Chez Larsson

A Collector

On Saturday Sanna and I went to the Christmas market in Gamla Stan and after a nice stroll went back to her place for dinner. I brought my camera and snapped away while there.

 

Both Sanna and Sebastian love growing their own herbs and spices. both in the courtyard below the apartment and in the kitchen.

 

 

But most of all they love collecting. Avidly. The scour the auction houses and car boot sales on weekends and have some awesome finds.

 

Like this amber, jade groupe on top of a 1930’s cabinet.

 

And this 1960’s image of a mother and her baby which is one os Sanna's favorites and she's created a cute arrangement of matching objects around it in the bedroom.

 

I love this vintage bon-bon tin. Sanna does too, so much so that she has two!

 

In the living room she keeps her ever growing collection of all things turquoise & co.

 

Many of the finds are from Småland where she and her family spend summer holidays going to auctions, estate sales and flea markets.

 

Sanna likes all things vintage as you can tell so when she happens to come across a magazine from 1969 with her mom on the cover she picks that up too:).

Inherited Fossils

The previous owners of our house didn’t leave much behind but they did leave a pile of rocks and a plank of wood with some beach finds on the patio. The board quickly went and so did some of the rocks but I realized that a major part of that pile of rocks were actually really cool fossils.

 

I’ve kept the fossils out back until now but I wanted to do something with them since they are so cool. Besides the pile in the top photo I also found quite a few in the flower bed next to it and they were covered in dirt so the first thing I did was give them all a bubble bath and a good scrubbing.

 

And check them out now! Aren’t they amazing? Some are pretty and some are quite freaky. The creepiest ones are at the bottom because Wille has trypophobia and they creep him out too much. I offered to get rid of them but he thinks they’re too cool to get rid of but at the same time he doesn’t want to look at those particular ones.

 

Freaky or not, they do make a nice centerpiece on the new table out back.

Wille's DVD Collection

Quickie today.

I’m waiting for Wille to arrive back home after a week in Crete, Greece, with Martin. He should be home any minute now and I can’t wait to see him.

Meanwhile this is what Wille’s DVD collection looks like now. He used to keep his DVD’s in the Expedit in his previous room but requested shallow “DVD-depth” shelves this time. These are part of the IKEA Bestå line. Four shelves per unit are included and I added another 3x3 to maximize the space. Still plenty of room to grow his collection in there!

Martha's Moved

I guess you Americans out there are aware that Martha’s moved to the Hallmark Channel. What you didn’t know was that she did another important move too!

I’ve kept my collection of Martha Stewart Living magazines in the top cabinets in the dining area since we moved in to the house but I was running out of space. When I took this photo I’d already removed the 2009 and 2010 issues and before that wasn’t able to squeeze a single more in there.

 
Martin moving out does have it’s perks! One of them being I can finally move his collection of books on history downstairs to the boat room (which will stay intact for the time being until he has more storage space).

 
Look at all that space! Wohoo!

 
I’ve mentioned before that my Martha Stewart Living collection is complete and here it is in all its glory. All 202 issues! There’s also a pile of other current magazines, that’s the one in the top left corner. I don’t save those for longer than a year at the most.

What can I say other than; I love it!

Lotta

I have two complete collections. One is my huge stash of Martha Stewart Living (all 200 issues). The other is my complete collection of Lotta books.

Lotta is the funny, awkward and sweet heroine of a series of books for young girls and I used to love them. So much so that I wrote to the author Ester Ringnér-Lundgren who wrote them under the pseudonym Merri Vik and I received a sweet note back.  This was sometime in 70’s.

 
The Lotta books first came out in the late 50’s and as I’ve been rereading them this summer it’s definitely those early ones until the 70’s that are my favorites. One of my favorite passages is when Lotta is painting the furniture in her room (sound familiar?)…

The last book came out in the early 90’s and by that time one could tell that the author had kind of lost touch on what was “young” so they are a little bit too awkward but I still kept buying them. Last year I finally found the last missing piece of the collection on-line and thus the collection was complete.

 
For you other Swedes that may like Lotta, I just googled the author and found some fun sites including this one where all the covers can be viewed individually and with a bunch of other stuff that I’m going to explore further and there’s even an Ester Ringnér-Lundgreen society where they have Lotta meetings and celebrate her! I’m going to have to join that don’t I?

Do you have any complete or nearly complete collections of anything? What were your favorite books when you were young(er)? Do you ever reread them?