Sunday home decoration collection

Anna has found fantastic items for today's collection! That pillow whale is really cute :) And I love that wall behind the chair. 

Find all the featured shops in this collection as well as the featured shops from the previously pulbished collections in our growing guide of great items for the house decor here.

Bead Day

Theriault's Antique Doll Auctions-Carved wooden folk doll with wooden hands.Wearing original elaborate traditional Greenland costume. Decorated kidskin with beaded yoke, beautiful thigh-high boots.
(found it on this Pinboard. there are other antique native dolls there)

Still life photography. Silver earrings with "emeralds"

I find Instagram a very attractive kind of social media. I thought I would just slowly add my creations there, plus maybe some travel pictures... but I get more and more involved with it. There are very specific pictures that trend there depending on what you publish. 

I fell in love with an idea of the still life pictures. Last time I was interested in the still life was when I went to my art school where we painted a lot of them. Long time ago! I love still life pictures! I did not even think about it until I started coming across them in Instagram. I do not even need to paint them (I am not good at it anymore anyway), I just need to arrange some items in a nice composition and take a picture of them. 

Of course, jewellery is my main object for photography besides the glass or pottery objects and fruit. I will be sharing my experiments in the blog sometimes :)

Silver earrings with emerald green glass stones and cubic zirconia

Jewellery masterpieces. Jean Boggio

A gold necklace by Jean Boggio

Throwback Thursday

2009, VanDusen botanical garden, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Jewellery history. Snake bracelets

Do you like snake rings and bracelets? I love them! I did not make any so far... thinking that it was a too easy idea. It sure was! :) They keep coming back in fashion again and again. Here is a gorgeous modern snake bracelet, for example:

This one of a kind Weny Yue pave ruby snake cuff is accented with white opals and diamonds set in 18kt blackened white gold.

Snake bracelets were really big in the 19th century. Jewellery designers got a great inspiration for their creations when archaeologists started finding ancient gold Roman and Egyptian jewellery. The fashionistas of the 19th century wanted the replicas of the ancient jewellery, of course! 

Not all jewellery were the replicas, they were more "inspired" by the ancient style rather than replicated. You can find many examples in Internet if you search for Classical revival jewellery or Roman revival jewellery or Egyptian revival jewellery.

Jewellers did not make the snake jewellery only, of course. You can find many other samples too. My blog post would be too long if I tried to show all most common types of the revival jewellery of that time. So I will stick to just my favorite type of jewellery for that period, that is snakes :)

Gold snake bangle-bracelet, last quarter 19th century

Victorian Gold Serpent Bracelet

VICTORIAN sterling and cut coral beads coil bangle in the form of a Chinese dragon serpent with ruby eyes

VICTORIAN yellow gold snake bracelet with garnet cabochons and faceted garnet eyes, etched design on snake's head, double hinged

This is probably the most famous snake bracelet by Lalique. It is absolutely the best, don't you think?

Snake bracelet and ring designed for Sarah Bernhardt ca.1899

In case you are wondering what clothes the snake jewellery was worn with... Nothing specially made for them, just whatever was in fashion:

Yulia V. Telyakovskii, 1848 State Hermitage Museum
Picture by Gavriil Yakovlev

These are real ancient snake bracelets that have given the inspiration to the jewellers. They are not as fantastic as the later variations! 

Gold bracelet in the form of a coiled snake, 1st Century AD, Roman, Pompei

A ROMAN GOLD SNAKE BRACELET CIRCA 1ST CENTURY B.C.-1ST CENTURY A.D.

The rings are quite exquisite:

Roman gold snake rings, c. 1st century B.C.-1st century A.D.

Carrot cake

This is a guest post by Anna. She is my most active guest blogger. This is not her first recipe here. You can see her other guest posts in her page.

Usually Anna sends a picture of the whole cake to go with her recipe. This one however was so delicious that I was lucky to get a picture of one piece!

The highlight of this biscuit is the addition of the orange zest. The recipe is very simple, but the result is striking. The amount of dough that you get from the ingredients is enough to make a small cake (3 thin layers with the diameter about 18 cm (7 inches) or 2 layers with the diameter about 22-25 cm (8-9 inches) or or small baking tray of muffins.

Ingredients:

200 g (7 oz) of grated carrots

175 g (6 oz) of sugar

150 g (5,3 oz) of melted butter

175 g (6 oz) of flour

1 tsp. of baking powder

3 eggs

zest of one orange

Icing

:

400 g (14 oz) of sour cream

100 g (3,5 oz) of caster sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix carrots, sugar, melted butter, flour, baking powder, yolks and orange zest  in a large bowl with a spoon. 

2. Beat the egg whites and a couple pinches of salt with a mixer into a solid foam in another bowl.  Gently mix the dough. 

3. Heat oven to 350F. I baked 3 cake layers separately in 7" diameter tray. It took 25 minutes per each layer. I had one cooking tray though. You can also bake the whole cake in the same deep tray (it will take you 45-50 minutes) and then cut it into three layers. 

4. Mix the sour cream and the caster sugar to make the icing. Leave it to cool down in a fridge for ten minutes if it the mixture is too runny.

5. I love my biscuits impregnated with juices. This time I used freshly squeezed orange juice. It gave it an unusual taste.

6. Spread a few spoonfuls of orange juice and then the icing over each cake layer before you assemble the cake.

7. Try to take a picture of your cake before it is gone!

Beautiful nature

VanDusen botanical garden, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Jewellery masterpieces. Turquoise bracelet by Tommy Jackson

Tommy Jackson Rare Gem Grade Royston Turquoise Inlay Bracelet

Styles of Ebru art. Guest post by Katya Ryazanova

Katya Ryzanova is one of my featured guest bloggers. She has quite a few guest posts here. You can find a list of them here. Today she continues a story of ebru and shows what she and her kids have created!

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Let's talk about the ebru styles. There are surprisingly many of them!

All water drawings can be divided into two groups: the textures (abstract drawings and background drawings) and the pictures with an image (mostly flowers).

There is one more group that stands alone.  It is ebru with the words, that is the most complicated and time consuming.

Almost each kind of ebru kept the name of its creator. For example, Hatip ebru has been invented at the beginning of the 18th century by Hatip Mehmet Efendi, who was a preacher. He invented the ebru technique in which the paint is being dropped with a needle to the surface in a series of drops. Then a different color is dropped to the middle of the circles created by the first drop of paint to draw flowers without leaves and stems. The technique is used to create floral ornaments.

For a long time I could not figure out why the masters of ebru liked to repeat the same flower again and again in one picture so often. I found my answer when I started drawing ebru flowers myself. It became obvious that that repetition of an ornament was a sign of an artist's skill! It is incredibly difficult to create two identical images side by side because we are drawing on a liquid.

Can you imagine how trained your eye and your hand needs to be to pick up the same amount of paint with a needle to drop it on the surface of water again and again! They need to be absolutely identical: maybe 2, or 4 or 20 at a time! Usually they create 20 identical flowers (5 by 4) when draw in the Hatip ebru style. A master gets this skill after years and years of practice!  

Battal Ebru is another kind of the ebru technique. It is used to create textures. They usually use 4 (or so) colors to create it. The colors are splashed on to the surface of water. This technique gives a textured pattern resembling marble pattern.

Another ebry style is used for creating textured patterns. It is called comb (or scaly) ebru. Special combs are used to create it. The pattern resembles  a snake skin pattern.

Other variations of ebru are called Wave ebru (Gelgit ebru) and "the nightingale nests" (Bulbul Ebru). I won't be talking about them today :)

Katya Ryazanova

Etsy shop

Pinterest

I would like to share a few samples of ebru drawings by an artist Mustafa Duzgunman (1920 - 1990):

You can see more of his works here.