Christening day, or just a present, never to be worn?? Our boys' bibs were, of necessity, a whole lot larger and a whole lot plainer!

Somebody has enbroidered the word 'pet' on it, which I never really liked, personally. I know it's a human term of endearment too, but for me, this is what a pet looks like:

Note the half-tail! That's a tail for another post...

Here's the back of the bib, which I like best of all, because it's plain cotton rather than synthetic silk. And here is an adorable cloth button. I love the little details...

Here is something new from something old - Penny's cardigan, which I showed you last week. If you remember, it was all brown, with brown buttons and no colour. This looked great with Penny's sparkly silver hair, but does nothing for my paler colouring, so I changed the buttons for vintage Mother of Pearl ones...

and shortened the cuffs until they were the right length for me, trimming them with some lovely fabric from a much-loved T-shirt which recently gave up the ghost after over 10 years' active service... Here is me, wondering how on earth to get a good photo of the cardi when the mirror is screwed to the wall opposite the window...
You've had the old and the new, and here is something borrowed: I read Kari Meng's lovely blog The Warp and the Weft today and I think that, if you don't follow it anyway, you should read today's post. Once again, she's been given access to an old treasure-house with 'tons of old stock - ribbon, notions and millinery...' She has few photos on the post, but her descriptions of how she made the fascinating contacts which led to today's news are well worth reading.

And here is something blue! You'll note from my blog that I rather like blue, but I now have a problem. The upstairs bathroom is blue and the kitchen is blue. The spare bedroom is blue-ish. The living area's spring colours have often been green/blue/yellow, but this year they are more predominantly blue. Bit by bit, I am removing the orange and rainbow colours which have kept us warm this winter, and am replacing them with blue. And, before I get to the end of the orange, I have run out of blue!

Items from the kitchen and the spare room are creeping into the living area; these vintage-quilt cushions, for example. But I have now officially run out. Tragically, I now have a Mission - to scour Troc Shops, Vide Greniers, Charity Shops etc for Blue. Life is hard, sometimes...

Bienvenue a la Braderie!

Good-value second-hand shopping,in aid of a different 'good cause' every year...in the company of cheerful ladies! These amazing women run a 'braderie' every year in the village next door, where my husband works. We were chatting about my blog and they asked if we have anything like a 'braderie' in the UK or the USA. The answer is, not really, partly because it's such a TON of work! It's most like a deposit shop, where you take your good quality second-hand items, and the shop sells them on whilst you recieve a portion of the sale price. At a braderie, however, you take your goods, labelled with all relevant details and the price you want for them, and the dedicated ladies assign each item a number. This takes place on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. You pay the ladies a certain amount, according to the number of items you have for sale, I think. Then on Saturday and Sunday, the shopping begins! As everything is clean, folded, sorted, labelled, and priced, it's nothing like a Jumble Sale. Prices are a bit higher but it's easier to shop and high-quality items are included in the sale.
Here are our cheerful ladies again, because this is the check-out, where you realise how much work has gone in to the event. Things move VERY slowly! Each of the ladies on the right has a book, with numbers 1-400 in the first book, 401-800 in the next, etc. The first lady on the left looks at each of your items in turn, calling out the number, description and price. The lady on the right with the correct book stops chatting with a start, finds the number, and checks that the description is correct and crosses out the item. On Sunday evening or Monday the vendors turn up and find out from the books how much money they have made.

As this badly photographed banner shows, every year (over the last 20 years) the money raised has gone to a different local project - a computer room for the village, books for the nursery school, a play centre...

This village bradrie is particularly cheerful. Last year I turned up just after their lunch break, and the ladies insisted on my trying several of the home-made cakes they were sharing. This year I arrived during a crowded moment, and suddenly one of the woman jumped up, grabbed a claxon and hooted it loudly. She announced: 'We have a winner!' They had arranged some kind of prize and one of the shoppers had unwittingly won their goody bag. The atmosphere is punctuated by gales of laughter, and last year one of the elderly ladies had just arrived on the back of a motorbike, driven by a very hunky young man. The screams of delight were wild and long-lasting.

Now, if anyone knows anything about France, you may find this as unusual as I do. People really are very quiet and restrained, and don't want to make a display of themselves in public. Women in particlar stay graceful and calm... except here. The cheerful ladies invited me to join them to 'experience the spirit of braderie'. They say, 'we laugh a lot, we eat a lot, we work hard...' I actually don't think I have the time, as I teach every day, but it would be quite an experience...
As you can see from my photos, I bought a vintage platter, two little mauve planters, a crochet jumper, a groovy T-shirt (in most backgrounds), a book and a very non-French DVD. The total came to 15 euros. I also met my friend Sylvie, who said 'people are going to think we share the same address!', referring to the fact that we seem to meet at every second-hand shopping opportunity in the area!And, as always, when I came out, under my windscreen wipers was a flyer about another forthcoming event of interest to braderie-goers...

I also want to tell you about the most lovely giveaway, over at la Maison Douce. Isabel Lang, who is now based in the USA and writing in English, has an amazing European background and has organised three giveaways to celebrate her 100th post. The post tells you about her fascinating life and the reason that the three giveaways are from Portugal, England and Morocco. It is well worth reading.

Vintage baby, vintage bottles, fresh flowers...

This little cutie-pie came out of hiding last night. I've had her since I was a child, and my mother is going to have to remind me who actually gave her to me. She's been nestling in a box with some vintage lace (as you do) since the boys were born - I thought they were far too dangerous for her! She's now on our new (second hand) CD shelves, sitting on a French embroidered mat. The CD shelves were having a 'relooking' done on them (as the French would put it), because I'd bought several charming hand painted planters yesterday:

I felt that the top shelf looked light and bright, both with the white planters and the lamp, but that the bottom shelf, despite the pleasing selection of vintage bottles, just stayed too dark. What do you think?

Lo and behold, Carol, on Raised in Cotton, has a fantastic flower display using vintage bottles on her post today. She says, 'Fresh flower toppers are one of my favorite ways to display my vintage bottles. ' I rushed out to the garden to see what I could do:

Well, in my opinion, they bring a bit of light, colour and freshness to the othewise dark shelf. It's not as glamorous as Carol's, but I think it will do:

Thanks very much to Carol, for such a simple but effective solution to my problem.

I am always reluctant to put this bottle out. We 'excavated' it from our garden when we lived in North Shields, and it's an interesting piece of history: a feeding bottle for an invalid or a baby. However, I lament the way that mothers were (and in some countries still are) encouraged to avoid breast feeding in place of the often unnecessary and probably once quite risky practice of bottle feeding, so that makes me less than keen on the bottle. Just this once, however, I'm prepared to put it out, because the vintage baby/vintage bottle link is quite special, really. I think putting the narcissi in it is quite cheeky, too - better than feeding a baby from it!

So here is my little flower baby, tucked on a shelf between an ink bottle and an 'Eiffel Tower Fruit Juices' bottle, all of them English, but now sitting on a French mat, in a French house, surrounded by French flowers.

Blue is...

... every road sign in a French town... this one particularly inspires me...

... a blue Cedar in our garden...

... some fantastic fabric I bought in Veti'relais last week...

... Great great... great Uncle Joshua's bow tie...

... a little boy in the kitchen who reminds me of our own boys...

... so I had to buy two of them...

... a recent find from the troc shop - a lovely cake tin....

... an older purchace - ikat weaving I found in a charity shop in the 1980s - still one of my favourites...

... dwarf irises on our window ledge...

... metalic blue glinting inside a Fair Trade lantern... (it's just an old metalic balloon for a bit of colour!)...

... a weird but wonderful wind chime in the kitchen...

... my personal failing - a Fair Trade blue patchwork bag which fell apart, but I can't throw it away...

... so I recently made one myself...

... and I knocked up this cushion over the summer, too...

...but THESE are something special - my grandma bought a quilt from the 1860s, we think, at a Devon jumble sale. When it fell apart my mother gave it to me to see what I could salvage. Here are two cushions from the remaining good parts...

... a detail of fabric about 150 years old...

... and another, all stitched by hand... who made it? I wonder, as I do my own inferior stitching on it...

... a modern French salt cellar in the kitchen...

... and a 1920s French water container, also in the blue and white kitchen...

... which has recently become home to some of the commemorative mugs that Ben was given as a youngster...

... and I still love blue more than any colour, so I'm once again at work on a blue project:..

...old skirts and jeans, mainly, most of them treasured until they fell apart...

I can never have enough blue!