Giveaway reminder and a Happy New Year

Don't forget to enter the 200th follower giveaway, if you want to get the chance to win some vintage perfume samples.

And a very Happy New Year to you all! I have had so much fun writing this blog and I'm so happy you enjoy reading it! I look forward to next year!



The lady on the picture is my grandmother Greta at a New Years Eve-party in the late 30's. I still have the blouse, it's in pale green with darker green leaves and is probably one of her "America-blouses". I have forgotten the exact story, but a relative or friend worked in a clothes store and they were sent blouses from America to get to choose what to buy to the store. They came in a very small size and my grandmother who was very petite was just about the only person who could really wear them, so she was given a lot of them. I really need to take pictures of that blouse, doesn't I? (And no, the gentleman is NOT my grandfather, it muct have been taken before they got to know each other around 1940.)

Revlon lipstick

I found this nifty piece of information on The Fedora Lounge. Mosly 50's shades, but still. Now I don’t really need more lipsticks, but I get cravings nevertheless…



I do wish Raven Red were available as a lipstick too.

Looking back and forward

A new year is almost here and I realise that I will need to start on my spring/summer wardrobe soon if I am to have anything to wear. I'm a little annoyed with myself for not completing the autumn/winter wardrobe this year, but I shan't be too upset about it. This first year demands more clothes to be fixed than the rest as it assumes that a lot of clothes already exists in the closet when you start. Looking back I realise that I could have made this into a five-year plan instead, splitting the first year into two, but now it feels a bit too late. So instead I will finish the clothes I have already started, but will leave the grey wool dress , the brown wool jacket and the faux fur to next autumn instead. There are also a few details I haven't been able to get to yet.

I don't do New Year resolutions but I will try to focus a bit more on my sewing time. Much too often it gets neglected, which is bad as sewing makes me relaxed and happy (if I'm not stupid enough to give myself deadlines). We're also going to fix the sort-of sewing room up and make it a proper working space both for sewing and writing. Right now the sewing room is a bit of a place to store furniture that really isn't practical to have in a sewing room like a Regency sofa and a 1950's radio gramophone. Beautiful, but really no help at all when you work.

Here's an overview with links to the completed items.

A 1940's updo tutorial

I was asked how I did my hair here and as that may interest more people, here is a little how-to. My hair is cut in a middy that is quite long- soon it will be a femme fatale. The longest part is a little below my shoulders and the shortest layer reach me to my chin. It's also rather thick. You can do this style with both shorter and longer hair, if shorter it needs to be long enough to roll and with longer hair your rolls will be bigger.

What you need is booby pins, pomade, hair spray and some patience.

You also need to know a few things to start out. First you need to curl your hair. I always do my standing pin curls, but you can curl you hair any way you like best.

Nuit de Noel

I hope you are enjoying your holiday! Let’s have a perfum-y Christmas-post today, shall we? It seems rather suitable. I could say that I have eagerly waited to try this perfume until Christmas Eve, but that wouldn’t be quite true. I did try it before, just to make sure I liked it, but I have waited until now to talk about it. Nuit de Noel was released by Caron in 1922 and in case your French is lacking (mine is very rusty) it means Christmas night. It has a bit of a romantic story; it was created by Ernest Daltroff for his lover, who loved Christmas and its scents.

Merry Christmas

It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow and as that is THE big day in Sweden as opposed to Christmas Day, I will take the opportunity to wish you Merry Christmas today. I do so with a flood of glamorous winter and Christmas photos from the 1940’s. They are all courtesy of Mothic Flights and Flutterings, an absolutely wonderful source of beautiful pictures!

I wish I was a rich girl #5

I’m still feeling very un-intellectual, so here comes an easy shopping post instead. There’s a life after Christmas too, after all and plenty of time for long and interesting posts. Up until this week the weather in Sweden has been very unwintery and there have been more need for umbrellas than warm coats. So here is a little umbrella post- I especially love the fanciful handles!

Upcoming attractions

After writing about the ideal body I had planned to tie that in with an intelligent post about the ideal body shape, comparing it with the decades before and after the 1940's, but today is the day after our cat Adolf had surgery and all the tension has gone out of me and left me feeling a bit worn out and not very creative at all. You may have seen that we had to take away our cat Frida last week and the same day we found out that Adolf had a cancer tumour on his hind leg. Luckily it could be removed, thought it was as large as his paw! He is currently very annoyed with us, having to wear a big collar to prevent him from licking his wound.

But I promise, there will be a long post about girdle's and whatnot's very soon!



(Picture source: http://flow.allpinup.ru/en/view/normal/2527)

The 200th follower giveaway!

Being a rather niched blog I have been very flattered by the attention it has been given since I started it. Now it has reached 200 followers on Blogger and I felt that’s worth a little celebration in the form of a giveaway. During the year I have tried and tested many vintage perfumes and not everyone has been ones that suits me. Instead of letting them collect dust I have decided to give them away. It's a very small giveaway when it comes to size, but vintage perfume samples can be rather pricey, so I hope it will be appreciated.

1st prize: Choose three samples from the following perfumes: My Sin, Shalimar, Joy, Scandal, Blue Carnation and Fracas. A sample of Shocking will also be included.

2nd prize: The three samples remaining plus a sample of Shocking.

3rd prize: A copy of The Little Book of Perfumes: The 100 classics by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

I read blogs

I read Solanah at Vixen Vintage. She has an incredible style sense as well as a seemingly endless wardrobe. Reading her blog is truly inspirational, shock full of beautiful photographs as it is. There is also some tutorials- only today I got the tip on how fill a vintage with loose powder that you press.

A review on Sense and Sensibility's swing dress pattern

In the beginning of this year Casey at Elegant Musing hosted sew along for Sense & Sensibilities swing dress pattern. I joined, but when it was time to hem it I completely lost steam and only last week I finished it. Here is my review on the pattern

Sense and Sensibility says this about it:

Here is my 1940s “Swing” Dress Pattern, inspired by an original Hollywood design, circa 1942. The design comes from the WWII days of fabric rationing, which meant narrower skirts and more tailored lines.
• Sizes 8-26 all included in one envelope.
• Unique yoke with gathered shoulders and two sleeve options (short and “bracelet-length”).
• Gored skirt great for twirling! Put on your dancing shoes!
• Transition this pattern to evening wear by lengthening the skirt.
• Photo Instructions online (coming soon in PDF format).
• Click to download the Swing Dress Pattern yardage chart.
• Available for instant download as an ePattern in PDF format!
• I also have an online class available for this pattern.

The ideal body

I have talked about the ideal body when it comes to the ideal movie stars, but how about the ordinary woman? Well, slim is pretty much the ideal now and it was the ideal back then too. However, it didn’t mean exactly the same thing as it does today. The thin athletic body that we see on fashion spreads today is not the same as the slim, but still rather curvaceous ideal of the 1940’s.

I wish I was a rich girl #4

Today’s shopping is all about cats as a tribute to our 13-year old cat Frida who we had to put down yesterday. Her kidney had stopped working so there was nothing to be done. She was a remarkable little cat who lost her sight when she war around seven, but didn’t allow that to stop her. I think she saw it as a challenge, not a limitation. She was easily the cutest cat I have ever seen and the smallest too- she was absolutely tiny. Despite that she has left a big hole in our lives. No more bellowing at my feet when I cook, in case I would forget to give her something nice to eat. No more demands to my darling that he was to make the bed NOW and then lay down on it so she could take a nap in his chest. We’ll miss her a lot, even if we still have four cats and a dog to keep us occupied.

Living the vintage lifestyle?

This is something I have been thinking about, from time to time, since I started this blog. When reading this thread at The Fedora Lounge about what it is that attracts you to the vintage areas, I started to think about it again.

Min boudoir

I guess my Swedish speakers already know about this new magazine, but if not, then I think you should. Min boudoir. To quote the website it’s “A Swedish magazine for all things retro/burlesque/vintage/pinup in Sweden (incl Finland, Norway and Denmark)” The founder is the beautiful Tifa De Leone.



The first number is out and as I understand it is meant to be a quarterly magazine. 60 pages on high quality paper which made it very nice to handle. Well, the reading was very nice too. Interviews, shopping tips, music and fashion, beautiful photographs, btw, which made for a good reading mix in my view. I especially enjoyed to relationship column which had two answers, one appropriate for 1956 and one for 2011. And not t be missed- my hairdresser Retroella gives hairstyling tips in every issue.

I really hope this will take off as I think it's such a great idea. There are similar magazines in English, but I think it’s great with one in Swedish. There is a growing scene for vintage and burlesque in Sweden and it’s nice to get a Scandinavian angle. And Min boudoir is no slapdash magazine, it’s obvious that a lot of hard work has been put into it.

(Picture borrowed from http://www.minboudoir.se/)

I wish I was a rich girl #3

When I was a kid, hair combs were brightly coloured pieces of plastic. Not very pretty at all. It took me a while to realize that many of those pretty hair ornaments that you see in old movies and pictures are actually combs and forks. Here is a collection of Art Deco and 1940’s combs for your pleasure.

1940’s celluloid tortoise comb. I really like the shape!

Brown skirt

Not the best of pictures, but this skirt have been finished for a while and it seems next to impossible to find daylight and someone to take a pic at the same time right now. The patterns is the skirt part of one of my 1940's dress patterns. An A-line like the grey skirt, but this one fits much better. The fabric is a wool blend, a totally hateful fabric that just didn't want press properly. Apart from that I like it. The blouse is the Betty blouse from Puttin' On the Ritz that I bought at the same time as my coat.



Also me in glasses- totally non-vintage one and what I ususally look like when I haven't curled my hair. Which DO happen. :)

The good china

When my maternal grandparents got married in 1943 they bought a new, smart set of china to have as their “good one”. In time my grandmother collected several sets, but this first one was in use all of their life. And eventually I inherited I use it as my good china too. The set is called (Blå) vinranka (blue wines) and was designed in 1939 by Arthur Percy for Gefle porslinsfabric. It became quite popular and was in production until 1969. My grandmother used to call it “flytande blå” (flowing blue), which seems to be a quite common nickname for it, due to the way the blue floats out. Percy also designed a red version which was much more distinct, but never seem to have become as popular.

Agatha Christie

(Picture source: http://teawithmarykate.wordpress.com/)

I couldn’t very well ignore Agatha Christie, could I? The 1940’s was part of her Golden Age; she wrote 12 novels during that time, though her whole career span over 50 years after debut in 1920. If you are familiar with her works through the very excellent TV adaptations of Poirot, with David Suchet and the visually beautiful but not quite as good adaptations of the Miss Marple mysteries, then it may surprise you to that not all the Poirot- books takes place in the 1930’s and not every Miss Marple is set in the 1950’s. And not all of her stories feature her two most famous sleuths, of the 40’s books, six are Poirot novels and two are Miss Marple.

I started to read Christie’s crime novels when I was around 12 and I still re-read them. It’s true that she often uses stereotypes instead of fully rounded characters and if you read enough of her novels you learn to recognize them, like the handsome never-do well man with just a little to close between the eyes, the vamp, and the straight-backed military man and so on- but you can never count on who is the murderer. Of course, having read them all, I know who the murdered is, but I enjoy reading them anyway. Christie had a knack for describing atmospheres and they don’t have to be spectacular to appeal. Try reading 4.50 From Paddington when you feel sick to death on household chores. I promise, when you have followed Lucy scrubbing the kitchen table, you can feel her enthusiasm. It helps that she does so looking stylish too.

The Pirate 1948

In June I wrote a post about using historical movies as inspiration and the movie that triggered that post was the musical The Pirate from 1947 starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Manuela (Garland) dreams about a dashing pirate, Mack “the Black” Macoco, but agrees to marry a rich, boring and much older Don Pedro. A circus performer, Serafin (Kelly) falls in love with her and pretends to be Macoco in order to woe her. After some twists and turns- it turns out that Don Pedro is the aging Macoco, everything ends happily for Manuela and Serafin. And as it is a movie with Garland and Kelly, there is a fair amount singing and dancing. The movie is set in the Caribbean in the 1840’s, but the costume designer, Tom Keogh, plays rather fast and loose with historical accuracy and nods quite equally to the contemporary fashions of the 1940’s. A hundred years earlier the fashion dictated sloping shoulders, puffed sleeves, a rather high, but narrow waist and a full skirt with many petticoats. There were also some rather oddly shaped hairstyles, like this fashion plate indicates.

I wish I was a rich girl #2

December is almost upon us, so why not wish that you would buy all these gorgeous Christmas ornaments? My favourite kind of tree ornaments is glass baubles. I buy a new one every year and though they occasionally break, my tree is quite full by now. I’m not big on decorating, but I want my tree overloaded with tinsel and glittery glass ornaments. I also have the three lights my grandmother Greta bought for the very first Christmas as a married woman in 1943. I’m so happy that they are still in working order and in their original box too! My maternal grandparents only had plain round glass baubles but my paternal grandparents had ornaments in all kind of shapes and I have found their counterparts on Etsy. I especially love the ones which are dimpled, as a child I found them absolutely fascinating!

Fräulein Frauke and my new hair

Fräulein Frauke Presents Duty Calls took place on Saturday, and a mighty good time was had, I must say. Nalen is an absolutely fantastic location and though it was pretty crowded the ceiling is so high that it never got too hot or felt too crowded. However, I met a friend in the wardrobe and then manage to not locate her for the rest of the evening, so it was definitely a lot of people there. We were early so we were among the first 250 who got a free glass of champagne when we come. I didn't see all of the cabaret, but the artist I did see were very good. Fräulein Frauke was, as usual, adorable:



I also enjoyed the ringmaster, Dusty Limits, very much as well as Vicky Butterfly

Two giveaways

Perhaps it is the season, but there are giveaways everywhere right now. Me, I’m thinking of having one when this blog reach 200 followers, a sum that seems to be within reach, to my great surprise.

First Kristina at Dahling It's Vintagy!, who is giving away this lovely lipstick, rouge and mirror combo:



Read the rules here.

Next, Brittany from Va-voom Vintage is giving away a gift certificate from ShoeclipBiz , who sell just shoe clips. Read more in this post.

Duty Calls

Tonight I will have the perfect opportunity to don my blue evening gown as I’m going to Fräulein Frauke- Duty Calls. Fräulein Frauke is an excellent burlesque club here in Stockholm and tonight the theme is World War II, so of course I have to go! I have been to FF before and enjoyed myself, but that was in their old place which was truly terrible when it comes to drink, ladies rooms and wardrobe, but the atmosphere and show made up for a lot of that. This year, however, it moved to Nalen, which truly must be the perfect place for a 1940’s club. Nalen was THE dance palace in Stockholm from the 1930’s to the end of the 1960’s and I’m pretty sure that both my grandparents and parents have danced there. It opened again in the 1990’s and have several scenes and dance floors. I can’t dance swing, but I expect I will be able to enjoy other dance tonight!

A birthday cake

If my grandmother Greta had been alive, she would have turned 99 last Monday and, quite naturally, I have been thinking a lot about her for the last couple of days. She was, as I have mentioned before, a woman with many talents and one of them was to bake. She baked bread and she baked cakes. Though she didn't quite followed the tradition of a Swedish "kafferep" (a social meeting where you drank coffee and had cakes) and always had "seven kinds of cakes" at home, she had, at any given time, always buns, sponge breads and several kind of cookies. My Mum said only the other day that when she was a kid there was a special "cookie cupboard" in the kitchen. One of her fortes was to bake three sponge cakes in the oven at the same time which made the middle one sunk, as it didn't get as much heat. For some reason that middle one always tasted like it was filled with almond paste.

Thinking of my grandmother and cakes made me remember that I have one of her cookbooks, the one the picture, called Läckra Rumfordfinesser ("Delicious Rumford Delicacies") from 1946. It’s really more a pamphlet to advertise the glory of Rumford baking powder, but it's a quite lavish one. There are several coloured pictures of rather tasty looking cakes and cookies, but most fun is the two pictures on the inside of the covers. The first one depicts two women engaged in just a "kafferep":

I wish I was a rich girl

(Picture source: http://www.citrusavenuecollectibles.com/blog/)

It’s so easy, when I can’t sleep, to surf around on Etsy and drool over all the things I would like to buy. And it’s so easy to buy it too- the dollar is low compared to the Swedish krona and, oops, there I bought something nice again for almost nothing. Unfortunately a lot of almost nothing ends up not be so little in the end… I have, by no means, shopped more than I can afford, but I have a few things coming next year that I want to be able to spend on, so it’s time for me to tie the purse strings and only buy what I need. At the moment I have all the fabric and patterns I need for my upcoming sewing projects and the only thing I can allow myself to shop for is a black dress and a brown handbag and knitted mitts. Possibly a pair of green court shoes, but that’s stretching it a bit. What to do then, with all the lovelies I can’t buy? Well, I thought I would post them here in the hope that it will be exactly what you have been looking for. My choice is purely personal- none of the sellers has in any way endorsed me. Some of these things I would probably not buy because I find the price too high, but it may very well be in someone else’s budget. I haven’t purchased from all the sellers, so I also recommend that you check out their feedback first. So then, let’s begin with;

Dress clips Self explanatory, I guess, one or a pair of clips that you put on your clothes. You can use ear clips for the same purpose, but a dress clip has little spikes to make them sit more securely (and you wouldn’t want to put those in your ears…) With a pair you can use them to change the shape of a neckline and thus put a new spin to a dress. Be a little careful with fragile fabrics you don’t damage the fabric.

I'm going to the hairdresser tomorrow

I’m going to Retroella tomorrow to spruce up my middy. I’ll keep it longish, but I do need a trim. I’m also contemplating something else… I stopped dyeing my hair in the beginning of this year. I have dyed it a dark brown for the last ten years, or so, so it felt a bit odd to see my own lighter brown turn up again. It’s actually not as mousy as I remember it, but a rather nice bronzy colour. The ends are still darker, but it looks ok anyway. So I decided to keep my natural colour, it could be nice to have it around before it starts graying. Not that I’m graying just yet, but at my age you never know. After deciding that I quickly got bored with not playing with my haircolour (I think it’s addictive) and have been thinking of what I could do that would add some fun and be a suitable vintage solution. I came up with this:


(Picture source: http://thedressersroom.wordpress.com/)

Of course, I won't ever be as glamorous as Rita Hayworth!

Suitable shoes

(Picture source: http://glamourdaze.blogspot.com)

Of course Alla kvinnors bok doesn't just tell you what clothes to wear, it talks about shoes as well. It begin that with lamenting that Swedish woken has so much bigger feet than the French and the Italian and also that we live in a climate with plenty of both rain and snow-a all things that makes it difficult to be both well-shod and find beautiful shoes. I can't agree that larger feet are unprettier than smaller ones, but I really agree that the climate may make it hard to find the both practical and pretty. However, never buy shoes just because they look nice- the most important part is that they fit.

A review on Bèsame lipstick

Like so many others I have been looking with longing on the beautiful products from Bèsame. So stylish and with such design, looking so much like make-up packages did on the good old days. And everyone who tried seemed to rave over the quality, especially the lipsticks. I have been a bit scared to order anyway, just because I have felt unsure on what colour to choose. Luckily Bèsame offers samples on six of their lipsticks, namely:
Bèsame Red, a cool-toned true red.
Cherry Red, darker cherry red, cool-toned.
Red Velvet, darker red, neutral
Red Hot Red, a warm-toned true red
Carmine, a orange red
Merlot, a brownish red.

Grey Beret

My autumn/winter wardrobe has two berets listed, one grey and one black. The black are to be made in the same fabric as the black wool dress, so I plan to sew that one myself, but I have been looking for a classic grey beret in stores. I haven’t had much luck, but then Retro Chic posted about berets, 3 Ways to Wear a Beret- read it for some nice tips and she mentioned Village Hats as a good source. I looked; I found and ordered a grey one within minutes to a good price. I placed the order on Sunday at it arrived today, which I think is very good considering that Village Hat is in UK and I am in Sweden.

The benefits of moving

Though exercise wasn’t as hyped in the 1940’s as it is today, it was still something that was considered good for you. Interestingly my beauty books don’t mention weight loss when it speaks about the virtues of moving your body, though it does say that exercise will keep your body trim. It put much more stress on the joy of being able to control your movements and to feel liberated in your body as well as promoting your health and vitality.

The advice is to do your exercise every morning for 15 minutes- get up a little earlier to find the time. The kind of exercise is what the book call gymnastics, but we probably would call aerobics. Start slowly if you are new to it and gradually build up your strength, but do try work hard enough to feel completely warm. Keep you posture throughout and don’t forget to breathe properly. Be very careful when you stretch out your muscles! Do your exercise in front of an open window, of, if possible, outside.

Heyday giveaway

Heyday is having an absolutely fabulous givaway, the black Fleur-dress with daisies:



One of the dresses I have been eyeing, in fact. And to complete it, earrings and brooch.

New skirt

I've actually finished something! To be truthful it's something I started before I ventured into the wardrobe project, but as it is a 40's skirt, it fits anywy. It's an A-line wool skirt that I very nearly finished in February, but then I had just the hemming left. It's funny how often the hemming slows me down... But now, in time for colder weather, I finally took the last stitches on it. And as I've spent the last few days feeling a bit under the weather due to a cold, I really felt the need to put on some lipstick and feel a bit pretty.

Back in business

I must confess that all the hard work I put into my masquerade costume came to naught. Well, not really, but I realized last Wednesday that I wouldn’t be able to finish it to wear on the masquerade after all. So I can’t show you any pictures of it yet I plan to wear it on a masquerade in Mars, so it will be finished. Instead I wore an old costume and wasn’t unhappy about it:



More pictures can be seen here.

Anyway, now I have finally time to spend on the 1940’s again! I’ll do my best to finish hemming my brown skirt very soon and then I think I’m going to make my fake fur- winter is after all approaching.

Waiting at the station coat

This week I finally got my coat from Puttin on the Ritz. I say finally as I have been waiting so eagerly for it, but the truth is that it was sent to me 2 days before the stated waiting time ran out, which is 6 weeks in the slow seasons. The coat is beautiful and comfortable and I couldn’t be happier with it. I always have trouble finding coats that fits, so I’m glad this worked out so well. I’ll definitely be ordering from them again in the future, probably a wool skirt for the winter.

An alternative to classic perfume

Before I realized there were such a thing as vintage perfume- or rather that it was possible to actually get your mitts on them, I hadn’t used ordinary perfume for years, but solely purchased my scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, or BPAL. For some reason modern perfumes gives me headaches and I very, very often find that they have a slightly nasty smell underneath the other notes, something that most of all reminds me of water from a vase where flowers has stood too long- rancid and flowery at the same time. And though I have fallen hard for vintage perfumes, I still wear my BPAL scents when I work, so I have done a little research to see if there are any of those that evokes the same scent ideas that my vintage perfume does.

I read blogs

I read Aimee and Harriett’s Bright Young Twins, The Lives of two best friends stuck in a time warp. They have an absolutely amazing sense of style and know how to take pictures of it too (I’m envious) There are many, many, posts I’d like to point you to, but I choose Tea Time!, because they review a book I really want, 'The Vintage Tea Party Book by Angel Adore.

Meanwhile there will a bit of a lull on this blog for two more weeks. After October 22, when the big masked ball has arrived and I have finished my costume, I will get back to a more interesting posting schedule. At the moment I spend every free moment stitching silk velvet and getting more and more convinced that I’m quite insane to choose such fiddly fabric for a very big 18th century gown…

Where I shop

I love to shop- don’t we all? What I hate, though, is to actually do the physical shopping. Especially clothes. Despite loving to have clothes, I hate shopping for them with a passion and I do practically all my shopping, except for food, online. So here are a few of the places I spend my money.

Clothing and shoes
Brandos A Swedish shoe store. They don’t really sell retro shoes, but it’s there I found my reproductions rubber boots from Viking. Last time I looked they had those in two versions. I have also seen some rather 40’s looking sandals.

Casablanca 1942

Do I need to describe the plot of Casablanca in detail? Let’s just quote IMDB; ”Set in unoccupied Africa during the early days of World War II: An American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.”. And I guess you already know it features Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, not to mention such dependable actors as Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre. And you can probably quote it, even if you haven’t seen it. Though “Play it again Sam”, was never said, even if it’s probably the most quoted of all. And of course, most people know the tune too.
Dooley Wilson (Sam), sings As Times Goes By


It’s not a big costume movie, but perhaps that makes it even more interesting for those who want to incorporate the 40’s in their ordinary wardrobe. Looking as lovely as Ingrid Bergman isn’t easy, though.

I read blogs

I read What-I-Found, Vintage sewing and fashion ephemera with a few other finds from my travels. It’s a treasure chest, actually. Tina posts pictures, articles and parts of books over a variety of vintage subjects. There are a lot of posts I really like, but as I plan my 40’s bedroom, I found this post on 1943 home decorations particularly interesting.

Flowers and leather

I’m still happily trying my way through my perfume samples. Unhappily, at least for my wallet, I find new perfumes I want to sample too, so my wish list never seems to grow shorter.
Cyprus Musc from Creed, 1948 I don’t know how I managed to buy this one, as it’s a men’s perfume. The Perfumed Court describes it as “green and musky fragrance with notes of English mint and cypress” and I think that describes it very well. It’s not overtly masculine and could easily be worn by a woman. I liked it, but my darling dismissed it as “expensive soap”.

A beautiful smile

Please note that this is advice on dental care from the 1940’s. If you find that they differ from what your dentist tells you, then I think you should listen to your dentist!

The best way to ensure beautiful teeth is to take care of them. Brush your teeth morning and nights with a hard toothbrush of good quality. Make sure that you brush every angle of every tooth that you get to and lightly brush the gums too. Rinse the mouth after every meal with tepid water; possibly add a few drops of refreshing mouth water.

Lord Peter Wimsey

A general feeling of being under the weather evolved into a nasty cold last week. Combine that with me trying to finish an 18th century ball gown until October 22 and you have the reason for the no posting. I’ll try to do better, butI may post a little more sporadically until the gown is done. I hate deadlines and try not to have them, but I have only myself to blame.

I hope you don’t mind if I fall back into a book post today. I’m currently re-reading the books about my favourite sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a number of novels and short stories about him between 1923-1940 and if you want witty and smart crime novels in an Art Deco setting, then you should read this.

Pretty hair things

My vanity and wish to look nice is in constant battle with my laziness. I can spend a lot of time getting ready for a party, but on an ordinary workday, especially when I get up at 4.30 in the morning, I don’t want to fuzz. For years I kept my hair long and it took me five minutes, at the very most, to fix it in the mornings and I really wasn’t prepared to spend longer time on it when I cut it in a middy. Fortunately I don’t have to, even if I have pin curls to brush out, my morning routines are only marginally longer.

How to choose a flattering hairdo

My trusty book, Alla kvinnors bok has opinions on everything, so of course it gives advice on how to choose the perfect hairdo. It start out by saying that Swedish hair colours are usually quite boringly mousy, but if your hair is on the blonder side then you can bleach the top hair around your face. A darker blond will benefit from using henna shampoo to give the colour depth. When choosing your new hairdo, take the advice from a good hairdresser, but never from a man. The Swedish man, according to my book, are extremely conservative when it comes to female hair and don’t want flowers or any other kind of jewelry in it. It shouldn’t be too curly or too straight or too much in any way. So don’t even ask him.

I read blogs

I read Diary of A Vintage Girl . You probably do too, but if not, then I think you should go and have a look. Fleur look like she has stepped out from a glamorous Hollywood movie and indeed she work as a model, so there are a lot of eye candy to be found in her blog. She’s smart too and writes eloquent and thought provoking posts about dressing vintage, like this one. I first found her when I was looking for hair tutorials and then I got hooked.