MooiVintage in Dutch ELLE Magazine

MooiVintage is featured in an article in the May issue of Dutch Elle Magazine on Etsy sellers! Sneak preview here:

New discoveries

It's always so great to find new jewelry designers to drool over. I found a number of great people at the Sieraad Art Fair:
Anna Tomich from Lotocoho. I'm a sucker for faceted jewelry and Anna Tomich sure knows how to make those. The pieces are inspired by mountain structures. You can even let her know what your favorite mountain is and she'll design a piece for you.

I also love french jewelry designer Violaine Ulmer. She makes beautiful strong and huge rings out of porcelain and paints them in gold silver and metallic. One ring was screaming my name, but I resisted.

Pure gold?

I  just came home from a visit to the yearly Sieraad Art Fair in Amsterdam. Last year was my first time and I blogged about it on the Dutch Etsy website. This year I also discovered some pretty amazing designers. I came across a Cami Caubergh, Jasper Vandenberghe and Hermien Cassiers, three of students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. They made some very original pieces for a school project. One was a seethrough tube necklace filled with water. The idea behind it is that in the future water might become as valuable as gold because of wars and bad environmental choices.

Their second idea really got me excited. The students made a brooch that looked like a very heavy piece of pure gold. You even got a little wooden booklet with a certificate, describing the history of gold. The piece of gold actually was a stone covered in real gold leaf. Before you bought the "gold" it was put on a scale and you had to pay 8,60 euro's per gram for it. I really love the idea and it reminds me of how vintage costume jewelry started. People wanted the real gems for a fraction of the price. Only you know it's not the real thing.

Cream and goldtone obsession

I don't know why, but I've been selecting a lot of and cream coloured mixed with gold tone jewelry for the shop. The last piece I've bought is simply amazing. It's a huge modernist pendant necklace, you can get it here.

Arata Fuchi +1

Last year I visited the Sieraad ArtFair in the Westergasbriek in Amsterdam. Lots of exciting jewelry designers showcased their work there. I also came across Arata Fuchi and was immediately drawn to his work. He uses the socalled 'pulverisation' technique. By covering silver pieces with silver powder they become very rough and needless to say very beautiful.

YSL Arty ring

Yesssss I know I know I know I'm the last in line to blog about this and how I could have missed this amazing collection is beyond me. But I still want to write about the YSL Arty collection. The rings have a distinct vintage feel and the rough, chunky and bold pieces are right up my alley. Don't get me started on the colors:

I blogged before about my ring search and I just bought a very cute ring by Etsy shop Beady Cats. It's no YSL (which is great for my wallet), but I think the combination of stones is great:

Vogue Italia features Marga Weimans!!!

Vogue Italia online has a big feature on my sister fashion designer Marga Weimans!!!
Check it out here

Maxi skirt mania

I just cycled passed the new American Apparel shopwindow in Amsterdam and it was filled with colorful maxi-skirts. Not only AA is maxi skirt crazy, they're everywhere from ASOS to Ralph Lauren. The skirts look even better with a cute MooiVintage beltbuckle from designers like Mimi di N, Doreen Ryan or Ann Turk. Find all of them here. On another note: so glad spring is finally here!

Blue Ackermann * Blue Vintage

I loved all the blue silhouettes in Haider Ackermanns fall winter 2011 collection. It inspired me to look for some beautiful blue gems for the shop.

Bye Liz

She had a love affair with jewelry, 

she was a great actress, 

she collected millions for AIDS research

She lived and partied like the best of them 

and now she's gone

Rest in peace Liz Taylor

Lady of the rings

I'm in search of the perfect summer ring at the moment. I just bought a beautiful Trifari knot ring, but my ring craving isn't over yet.

Vintage knotted Trifari ring

I've also been eying the gems made by the ladies of Beadycats a great Etsy shop, based in Istanbul Turkey. I especially like the rings with three stones like this one:

Ring with amethyst, druzy and labradorite stones @ BeadyCats

Of course I could also keep this lovely black and goldtone ring by Avon, which is for sale in my own MooiVintage shop on Etsy. But I hope to make someone else happy with it.

Vintage Avon ring @ Mooivintage

And then there's British jewelry designer Jade Mellor. Just looking at her work makes me happy. Stylish, bold and in cool colours. And correct if I'm wrong, but I believe they are screaming my name;-)

Jade Mellor

Color blocking

I'm usually not much of an avid fashion trend follower. I walk to the beat of my own drum...but there is one current trend that I will follow like a true fashion stalker: colorblocking.

If you're a reader of fashion glossies then you must have seen the Jill Sander SS 2011 ready to wear collection. I know I'm the millionth person to blog about this, but it took my breath away. This summer will all be about colourblocks for me. I realised I wear an awful lot of black....no more! In my shop I always love to upload vintage jewelry with one or two colours. Some of it mixes really well with the Jill silhouettes.

    White Trifari necklace

     

Black & white mother of Pearl bracelet

Red & black pendant necklace

                                                                                                Choker necklace with amber pendants

   Goldtone circles with green beads necklace

New Etsy shop!!

Back again from blogging hiatius and with some really good news: I've started a brandnew Etsy shop. I'ts all about the vintage watch:

Strawberry Earth Wonderland

Haven't had time to tell you all about the amazing eco-fashion event Strawberry Earth Wonderland by my friends Mette te Velde & Ikenna Azuike. I was there selling MooiVintage jewelry together with big sis fashion designer Marga Weimans. I also hosted the Fashion Blogger camp. I great discussion with some well known Dutch fashion journalists like Georgette Koning Milou van Rossum en John de Greef and bloggers  Andy Torres  of StyleScrapbook.com and Ernst-Jan Pfauth the Dutchproblogger. More pics to come soon, but here's the video:



Strawberry Earth Wonderland from Spiral Move on Vimeo.

The market of 1001 tastes

I've been living behind the Amsterdam foodcenter for almost two years now. It's a huge wholesale market where a lot of small and large Amsterdam shops come and buy their fruits, veggies, meat and fish. This Sunday they had an open day for the public. Which meant loads of yummie food I sampled till I couldn't sample no more;-) I bought some carrots at a stall selling socalled 'forgotten' vegetables: red, white and yellow carrots, and beettypes we used to eat a lot in Holland say 100 years ago. Check out those beautiful tomatoes!

Mushrooms galore.




I bought asperagus sprouts from van der Plas Sprouts. This company grows anything from well known alfalfa, to sprouts of garlic plants and the taste is amazing!

The traditional Dutch raw herring on a piece of 'roggebrood' or black rye bread with a gurkin was a little too much for me, although it looked great. I did take a bowl of what looked like a red fruit stew with cream. It contained raisins and berries, but the main ingredient surprisingly enough was 'gort' which is kinda like rice. Very unexpected and lovely dessert.

You can wake me up for a lemon curd tartelette any hour of the day (seriously) so these cute lemon merengue tarts had to come home with me. Not all of them of course, just two. 

This tiny shop in a car had a wide variety of foods, anything from sausages, coffee, cheeses and anchovy.

Photocollage of people working in the foodcenter in the past decades.

While the public was enyoing all the food, this lad still had to work and deliver the bread on time.