Confessions of a Broochaholic

Can you believe it's March already? Never mind that January and February felt neverending at times, in hindsight they seem to have passed in the blink of an eye. It's all a bit of a blur though, so I'm glad of my blog keeping track of time, enabling me to look back and see how I spent my days.

It's almost beyond belief that I've been regularly churning out blog posts for 8 years now. When Beate recently went on a trip down memory lane to October 2015, she was surprised when I commented that I wasn't a citizen of blogland yet at the time. But yes, it's definitely true that I only published my first post on the 5th of March 2016!

But I'm running ahead of myself again, as here I am, ready for February's edition of our favourite indoor flea market on Sunday the 18th. 

It was the perfect day for it, as it was wet and very windy, which made the alleged highs of 9°C feel quite a bit chillier. It might, in fact, have been a tad too chilly for this purple and white diamond patterned vintage dress I insisted on giving its first outing and therefore required a couple of layers.

I'm rather partial to a purple paired with chartreuse, so I opted for a pair of opaques, a purple-edged cardigan and a triple strand necklace in the latter. 

On my feet, my super comfy caramel suede lace-up ankle boots. They're from a label called No Stress  and were a charity shop find in December 2022. They really do live up to their name: even lacing them up is stressless as they've got handy side zippers!

Vintage dress from Think Twice

Soaked in Luxury cardigan: charity shopped

Necklace: flea market find

Peacock feather brooch: charity shopped in Llangollen in June 2019

Opaques: high street sales bargain

Now on to the flea market!

We'd hardly walked in when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted this rather spectacular wicker tote bag. As I made a beeline for it, I realized I recognized the stall, which turned out to belong to Wannes and Ilona. We first met this lovely couple on a flea market in Antwerp in the early days of my blog, and their well curated stall always draws us like a magnet.

The tote bag is lined in a fabulous floral fabric and came with a surprise wash bag which was hiding at the bottom.

As Wannes was kindly putting it aside for us to pick up later, I scanned the rest of the stall and was captivated by this cute little lidded wicker bag, which obviously had to come home with me as well. In my mind's eye - or should that be ear - I could hear the IKEA coat stand in our bedroom heaving a big sigh.

I also found the first of the day's brooches here, which you'll get to see later on.

I shilly-shallied over the T.G. Green Cornishware Raisins canister. Although its asking price was a mere € 5, I walked away because it was missing its lid. We'd hardly gone a couple of meters when the seller came running after us bearing the canister and declaring we could have it for € 3. Well, who were we to say no? When I posted it on Instagram later that day, someone in the know told me it was an absolute bargain!

It was an excellent market for brooches, as I added no less than 10 of them to my collection. 

Below, clockwise from top left: enamelled mushroom brooch, wooden deer brooch (from Wannes and Ilona), wood look flower brooch and Edelweiss hiking souvenir brooch, both made from some kind of early plastic.

Below, from left: glass beaded brooch, diamanté and gold-tone lobster brooch and green and translucent paste brooch. They were all picked up from the heaped costume jewellery stall of another flea market habitué: a very chatty older lady who lives in the next village to ours.

The middle of the next row of brooches also came from her, while the other two, which are among my favourites, are from separate random stalls. The funky enamelled one on the left was the most expensive at € 12, while the souvenir brooch from the tiny but picturesque city of Dinant in Wallonia - the French speaking part of Belgium - surprisingly was only € 6.

After I've been asked more than once if I've still got space for all the brooches I keep finding and how exactly I'm storing them, I thought it was time I enlightened those readers who aren't already in the know. 

It all started innocently enough when the handful of modern brooches I already owned were joined by the first of the vintage ones I found on flea markets and in charity shops. Slowly but surely my collection was growing until the boxes I was keeping them in were starting to overflow.

When Jos mentioned my predicament to a friend, he came up with a fantastic solution in the form of several dark wooden drawers which were originally used to store his collection of coins. Soon, the original three were no longer adequate, at which point I was given another three, as well as the big black hinged box (below) in which I'm keeping my most fragile and precious ones. Contrary to the others in my collection, these are rarely worn for fear of damaging them.

Still my collection kept growing until it got rather cramped inside those lovely wooden drawers. 

In December 2018 my dream of finding one of those antique wooden chests with glass-fronted drawers, formerly used to display sewing threads in haberdashery shops, finally came true. Until then, the ones we had come across had been eye-wateringly expensive, so we were overjoyed to find this one for an affordable price as its top was slightly cracked.

That was five years ago, but apart from a brief lull courtesy of Covid-19, I obviously didn't stop collecting as, let's face it, they're rather addictive. They're such a fun thing to collect and generally quite affordable too. I rarely spend more than € 15  on a brooch and the vast majority of my finds were less than € 10.

To cut a long story short: I am yet again at risk of running out of space. But fear not: help has already arrived, as I've recently acquired another two of those wooden drawers and an additional hinged box ...

It was back to the office on Monday, and with the grey and rainy week that followed, it was at times hard to stay positive, particularly since work was relentless. 

Still, I was determined to find some things to smile about each day. 

As I was running an errand at Hema - a well-known Dutch chain of department stores - the sight of the row of Miffy cushions lining the escalators to the second floor made me whip out my phone. At the same time, they're emphasizing the demise of the restaurant which used to be up there, and which was inexplicably closed at the end of last year.

Another smile came in the form of this Tiffany-style owl lamp which came to live at Dove Cottage on Wednesday, a gift from Jos's youngest daughter An. Isn't he fabulous?

I only worked half a day on Friday - we were the 23rd by now - which was nothing short of a blessing for more than one reason. Regular as clockwork, a neverending succession of concrete mixers are turning up at the Art Deco tower building each Friday, making one hell of a headache inducing racket.

Although I've got to admit that those candy-striped mixers do look quite the part from our 5th floor perch ...

The overnight storm called Louis, with lots of rain, had brought the temperature down to 8°C by Friday.

It was still drizzly and miserable, so I didn't wear my pink suede boots out. However, as they turned out to be a perfect match with my outfit, I insisted on wearing them for that day's outfit photos.

And no, my dress isn't grey but the kind of green my camera refuses to register. Its fabric is sprinkled with multicoloured hundreds and thousands.

I guess it won't be a surprise when I tell you the dress came from Think Twice? However, I did replace its rather nondescript buttons with vintage green ones with a bit of pink in it from my stash.  

Both my pink plastic ring and the pink belt edged in green plastic stitching were found on the high street, the latter a sales bargain from Mango in the Summer of 2022. The pale pink beads are from a long-gone vintage shop, and the pink and white metal peacock brooch was a charity shop find in May 2016. Without the aid of my blog, it would have been impossible to keep track of those things! 

Still ill

 A week ago on Thursday I arrived home all hot and bothered and with an imperceptible tickle in my throat which for the moment I chose to ignore. 

I put it all down to the whirlwind visit from my bosses earlier that week as one of them seemed to have brought a persistent cough with him. Their visit also included a visit to IKEA to select some furniture for the soon to be finished office, part of which was supposed to be delivered on Thursday morning. 

When they still hadn't shown up by 2.30 pm, a phonecall to IKEA confirmed that they were stuck in traffic. Then, when they eventually did arrive half an hour later, they weren't able to find a proper parking spot. When your office building is landlocked in the middle of a city's main shopping area, this tends to be a problem at the best of times. To cut a long story short, they refused to put their blinkers on and quickly unload the stuff in the street at the back of our building, which is what everybody else is doing all the time. Having had to run downstairs and argue with them in the biting sub-zero cold seemed to have made matters worse so, quite unsurprisingly, I wasn't feeling exactly my best when I woke up on Friday morning.

We lingered over breakfast, after which I started feeling a bit more human and was even prompted to dress up in something stylish, warm and comfortable. We might have scrapped our usually charity shopping plans, but I still wanted to dress up and look the part, even if reclining on the sofa would be the only order of the day.

I'd bought the mustard flannel skirt brand new from Uniqlo back in October, and this was its first wearing. It's from the shop's collaboration with the French model and fashion designer Inès de La Fressange. Together with the vintage blue acrylic jumper and the white fluffy waistcoat which was a cheeky and cheap high street buy a couple of years ago, it was absolutely perfect to brave the continuing deep freeze temperatures. We were down to between -7°C to -9°C by now, which is a big deal in this part of the world.

Although I only briefly braved these bone-chilling temperatures for a handful of outfit photos in our new favourite spot ...

Then I was tempted by the sight of the iced gems in our garden to walk the length of the garden path and snap a few pictures. 

The last of the Nasturtiums, still going strong until a week or so before, had now all succumbed to frostbite, their limp orange blooms encrusted with jewels of ice.

These, together with the icing sugar coated bright red Cotoneaster berries and the clusters of dusky blue Virginia Creeper fruits provided the odd splash of colour.

Then it was back inside to hunker down for the rest of the weekend, Bess unashamedly taking advantage of the fact that we weren't gallivanting around like we usually do on a weekend.

By Saturday, I was a coughing and snuffling wreck, with brain fog and fatigue preventing me from doing anything more strenuous than reading a couple of pages here and there. Although I did manage to cobble together my previous blog post and publish it that evening.

We even had to cancel Sunday's much anticipated visit to our friends Kris and Marnix, who live just over the border in Holland. Kris used to be my colleague before he moved abroad and due to circumstances which I'm sure don't need an explanation, we hadn't seen each other since December 2019. Which made it heart-rending that we once again had to postpone our reunion ...

Not even dressing up in one of my favourite vintage frocks managed to make me feel better. After taking a couple of hurried photos we scuttled back inside where I uncharacteristically changed into jogging bottoms and a jumper for the rest of the day.

At the time of writing, I'm still in the throes of the lurgy - which luckily turned out not to be Covid! - and my brain fog and fatigue are still very much present.

Consequently, there isn't much to tell you about my final working week of the year (apart from the fact that the IKEA delivery has now been completed), and as no outfit photos have been taken either, why don't we have a proper look at last week's flea market finds instead.

I was instantly drawn to the colours of this ancient and time-battered tin, which I believe to be from the 1930s. There's no indication as to its provenance, but I loved it enough to give it a home.

The flea market yielded some odds and ends as usual. The mystery object on the top left was pure childhood nostalgia for Jos, who remembered being given this bank savings calculator when he was a schoolboy. 

The trivet on the top right was a giveaway by washing power brand Tide back in the day and depicts a well-known Bruges scene. It was a gift from friend and trader Tanja. 

The small hinged trinket box came from the stall of another favourite trader, Ilona, and has already been roped in to hold my jewellery selections for the week.

Tanja had to laugh when I made a beeline for the green cruet set, commenting that I always go for the kitschiest items on her stall. Well, what can I say? I'd already spotted it on her Facebook page the day before, so I made sure to look out for it especially, hoping that it hadn't been sold in the meantime. And that was before she told me it was English!

Back to back with Tanja's stall, is Rita's, supplier of last market's plaster lady. Her stall now contained a display of perspex rings, which all turned to be my diminutive size. Apparently, they all came from the same lady who could no longer wear them due to arthritis. 

From a box full of furry hats, Rita then conjured up the delightful muff on the bottom left, which I insisted on wearing for the rest of the market. 

Meanwhile, Jos fell for the white Bakelite pillbox size thingy bearing the logo of Belgian chocolate and biscuit factory Victoria, instantly recognizable to people of a certain age in Belgium!

When I picked up the tiny fruit basket, which is actually a brooch, for closer inspection, Rita insisted that I accept it as a gift. Isn't she - and the basket - sweet?

Finally, let's have a look at the other brooches I picked up and which, to answer Vronni's question in her comment to my previous post, have all found space in my drawers of brooches, even if it is becoming a bit of a squeeze in there! 

The celluloid deer came from the same stall as the 1930s tin, while both the fox's head with its piercing blue eyes - which might very well be my favourite - and the brown-hearted one on the bottom right came from random stalls. The latter is the only one which is marked. It's by Sarah Coventry. Founded in 1949 by Charles Stuart, Sarah Coventry's name was the combination of his granddaughter’s first name and the town of Coventry in England, where the Stuart family had emigrated from to the US. The jewellery was sold via house parties a la Tupperware and Avon.

Another regular seller, Nelly - who always gushes over my outfits - supplied the superb enamelled pansies brooch ...

... as well as the pink-rimmed plastic flower brooch (a twin of a blue-rimmed one I've had for years) and the gorgeous blue Cameo.

The tiny pair of cork slippers and the moulded rose brooch were my final finds of the day and came from another random stall.

That's all for now, my friends. I hope to be back in full health after Christmas and promise to catch up with your blogs soon.

Before I go, though, here's the other present my bosses brought me, and which was infinitely better than that nasty cough: a very fragrant Jo Malone gift set!

Have a wonderful Christmas, whichever way you celebrate it - or not!