Flea Market Finds

This week, it's actually just one find and it wasn't a real flea market but an antique market. We have those in Wiesbaden once a month or every six weeks, I'm not exactly sure. I was looking through the upcoming flea market dates because we need to get rid of some things before we move as well and saw the antique market. I've been there once before, a few years ago, with my dad, who loves flea markets. So much actually that he took my mom there for their first date. Guess I inherited that.

It was awesome. There were so many great paintings, old machines (for example type writers, coffee grinders, etc.), chandeliers, furniture... I could've bought it all. Unfortunately, since it was all antique, everything cost about a fortune. I found lots of cute little paintings that would've looked great on our walls, but I can't afford spending 60€ on a painting that's smaller than my hand.

I did find one little treasure though!

It looks so gooey and romantic, I just had to buy it. I got it for 5€ even though the guy who sold it initially wanted 10, which makes me a little proud because I just started actually buying things like this at flea markets. Usually, I just gawked and wanted it all, but never had room for it.

Well, now I can gawk at my little swan and think up a story about it while I hopefully finish the stupid shelves that I've been working on today.

Wall Art Inspiration

In his room back at his mom's apartment, the Doctor had a huge picture on the wall. Not photo wallpaper or anything the like, but a real picture that he painted there. He told me that he'd like something similar in the new apartment and since most of the ideas are mine and rather... well, not exactly manly, I want to give him something that's his and that he can admire. Rather than the pretty paintings I'm hanging on the wall.

I googled black and white art, paintings, pictures, wall art and wall tattoos, but didn't find anything I liked. Most of it is girlish or floral and that's really not the right thing. In my head, I have a lot of ideas. But I'm not a good painter. It all looks great when I think of it, but the moment I try and draw, it turns into a mess. I need inspiration, I need something that I can look at and then draw something similar in order to make something that looks nice. The idea I had for the wall was a sort of "two against the world" or "breaking out" theme. Two people in a house on a hill (maybe those two people will be framed) and outside of the house and/or frame, everything's crazy. I thought of flesh-eating plants, zombies, wild patterns, unicorns and all that other stuff that goes on in my brain when I'm left to think.

And then, last night when I was about to fall asleep, it came to me. Insanely twisted shadow planet! For those who don't know: Insanely twisted shadow planet is an Xbox game that's rather Indie and one even I can play. It's relatively easy to draw because it's black and white and only has a few spots that are coloured and I'm pretty sure that it would look amazing.

In our life, it's sort of tradition that I watch the Doctor play Xbox. I don't watch every game he plays, but when he played Silent Hill, for example, I sat next to him annoying him because, of course, I always know better. "There's something on that wall over there!" "Go right, not left" "Oh my god there's a monster. Oops, just a tree." So having a pretty picture that reminds us of it and looks great would be perfect for our bedroom wall.

It also fits the theme of "two against the world" because well, in this game, you're playing a little space ship that needs to fight its way through an insanely twisted shadow planet. There are tons of great looking scenes in that game that we could incorporate into the picture on our wall. I'm saving a few right here so I don't forget and can get inspired by looking at them again.

I'm planning on borrowing a projector from the Doctor's workplace (he's an event engineer so they have tons of them) and projecting it on the wall in order to draw all this - and then it's time to paint! Another idea that just came to my mind was painting the curtain that will be in front of our closet with this. I'll have to think about that, I've never really painted on fabric and I'm afraid that it'd ruin the curtains, the floor or would just look weird. But it's an idea!

I could imagine something similar for a kid's room, too. Maybe not quite as dark, but hey, I'm most likely not going to use black paint but something grayish with red accents in it. We'll see about that once we're in the apartment, we still have six weeks to go and with our teeny tiny budget, wall paintings are really the last thing on our bucket list. 

Kitchen Wall Inspiration

Those past days have been beyond busy. We had our current landlord over to check out the apartment to see whether or not they want to renovate it. Well, turns out they do. We expected that but thought that we could get out early because of this, that they could just renovate it during our last two months or so. Yeah, that's not working. We get one month off but that's it.

And as if that wasn't enough, because they renovate it all, we have to get everything out. Every wallpaper, every styrofoam ceiling cover and every flooring. Well, not every flooring, luckily we left the old PVC in kitchen, hallway and bedroom. But we have to get the wooden floor out of our living room and the new PVC we put into our bathroom has to go as well.

Yep... that's going to be a lot of work. I don't even want to think about it right now. We're starting this weekend so we don't have to do it all in the last minute. The Doctor is starting with the basement room that belongs to our apartment, we pretty much have to put it all in the trash because we don't have room for it. I'm guessing that's going to take more than a weekend. Not only because there's so much stuff in there, but because it's going to be a walk down memory lane with all these boxes he hasn't looked at in years.

In the meantime, I'm continuing on my upcycled shelf, I'm hoping to finish it later today or tomorrow morning. Most likely tomorrow morning. When I'm done with that, I'm starting with the kitchen, our biggest problem because it's full of the things that the tenant before us left here. The Doctor knew her rather well, it was an old lady and his mother cared for her until she died. She gave him the apartment and everything inside it.

But now, what I actually wanted to talk about!

Once we've got rid of all the things in the kitchen, we're hoping to actually buy a new, smaller one, because the kitchen space in the new apartment is rather tiny. In case you haven't seen the post with the apartment pictures, here is one of our kitchen.

Yes, that's all. We have room for everything, even our dishwasher, but there's nothing more. The kitchen furniture goes on the left wall and the one in the front, we're not putting any furniture on the right side because then we'd hardly have room to walk through it. Instead - I can use it for decoration!

With the red tiles and the white walls (and, of course, the wooden ceiling), the whole apartment has a rather rustic look. I'm going to embrace that style and use it for the decoration. The first piece I'm using here is my favourite flea market find that I bought last week - the fat man drinking wine. After all, the kitchen is a place to eat and make delicious food and maybe have a glass of wine, so that's just perfect.

His smile makes me so happy! I rummaged through our kitchen to see if the lady left us something else that I could use and I found it hanging right on our wall! I never paid much attention to it because there just isn't any decoration here usually and I've made my peace with that. I've seen those things, of course, but I never realized they were there!

An old cheese grater is the second piece that will go on our new wall. It's super simple, doesn't take up much space and looks nice, too. It's not art, but I'm confident that it will look great once it's on the wall with the paintings and everything else.

This one is number three. A really, really old thermometer that hung on our wall. The black parts aren't dirty, that's just the colouring of the leather casing. It even shows me whether it's going to be "rainy, uncomfy or pretty", I just have to take it with me and put it up for everyone to see.

That one is just an example - a tin plate. I'm not sure whether they're popular anywhere but in Germany, but my grandma has tons of them. We found two in this apartment as well, but they're not that pretty so I'm hoping that grandma will give me one of hers. I know that she has lots of them that are in the cabinet because she doesn't have room on her walls anymore. And yes, that's how many she's got.

Those are tin spoons. My grandma has many, many of those as well. Those two aren't particularly pretty because of the weird roof thingy, but I want one or two on my wall as well. I bet it could look great after working on the wood for a bit.

I found this one right here on Pinterest and knew I had to do it right away. My grandma's and my mother are great cooks, they really are, and they've taught me a lot about it, so that's going to be my way to honour them - ask them for handwritten recipes, frame them and hang them on my kitchen wall.

There's another flea market here on sunday, I'm hoping to find more art that fits on this wall together with the other pieces. I can't wait to decorate this, it's going to be one of my favourites in the new apartment, most definitely!

Painting for starters. Or well... me.

You might have read the post where I said I'm a great cook. Well, I suck at painting. I'm not sure if you know that feeling of really wanting to do something. Like singing when your voice sounds like nails on a black board.

For me, that's painting. In my head, I have these great pictures. I know exactly how they should look. They're beautiful, rich of colour, have all these hidden little secrets. And then I start to paint. And normally, it turns out like this.

Translation: "I'm a pubic hair and I'm sitting in your fridge. Happy eating!" I don't always draw pubic hair in a fridge, this just happened to be the first thing I saw when I opened the fridge in my new apartment.

 Mind you, that's one of my better pictures. Nevertheless, I can't stop trying. I'm nowhere near perfect, but it's fun and the Doctor likes them. Or pretends to. Either way, I get to hang them from the wall and feel all fancy.

Since I don't have a huge budget and no collection of paint, I have to start out simple. Which is better anyways, because there'd be a huge mess of colours if I had dozens of paint cans. This time, the Doctor was nice and bought me some canvas and paint; ochre, brown and black.

I had a specific thing in mind so these colours weren't coincidence, I actually asked for them. I saw this picture, really simple, of four flowers on an ochre background. And I figured I could try that and see if I manage to make it look nice.

I started out with ochre, naturally. As you can see inthe picture above, the ochre looks really bright, so I only used a bit of water to make it a little thinner. Unfortunately, as it began to dry, it grew darker and darker. I went with it - what else could I have done. But since learning from mistakes is always the best kind of learning: Try your paint before you use it if you haven't used it before. See how it turns out once it's dry! Especially if it's cheap paint. Nothing against cheap paint, but it can be a bit of a surprise.

While the original painting looked a bit like canvas, this doesn't. But oh well, can't change that now! (Especially since the only white paint I have is white wood stain) I let it dry completely over night and the next day, I started distressing it a bit. I wanted it to lose some of its colour as well as look a bit old and used. I used medium rough sandpaper that I found in the Doctor's secret cabinet of wonderful things like drills and sandpaper. It's not that wonderful but it does come in handy now and then.

I managed to scrape off a bit of the top layer of the paint and I made sure to scrub extra hard over the edges and in the middle, where the wood sits against the canvas. (Not all canvas have that, but this one was so big it needed it). For a few more of those white lines, I used an old book, held it on the back of the canvas and then sandpapered over its edge.

It's still a bit dark, but doesn't look as weirdly yellowish anymore. So that was a good thing. I actually managed to sandpaper a little hole into it, luckily nobody's noticed yet. When I was done with that, I mixed the colour for the flowers. I wanted them to be really dark brown, almost black, so that's what I used the other two colours of my extraordinarily huge collection for.

Now, I've often made the mistake to mix a colour that I use for a rather big portion of the picture and then not mix enough, so I figured "better mix more this time." Unfortunately, four flowers don't need that much paint, so I ended up with way too much. I guess this kind of thing comes with experience.

My flowers, as you can see in the final picture, have dots as petals. I wanted to see what to do them best with. I used the eraser end of a pencil. It worked nicely, but I wanted to see what else would be useful. I used a paintbrush, but it didn't look the way I wanted it to look. I'm also not patient enough to draw all that, I'm the instant-result kind of person. I used body parts! Even my nose. Most of the petals were made by my index finger though. It worked, it's a bit annoying to get rid of the paint under your finger nail though. Personally, I like the finger print that comes with it in some of the petals. It just adds a bit of personality and texture to the picture, in my opinion.

That's the result. The lines aren't perfect, I used too much paint in the beginning so there's a bit of a blob there and they look a little shaky because my back and my arms were tired from drawing on the ground, but the overall result isn't too bad, in my opinion. You've seen the other picture I drew in the beginning, so I think there's at least -some- improvement visible here.

The Doctor hung it on the wall above our couch. I think he even used a new nail with the sole purpose of holding my picture up, which makes me proud, because I just hung it from one of the bazillion nails that are already stuck in our walls next to something else so it was really askew.

And now it hangs there, my first "real" painting that doesn't look as if I'd fallen into a huge trash can filled with old paint and then rolled around on some canvas. It will never hang in a gallery, but it was fun to make and I definitely learned from it. I already bought new canvas today.

Painting will most likely never be my #1 thing to do, but it's a nice change.