On thrifting love and the spoils of the hunt.

Sometimes you gotta write about amazing DIY's, and sometimes you just.. gotta write. 

I'd like to tell that my love for thrifting began with porcelain.

But the more accurate thruth was that I refound my love for thrifting through tableware. 

My actual love for thrifting, as my mother likes to tell me, began with a bathing suit. 

I grew up in a tiny village on the northern Dutch countryside, a sleepy village with not much more in it than a mill, a bakery and.. a teeny tiny thrift shop that sold children's clothes.

Me, being only 4 years old, loved the weird shop of which I only remember some snippets ( snippets that for some reason, mainly involve images of David the Gnome-puppets)

One day, my mother bought me a second hand bathing suit from that little shop, and I -having only owned swimming trunks for all my life- was absolutely in love.

So much, that from that moment on, I would only refer to it as "my fantastic bathing suit". Tiny me, 4 years old, had falling in love with thrifting for the first time. 

well, it isn't in my fantastic bathing suit, but as you can see, I was a very fashionable girl..

Fastforwarding a quite a few years, to me, at 18 or 19 years old. The word "brocante" had just made its entrance in all the lifestyle magazines, and with it came, at least here in the Netherlands, a fascination for brocante porcelain and tableware. And thus I would hunt with my mum on the weekends in thrift shops, finding all kinds of dainty, flowery, old fashioned tea cups and the likes; I had fallen in love with thrifting again.

My little student room soon bursted out of its seams from all the porcelain I stashed there. And it it didn't stop at cups and saucers, slowly but surely, my entire room filled itself with the spoils of my huntings. 

My old rooms! I really wanted a photo of my porcelain stash as well, but I don't have that any more.
But the rest of the room shows my thrifty hoarding ways.
and yes, I'm a bit ashamed about the letters "home" being up there. 

Since then, I have quite left the my hunts for porcelain behind me, realizing that those tiny teacups ar not terribly practical when you drink tea by the liter rather than by the cup, and also I live together with a man who is really particular about the cups he likes to use (there appears to be such a thing as mouthfeel, when it comes to cups, and if I may believe Joost, 99% of all the cups in the world do not have it)

But every now and then.. I just have to buy porcelain again, if not only for the reason to remind myself why I (re)fell in love with thrifting. 

Like this cute flower-shaped bowl, or the beautifully tactile plates underneath it.

I just can't help myself, I guess. Although -in order to avoid buying stuff that will get stored away because of the lack of aforementioned "mouthfeel"- there is some method in my madness: I refrain myself from buying dainty, impractical little teacups, and stick to a colour scheme that is at least somewhat harmonious. 

which isn't hard because I really love these colours, and indigo/white is found througout the history of porcelain; from the Netherlands to Japan. 

And perhaps, most of all, I love the subtle ways in which porcelain can show its history. For example, the saucer and dish with the excuberant blue floral pattern are from a line of porcelain that was released in the Netherlands in elebration of the royal wedding of our former queen Beatrix.

And while I don't know anything at all about the two lunch-sized plates, I do remember finding them with my mother in a particularly busy thrift shop one saturday. 

And for the hand-made speckled plate, I only found that one last weekend, but I couldn't ignore the feeling of a succesful hunt in my stomach, seeing that it was in fact a handmade one. 

Oh well, maybe, one day, I'll also find a fantastic bathing suit again.