Vintage children’s book III: La Fontaine Fabeln

The last book in this blog post series is a vintage German children's book. It's got fantastic colourful illustrations by Gerhard Oberländer and was published in 1964.

Bottled mice, anyone?

Vintage children’s book I: Singeling for rare ting

Blogspot had big problems this week. As a result, the original version of this post (and comments) disappeared and was never restored. I'll try to repeat myself as best I remember..

This Norwegian children's book was published in 1961. The illustrator's name is Unni-Lise Jonsmoen. (She's the wife of the author Ola Jonsmoen.)

The story is about Enok who's 6 and home from school one day due to a cold. He's bored and his mum suggests he do some drawing, which he does. He then makes up some fantastic stories based on the drawings.

The sign on the tram reads 'Enok’s town'.

Vintage children’s book II: Min første bok

Picture books naturally don't have much text, but this one doesn't even have the year of publishing. Judging from the photos I'm guessing it's from the 1950s. The title of the book translates to "My first book" and the subtitle reads "A picture book in colours". And what colours!

Note how the banana is posed on some soft furnishing. I find that amusing for some reason.

There's more of course, but this will have to do for now.

Have a nice weekend! I'm off to another fleamarket tomorrow and hope to have something to show for it here later.

Birthday parties

I had my big 40 party Friday night. We were 10 'girls' for dinner at the fashionable Bølgen&Moi restaurant. It was really good. Having to spend all next day baking cakes and preparing for my son's birthday party the day after.... not so good. But I persevered, and these cupcakes went down a treat. I quite dislike blue food coloring, by the way, but it's for the kids, right? I was thinking Jonathan Adler color combos at some point when decorating these...


Looks like just two candles, but there was 3. Time flies...

The Fatboy was popular.

As were the soap bubbles in everyone's bag of treats.

Birthday boy didn't want to take off his crown, not even when it was time for pajamas.

Designers Go Playground - contemporary dollhouse and so much more

I can't believe I haven't seen this before: It was shown at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair , in New York a year ago and it's had publicity both online and in papers. Where have I been?? Thanks to Sari for requesting my friendship on facebook I found this on her web. I SO want it! I love everything about it - the clever combination of modular furniture and the über-cool dollhouse... The colours, the patterns. What's not to like, really? I can't wait to see this in the shops.

Designers Go Playground is a collaboration between Finnish textile designer Sari Syvaluoma and Norwegian industrial designer Johan Ørbeck Aase.