"It doesn't matter where you go you always bring your self ", Liesan commented on my last post here. It is true. It's a bad thing, and a good thing. Sometimes I manage to bring with me only myself and leave worries behind (like whenever I go to London), but I guess it would be too good to be true to be able to escape worries and unfinished matters at home too. I'm the princess with a pea under her huge pile of mattresses, whenever there's something wrong it keeps on gnawing on my nerves. If I could change one thing about myself, I'd choose to care a little less. Until such possibility comes upon me, I try to enjoy the beautiful sheets meant for my mattress tower. I hung the lacey vintage bedsheets as curtains to our bedroom window, craving for something white to counterbalance the overwhelming blueness of the walls and wanting to not forget things to the back of some cupboard.
When I make myself at home somewhere, I don't only bring my baggage, I bring loads of other things too. I bring an entire history of crafty women with me. Like I've told you before, my mother makes all sorts of things by hand, quilts mostly nowadays, and her mother seems to have tried her hand at more crafts than what now comes to mind, my great grandmother and her sister Saima were quite talented too. Since my family rarely throws anything away, loads of unfinished craft projects have survived for what to me seems like a century (and I may not be off much) and a ton of fabrics, trims and buttons from Saima's days that previously filled my grandmother's sewing room now fills my mother's and seeps into my possession as well. Inspired by a small stack of the most beautiful white vintage linen remnants my mother sent me I made a tiny collection of books I came to refer as the Saima books inside my head. I've never met Saima, I've only heard some stories of her, seen photos of her (go spy Emil's if you're interested in her unbelievably beautiful-looking life in the early decades of the 1900's), but all that has contributed to an imaginary Saima of my own. In the Saima books I used some of the vintage linens, some new fabrics that complemented the colour palette I had in mind, some antique laces that have been passed on to me ages ago (sometimes you have to use even the most treasured materials when the right project comes along) and a whole bunch of vintage mother of pearl buttons. I wanted to add a bit of that nowadays otherwordly decadence to my notebooks, turn them into something really one of a kind. Hopefully people treasure all the notebooks I've made for them, but this small stack is super special, to me at least. That's probably why it felt so good to make. I do not only carry baggage with me, but real treasures too. I'll show you more in the days to come and will list these on Etsy eventually.