My 60th Birthday

Yesterday (30th May) was my 60th birthday. Yes, I know, I can scarcely believe it… I don’t FEEL 60, and 60 isn’t a number I would choose to associate with myself lol! Still, it can’t be denied, and I have to live with it as best as I can! Everyone says I don’t look it, so that’s some consolation, I suppose.

We had a lovely day. My hubby and I drove to Dorset to visit my sister and her husband, and also to see Mum who is staying with them until our new house is ready to move into. The weather was generally nice apart from a gloomy patch in the middle of the day, but we did manage to see my sister’s new place at its best. They moved fairly recently and had a great deal of building work done, and it is absolutely gorgeous – it’s right out in the country, an old farmhouse, and they are very thrilled with the new kitchen and bathrooms, and a large room which had originally been for animals, with a high roof, now converted into a studio where they host regular art classes.

My sister had prepared a beautiful meal for us with some canapes and champagne to start, and then fresh cold salmon with lots of delicious salads, followed by my first taste of strawberries and cream of the year, and some gooey choccie pudding.

For my birthday my dear hubby gave me an exquisite little tiny gold pendant in the shape of a picnic hamper.

It opens, and inside is a tiny mouse eating a cupcake! He spent a lot of time choosing it.

He also gave me one of the most beautiful cards I’ve ever received from him – very Great Gatsby! So glamorous, with lots of gold and bling and glitter on it. Here’s the outside:

and inside:

Isn’t it just gorgeous? I shall keep it forever! His message read “Always 30”!!! (I wish the photo did it justice – you can’t see any of the shimmer on it!)

I thought that was it, but when we sat down later for a cup of tea, suddenly a birthday cake appeared! My hubby had had it made for me, and I had absolutely no idea – he’d managed to smuggle it up in the car without me noticing. Knowing how I love sunflowers (I have painted them all around our kitchen), he requested sunflowers, and also the cake maker had created two little grey cats!

Isn’t that fun? My dear hubby always knows exactly what I like, and I am so thrilled with this beautiful cake! Here’s a picture my hubby took of me, enjoying the surprise:

and here I am, admiring it:

Not only was the decoration beautiful (made of soft icing) but the cake inside was delicious, a light Victoria sponge with jam filling. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep the sunflowers and kitties but we shall see!

While we were there, my sister showed me an exquisite little silver box her hubby had given her – we both love ducks and this was a particularly charming representation:

I love the concentric rings representing the ripples, and I’ve always loved watching dabbling ducks! She said “Open it!”

I’m afraid it’s a bit difficult to see, as it was very shiny and reflective and hard to photograph, but on the inside of the lid, you see the underside of the “water” and what the ducks would look like from beneath! It is really hilarious – the little duck tummies and paddling webbed feet, and the head of the dabbling one! The feet and beaks are silver-gilt. It’s an exquisite little piece, very quirky and humorous and just the sort of thing I love. Apparently it was made by a silversmith in London who has now gone out of business, which is a real shame. Such a little treasure! It measures about 3 inches across.

As we drove over in the morning, we had a phone call from the solicitor to say that contracts had been exchanged on our purchase at long last! Shortly after this, the agent phoned to say the same. This was such great news after all we’ve been through over the past months – there were times when I wondered whether it would ever happen. Completion is today!

This news was the best we could have received and an extra bonus birthday present for me. It did mean, however, that I had to closet myself away in my sister’s study after lunch, trying to sort out the buildings insurance, but that is now all done so I don’t need to lose any more sleep on that score.

From now on, as long as my energy holds out, I should be more active on my blog, as I go over to the house on a regular basis, taking photos of the work in progress. The builders start early next week.

New Youtube Video–3-D Silver Butterflies

Remember this?

I did a post on how I made this, over a year ago, and since I hadn’t uploaded anything to my Youtube channel for a while, I thought I would make a video slideshow of the project from the many photos I took during its construction.

Using Pinnacle Studio 12, with the addition of panning and zooming, titles and background music, it is soon easy to forget that this consists only of still photos.

Not having access to my creative world at the moment pending our house move, I thought I might make some more of these video slideshows of different projects which were never filmed while I was making them.

This particular project was made into a special birthday card. I would not normally do this, because stick a folding back onto a project and a greeting inside, and it immediately becomes ephemeral in the eyes of most people, and after the event it is celebrating, often reaches the same destination as the products of a famous card retailer – the bin! (This is one reason why I don’t concentrate my efforts on card making, and prefer to make something more permanent.)

This was a fun project to do, and I hope in future to explore further this whole area of light and shade, and reflectivity.

Romania–Buildings Pt 2: Interiors

This time I thought I’d show you what the interiors of Romanian buildings are like. As far as domestic buildings are concerned, most modern Romanians like the same furnishings and fittings that we in the West enjoy, and modern houses and apartments may not look that different, although many people like to celebrate their cultural heritage and have traditional Romanian decorations. They have beautiful folk-art plates hanging on the walls, always decorated with a “scarf” – a piece of Romanian woven textile – I’d not come across this custom before and it looks very pretty.

This picture was taken inside the cabin where we stayed in Horea.

We stayed in several apartments in city blocks during our tour. During the communist era, Ceausescu had a policy of population distribution, moving large numbers into the cities and housing them in pretty awful tower blocks, all heated with communal hot water pipes that ran over the streets between the blocks. They had grim concrete staircases and were generally pretty horrible. Since the collapse of the regime, modern heating and other facilities have been introduced, and while a lot of the common areas (staircases and halls) are still pretty frightful (although unlike in the west, they do not smell, and there is no graffiti), most people have now replaced their front doors and you get a patchwork of different designs – in the same way that the gates in Maramures compete against each other for OTT-ness, in a smaller way, these front doors also compete for individuality! As my hubby was always saying, once you cross the threshold, in almost every case you enter a little palace! These small apartments are beautifully kept and decorated, with flowers everywhere, and plants on the balconies – many people continue to grow their own vegetables in containers, and several families we visited had cats. One apartment where we stayed, it was quite obvious that the parents had vacated their bedroom for us, and they had a pull-out sofa bed in the sitting room, and when we tried to insist that we sleep on that, they would have none of it. They plied us with kindness in every way. This particular family had visited us in the UK – he was a hospital consultant, living in a 2-bedroomed apartment in a tower block with his wife and little girl, on a miserable salary compared with his peers in the West. My hubby arranged for him to visit our local hospitals, and the staff were only too happy to show him around and invited him to attend operations. He went home having learnt so much, and was so impressed with everyone’s kindness, and how blessed we are here with so much modern equipment. The whole experience of getting to know this family was most humbling.

Here’s the interior of a house in the Sibiu Village Museum which I mentioned before.

This shows some traditional wooden furniture and a very simple country interior.

Here’s another interior from the Sibiu Village Museum, showing a bedroom with a simple wooden bed, a woven textile adorning the walls, some interesting portraits and a glorious painted chest. Ages ago I bought a plain flat-pack chest from Ikea which has remained in its box ever since, and when we move, I am hoping to paint it and assemble it – I may do something in this style…

These are, of course, museum houses, and I’m not sure how many houses that are actually lived in are still in this style, but much of the country remains very rural and traditional, so it is quite likely.

I suppose the majority of buildings we actually went inside in the course of our travels were churches. This is the inside of the little Lutheran church in Cisnadie, the charming faded little German-speaking town we visited. These are the choir stalls, with beautifully painted panels.

This is the simple iconostasis in a tiny Romanian Orthodox church in the Sibiu Village Museum, transported from Salaj County. You can see the use of draped woven textiles again.

Here is the painted ceiling of the same church, together with a painted wooden chandelier.

These are typical interiors that you find in the wooden churches of Transylvania. In complete contrast, here is the high altar in the Franciscan church in Cluj, which is presumably Roman Catholic, as far as I remember. I know where my own personal tastes lie, at any rate!

This painted interior and iconostasis in the Orthodox church in Baia Mare is typical of the more urban churches.

I promised I would show you some more pictures of the interior of the synagogue in Baia Mare. This is the painted ceiling, embellished with innumerable gold stars around a Magen David, with the Torah tablets painted at the further end of the ceiling, above the window. You can see the women’s gallery on the left.

This is the bimah, where the Torah scrolls are read. You can see the Magen David and Menorah decorations painted on the pillars.

Here, our lovely old guide has opened the Ark and my hubby is looking at the Torah scrolls inside.

I found the synagogue to be the most poignant and moving place to visit, redolent of its more vigorous and lively past before the Holocaust bore away most of its community. I always remember seeing Rabbi Lionel Blue on a television programme, travelling around Eastern Europe, and coming to a building which acted as a repository for rescued Torah scrolls, each one representing a community completely exterminated, and he turned to the camera and asked them to stop filming – he said, “I can’t stay in here…” and could speak no more.

I hope this has given you a taste of the very varied interiors we encountered on our travels. Next time I shall be showing some photos of how the buildings were constructed – something I found absolutely fascinating.

Romania–Buildings Pt. 1: Exteriors

I decided to split the post I intended doing on the buildings of Romania because there was just so much – I was completely bowled over by the different styles in the various regions, their beauty, and their total otherness from anything I’d experienced before. In this post, I intend sharing pictures showing the different styles of the exteriors, and in subsequent posts, I shall concentrate on the interiors, and on the building techniques we saw in action during the extraordinary period of transition when we visited – a real building boom!

In the cities, the buildings tend to be stone or brick built, and the churches are in the traditional Byzantine style of the Orthodox Church, covered richly with wall paintings inside, as you saw in my previous post – the picture of the church in Baia Mare where the blessing of the wedding rings took place. Here are a couple of pictures taken in the capital city, Bucharest, the second of which is a church.

In my last post, I mentioned the little German town of Cisnadie. The faded pastel shades and dilapidated condition of the place enchanted me – it had a fragility which made me feel that if something were not done soon, the place would eventually sink back into the earth, but the worst that could happen would be for it to be tarted up and made into a bland tourist attraction! I felt privileged to be there to witness its faded charm.

 

Here is a house at Beles.

A lot of buildings have aluminium roofs, which weather to a soft pale grey, but when they are new, they shine like silver in the sun!

We spent a day at Banffy Castle near Cluj. This ancient building was a ruin, but it was being restored by an international team. I took far too many photos to share on here, but here’s a sample:

Here is a portion that has been restored.

There are numerous monasteries in Romania, now enjoying a comeback after severe repression during the Ceausescu era. Here is the gate to the one at Rohia.

This is the chapel at Rohia.

The buildings in the monastery complex are roofed with aluminium, weathered to its soft grey finish.

Maramures is famous for its wooden buildings, and especially for the elaborate carved wooden gates in the villages – it seems that the Romanians in this region suffer from a serious case of Keeping Up with the Joneses – they all try to outdo each other and some of the gates are distinctly over the top!

A common feature is swags of chains hanging from the arches – this is a good example of one of these. The chains, like the rest of the gate, are carved from wood, and of course, they had to be carved from a single piece, showing great skill in the woodcarver’s art. You can also see the traditional cable-style carving.

Here’s a detail of another carved gate. This is a very traditional style of Romanian carving.

This is one of the typical Transylvanian wooden churches in Maramures. You can see the carved wooden detail running along the length of the building, and also the roof covered with wooden shingles. I shall be showing you more of these when we look at the construction of buildings. There are metal grave crosses in the foreground, and the wooden objects leaning against the church wall are coffin carriers.

Here’s a detail of the roof. The church roofs are often constructed in layers like this, rather like the beautiful oriental roofs of China.

This is one particular style of shingle. The overall pattern is delightful, and the wood weathers unevenly, giving a subtly mottled effect. Every shingle is hand-carved.

The grave markers (I can’t call them gravestones because they are made of wood!) are absolutely gorgeous. They often have pictures of the deceased, and some information about their life.

This particular one marks the grave of a lady, shown here with her spindle and distaff. There is a very famous cemetery in Sapanta, in Maramures, but unfortunately we didn’t get there. It is called the Merry Cemetery because of all the delightful and amusing pictures and anecdotes about the people buried there. If you Google it you can find lots of images. It’s such a lovely tradition, and it makes this final resting place of the dead a cheerful and happy place, rather than a sorrowful one.

We visited the old synagogue in Baia Mare.

I was reduced to tears inside, as we were shown round by an elderly Jewish man who clearly loved caring for this now virtually abandoned building. The Jews of Romania suffered horribly in the Holocaust and few returned. The pews contained the old books and prayer shawls, and it was a touching memorial of a once-thriving and devout community.

I will show you some more pictures  of its beautiful interior in the next post.

Returning to the wooden churches of Maramures, Surdesti boasted the tallest wooden spire in Europe – not sure if this still holds true, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

The entrance to the church.

Here’s a rather different style of Maramures house – covered in brightly coloured tiles!

These metal gates and railings are a very common sight all over the country.

Another decorated house, this time near the Prislop Pass in the Carpathian Mountains.

Notice again the aluminium roof. There are some wooden shingles on the building beyond.

At Varatec, up in the north-east of Romania near the Moldovan and Ukrainian borders, we found this house with a distinctly Russian appearance.

If it’s over-the-top you want, look no further than the famous Romanian gypsy palaces!

Finally, no journey around the buildings of Romania would be complete without a glimpse of the painted monastery of Moldovita.

This exterior wall painting depicts the Battle of Constantinople in 717-8 AD, which stopped the advance of Islam into Europe.

This is only a sample of the photos I took. It was really hard to choose which to include. There were far too many to include interiors in this post, so they will have to wait!