Vintage Wednesday: London's Covent Garden Market

Apparently I have Europe on the brain this week because I'm gravitating toward writing about things I saw and found while visiting! This little certificate came from London's Covent Garden Market. London has several famous markets to visit and I've only scratched the surface of the lovelies available. I have, however, enjoyed the market at Covent Garden.

Covent Garden was the first public square in England - a result of first experiments in town planning. Anyone who's seen My Fair Lady will remember the flower and produce sellers hawking their wares in Covent Garden. And it's still a place to fuel your imagination - probably cleaner, but still contains some of the stalls built in the last century. You'll still find a flower seller or two!

The former vegetable market is now covered (though still open air) and contains some lovely shops and eateries. At the Jubilee Market, you can find antiques, arts & crafts or just a general flea market depending on the day you visit. As you pass through the stalls, you'll find a wide variety of colorful collectibles.

And that's how I found this sweet little drawing certificate from the turn of the last century. I found a stall full of ephemera and perusing through the boxes of stock, the design struck my eye. In typical Edwardian style, this certificate was presented to some lucky young lady upon completion of her drawing course. What a lovely keepsake for her and what a wonderful reminder of Covent Garden for me 100 years and an ocean away.

Vintage Wednesday: From Paris. I love.

In the first week of October 2001, my mother and I flew to Heathrow, took a bus through Canterbury to the white cliffs of Dover and boarded a ferry to cross the Channel to Calais. We then took a train across the French countryside and arrived in Paris. We were some of the first Americans in Paris after the 9/11 attacks and all the stories we'd heard about Parisians rebuffing Americans proved untrue. They welcomed us. And so began our time in Paris.

We did the obligatory touristy things: saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, crossed the guards with the huge machine guns to see the Eiffel Tower, walked across the gardens and over a bridge to see Musee D'Orsay and saw the stunning Rose Window in Notre Dame. These were "must see" attractions if you're in Paris for the first time. But we also took some time off the beaten track, finding a needlework shop, exploring a pharmacy full of wondrous scented waters and soaps and found one of the flea markets of Paris.

It was a huge, sprawling mess of booths - some covered with tin roofing, some in multistory building-like structures with an open air feel. And the things we saw in abundance in Paris, we'd search a year to find in an antique store here. You see, in Paris, vintage is what we call antique. And what we call vintage is - or was - cheap and abundant.

We found one shop that was full of linens and millinery supplies - there was a wall of shelves full of silk flowers and ribbons from the 20s and 30s. Another shop was full of vintage buttons circa 1900 - jar after jar of jet and glass and wooden buttons in a rainbow of colors. Mama's treasure was a stole, embroidered in gold and silk with liturgical objects. But my favorite find was this little purse. This purse stole my heart. At the time, the price was very dear, but THIS was to be my souvenir of Paris - the romance, the beauty, the style.

I've done a bit of research and I believe it was from around the late 1800s or early 1900s. Although a company named Whiting and Davis perfected the art of metallic mesh bags similar in style to this in the 1920s, this is a little different from those styles I've seen. The blue is a fiber instead of metal with bits of silver that look as if they've been crocheted into the mesh. The top looks like punched silver, so I don't think it was meant to be a compact purse (complete with mirror and powder puff). It's origin is still a mystery to me, but I treasure this little reminder of our trip to Paris and the wondrous things we were able to see. To this day, it hangs by my door as a reminder to seek out the treasures in life - because they're often waiting unexpectedly just around the corner.