Picasso

I went to the Picasso exhibit last week at Ateneum in Helsinki. Needless to say, the paintings looked totally different than in the photos so that was money well spent :) It made me extremely happy! Then I started to look at the creations like "If these were commercially worthless, which paintings would I wanna hang on my own walls". Of course they're all great pieces of art, but just too colourful for my taste usually... These are the ones I especially like:

Le Peintre et son Modele

 

Acrobate

La Suppliante

Jaqueline Lisant

Minotaure Caressant du Mufle la Main D'une Dormeouse 

 

Le Baiser

And this one I thought would be really funny in a hypothetical kids' room in the future

Enfant Jouant Avec un Camion

Bensdorp Cacao & Smith Kendon tablets

I adore these old "tin boxes". It's not easy to find a perfect one. The bigger one I found from an internet auction (huuto.net) for 14 euros or something and the smaller is from a flea market quite near our place. The second best flea market  in Helsinki (Valtterin kirppis). I needed a  can for my green tea leaves and this was just 1 euro. That's a bargain. And I think I'm not done with these. I rarely like retro stuff but these are just so cute :)

Chairs gone white

I'm not the biggest fan of reddish wood, but we do have that kind of furniture quite a lot in our place. Solution: paint :)  I bought some acetone, white paint and other equipment and then started removing the red from these:

 And then they looked like this. I didn't even know there was a beautiful light birch wood underneath. It kind of would've been nice to leave them like this, but the tone of these was quite unbalanced and the white paint was already waiting :)

And so they turned out to look like this. I love them now. Now they match so much better with the mostly black and white decor :)

Bedroom art

A couple of years ago I had an idea to glue black&white pics to an old wardrobe door. Dad made trims to it so it's deeper than a regular wardrobe door. The pictures are from my childhood when I liked to cover the walls of my room with tiny black and white pictures. Here's a picture of me doing the decoupage.

And here some close ups.

 

 It used to hang on the wall in my ex-homes, but now it looks better just leaning to the wall on the Ikea Malm drawers. The bedspread is from Tallinn, which is a great shopping city! Not as good as Helsinki but cheaper :)

Last spring I bought 5 meters of top quality silk from Bangkok and turned them into curtains. I love the deep dark blue colour in them and how they look so bright and cheery in sunlight :) And they cost almost nothing :)

Funny Ideas

Winter Helsinki

The beautiful view from the living room & balcony :) I live in Vallila, but the view is right to the artistic and the most famous part of Helsinki, Kallio. It starts from the neighbour building. Every time you go out, you can see some pretty peculiar people out there...

New living room

After two weeks of living in Helsinki my living room looks like this.


I love it. The shape of it is kind of triangual, but still it's not at all unefficient. The apartment is only 38 square meters so it's important to use those squares thoughtfully. Like here :) Luckilly there's a balcony so that counts for an extra room in summer.

I needed two new lamps and some curtains. I got the curtains (the outer panel curtains in the pic below) and also some new plants. My old ones didn't survive the 600 km move from Oulu to Helsinki :( Now in the living room there is this Kerä from Kodin1. I have been dreaming about this since last summer, and now my dream came true :)

It's kind of a copy from my extremely favourite lamp Random Light by Moooi:

The funny thing about Kerä is that it works well only with an energy saver bulb. First I tried with this old fashioned bulb and I got very blue, because I thought the whole lamp's a dissapointment. It created these stringy shadows all over the living room. The room got very very dark and cave-like.. Like spider webs and darkness all over. So it was like the opposite of a lamp. It made the room darker.

But when I put an energy saver to it: no shadows whatsoever! And I bought this massive bulb into it, because they're the most showy.