Beautiful illustrations

I went into the used book shop  Book Buyers in Mountain View and while I wasn't interested in expanding my to-read list I decided to look for items that I would normally not notice.

I got a book by John James Audubon who is a famous bird illustrator. And why do I need bird illustrations??? Well I don't, nobody does. But I thought the drawings were really beautiful and natural.

Then I also found some cool music sheets for single songs, which also feature some really cool and old illustrations as the cover page. Each music sheet was $1-$5 and the paper is old and wrinkly and smelly and awesome.

I think any of these are going to make some cool wall art, craft or stationary someday. I am such a fool for pretty paper goods.

1960's chest revisited

Remember my Italian treasure chest?

Pretty much everyone agreed that the old paper inside had to go, and go it did!

It took me a while, and it is FAR from perfect, in fact it was really awkward to cut and glue at times, and for some parts I ended up using many pieces of paper to cover a single area... I didn't want to do a DIY on this precisely because I sucked at it so much, I'm the one who needs a DIY!

One thing I can say is that it smelled... well... like it was 50 years old. You know that old musty grandparent house smell? Yeah, well it took about 6 sprays of Febreze (the Aussie version anyway, it's called Oust) to get rid of it, always letting it dry completely between sprays.

Hope you like it.

Have a nice weekend!!!

1960's chest

I hit the jackpot today.

Mitchell Road Auction House is a warehouse full of beautiful junk. In the ground floor are items that have gone through some mild to serious tear and wear, but are still functional and/or beautiful in their own way. The items on this floor are very fairly priced and this is where we bought chairs for our kitchen table and a standing mirror last Saturday. We paid $AUD 116.50 for a set of 4 chairs and the mirror, all in good condition. The auction house adds 16.5% to the tag price for having found and stored the item in their store. That is why we paid that odd number.

The second floor of the building is full of gorgeous antiques and retro items that are in *excellent* condition, and I mean there is a lot of stuff that is 30 years old but looks as good as new. The items on this floor are significantly more expensive, but you could debate that they are also fairly priced due to the fact that they have been maintained so well.

In any case, I liked the place a lot and decided to pay another visit today just for kicks. Well my friends, I did not come home empty handed.

I found this GORGEOUS chest!!! I knew I wanted it the second I saw it. The price tag was AUD$65 and then I just had to have it! M and I had been talking about how it would be nice to find a coffee table item that could also serve as storage, so we thought a chest would be perfect. Since that discussion a couple of months ago, we have seen a few beautiful chests but they were $600+ and then some were $100 or so, but too simple and boring. I took a chance when buying this one today because M is not home, he went on a company retreat for the weekend. Man I hope he likes it as much as I do.

The chest still has stickers attached to it from its voyage. I find it so fascinating, it makes me giddy.

What I could gather from the stickers is that it came from Italy on the ship Galileo Galilei operated by the company Lloyd Triestino and it belonged to either a Mr. Iannello Rosario, or a Mrs. Rosario Iannello. Even the original lock is still attached and says "made in Italy", though you can open the chest because someone broke the lock mechanism.

So I googled "SS Galileo Galilei" and finding out about it was easier than I thought. This ship travelled between Genoa, Italy and Sydney, Australia, between the early 60's and the late 70's after which the ship changed name and operator several times.

I am so delighted with this chest! I paid 75 bucks for it but to me it is worth its weight in gold. I think I will visit the Mitchell Road Auction Centre as part of my Saturday routines from now on.

The insides of the chest are clearly worn out, and now I am trying to decide whether I should scrape off the old paper and attach my own new one, or if I should let it be as it is and try to preserve it. What do you guys think?