Winter Warmers

Taking my cue from Sefarina's lovely Blog Windleben (http://windleben.blogspot.com.au/), here are a couple of my suggestions for cheering and sustaining you during dreary and bleak weather (two degrees this morning...!)

1. Find something to please the eye - and sit it on the windowsill

After seeing some lovely photos of glass collections online, I have just started to collect coloured glass. I have amber glass in the living room on the windowsill and blue glass in the bedroom. It looks so crisp and pretty with the white winter light coming through it, and makes the bleak weather outside the window a little less dull!

2. Bake - preferably something sweet!

I have recently borrowed Jane Brocket's Vintage Cakes (do you know her blog Yarnstorm? - http://www.yarnstorm.blogs.com/) from our great local library. Happy Days! Easy recipes that really turn out well and, as an added bonus, the house becomes nice and warm from the oven and everything ends up smelling delicious! I highly recommend the Parkin Cake and the Genoa...mmmm...

3. Listen to some good music

Music can change how I feel in a moment. I have recently re-discovered Backworld and their mellow sound is just perfect for the quiet, cool days right now...

I'm a little teapot

Sometimes without even realising it, you start collecting something. Teapots are a case in point. Both my father and I are great op-shoppers. Dad started to buy me unusual teapots when he saw them. Now they line the kitchen windowsill! He gave me this one - a very sleek, Zen-like number from Vietnam - this morning. I love it.

What are you collecting?

Catllectables... sorry!

I bought a small statue of Bast on the weekend and when I was looking for somewhere around the house to put her, I realised how many cat statues I actually have! Now I just have to convince my DH that we need to adopt one of the real thing...! What do you collect?

Ephemera

Image of the Madonna courtesy of http://www.depauw.edu

The problem with paring down is, of course, where to put everything. This is an especial problem for the inveterate collector, that is: me. I collect everything. When we go on holidays I keep train tickets, boarding passes, amusing wrappings off chocolate bars, serviettes at restaurants, newspaper clippings. And then I don't want to throw anything out because it reminds me of being there. "That wrapper was from those chocolates we bought in Tokyo!", "That was the train ticket from the day we went out to Versailles!" etc., etc. So it came as no surprise when sorting through my study yesterday to find a manila folder marked rather grandly: 'Ephemera'. I thought it might be fun for the next couple of days to sort through it and see just what this human bower bird picks up and drags back to her nest...

First up then are bits and pieces from our visit to the Museum of Russian Art at Minneapolis (http://www.tmora.org/) So beautiful but you could overlook it if you weren't making your way around 'the Twin Cities' reasonably carefully. Housed in what looked to be an old, Spanish-mission style church, it was showing an exhibition of sacred art when we were there last October. I am undecided on questions of faith but I find enormous peace in looking at Russian Orthodox icon paintings. Perhaps it's the colours used, or the expressions on those holy faces, I'm not sure. The little icon I bought did not photograph too well for some unknown reason so instead I post two other lovely ones above (the detail of the Archangel Gabriel painted by Semion Fedorovitch Ouchakov is from a print I have at home and photographed myself).

There were also other, more recent examples of Russian art at the Museum and I love that the women depicted in Konstantin G. Doroknov's "September" (above) are sorting through the cabbages. No reclining in salons for these ladies. Perhaps there's a little bit of Soviet Realism at work but I love those everyday details - the cabbages, their aprons, the kitchen. I have included two details from the painting which I photographed myself, since I couldn't find Dorokhov online.

Are you a collector on holiday?

The chaos of memories

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

-Walter Benjamin.