Sunny days and colorful nights

The warmth has finally arrived!

It’s so wonderful to finally get to go out without heavy jackets and get a little color from the sun.

I broke out my 50’s sleeveless shirt dress that I got from Portland based Xtabay Vintage and spent Saturday in the sun with friends. 

The colors of this dress gave me a chance to use my vintage Yves Saint Laurent scarf that I thrifted for $5 back when I was in high school.

My friend Verena soaking up the sun. Also note her pretty red suede vintage heels that she bought at last year’s Malmö Vintage Expo resting in the grass. Too cute!

Saturday evening started off at Far i Hatten at Folkets Park in Malmö. I just love this place, and it’s really at its best in the spring and summer when you can enjoy the outdoors.

The following photo is an oldie (and blurry) from last summer, when Metro Malmö newspaper caught me and my gals having a drink at Far i Hatten.

And they have cool old posters decorating the outdoor bar. This one is from the 1949 revue at Malmö's Folkets Hus (peoples' house).

A beautiful little peacock lights up the night outside of Far i Hatten.

On Sunday I went to the Mitt Möllan Spring Market. Mitt Möllan houses the Malmö Beyond Retro. Artists, crafters, bakers, and local boutiques were present at the market, and it was a great showing of the creativity that is all around in Malmö. I didn’t go home with any art, but Emmaus Björka (a secondhand store like Salvation Army) was also there…and I found some wonderful things! I’ll tell you all about them in my next post.

My first Easter as a Swede!

I hope you all had a happy Easter and an enjoyable long weekend! 

I did a little Easter decorating in the apartment in preparation for the weekend. I made påskris, which is a traditional Swedish decoration for Easter.

I took out my boyfriend’s 70’s Easter egg duck too.

But on Saturday, or Easter eve, I got the chance to head out of the city and celebrate Easter out in the country with my boyfriend and his family who live in the middle of Skåne in Hallaröd and Höör.

We stayed at his sister and brother-in-law’s place in Hallaröd. They have a big beautiful old farmhouse out in the countryside, complete with a garden in the backyard. Okay, I know what you're thinking. This is obviously not a springtime photo. Yes, this photo is from last summer. I forgot to take a photo while i was there this weekend and I just needed to show you how beautiful this place is.

Feeling very eastery outside of their storage house in the backyard. I’m wearing a skirt from a vintage inspired Swedish designer, Emmy. Yes, not actually vintage, but I find vintage reproduction skirts to be great sometimes, especially for bigger gals like me whose size can be harder to find. And this one is just such a vibrant yellow on a sturdy, textured fabric. 

The past few weeks have been so cold and windy, so we were especially lucky on Saturday and Sunday. It was warm, sunny and calm. Just perfect for a nap in the sun after a traditional Swedish holiday meal of pickled herring and potatoes washed down with shots of snaps and beer. Yep, a nap in the sun after all that is just the ticket!

After the nap, we spent the rest of the day outside having coffee and dessert, some glasses of wine, listening to music and just enjoying the sunshine. We even had a dance party. Here we are rocking out to Louis Prima!

After a grilled dinner and some good conversation, the dance party continued late into the night. 

On Easter Sunday, we went to my boyfriend’s parents’ home in Höör to celebrate not only Easter but also his mother’s birthday. We celebrated with this very beautiful silltårta (herring cake) decorated with smoked salmon, eggs, caviar, and vegetables, along with all of the traditional Swedish Easter foods.

The weather was beautiful and warm once again and we got to eat our strawberry cake out in the sun. Later, back in Hallaröd, we ended the day with a short hike through the countryside and forest.

Monday was a day of relaxing. Even in the few days we were there you could really see how quickly the plants were sprouting and trees beginning to bloom. We took a short walk out to the lake before heading back to Malmö. I can’t wait to see it in the summer and go fishing in the lake!

Once back in Malmö, my boyfriend and I saw Nattvak, a play at Teaterrepubliken. My guy’s big brother did the music for the play, so we really wanted to check it out. It was the first Swedish language play I’ve ever attended. Everything was really well done and I was glad to have the chance to see it.

I decided to wear my new (to me!) 1950’s dress that I got this past week to the play.

Last but not least, I’d like to announce that I now have Swedish citizenship! I look forward to getting a Swedish passport and passing quickly through EU passport control lines. Or maybe I'll use it to go to Cuba! Haha, who knows...

Tour guide for a day: visitors from Copenhagen and Stockholm

I like to play tour guide. When I’m home on Oʻahu I love to take friends from elsewhere around and give them a taste of my home island. While Malmö hasn’t been my home for very long, I still like having friends come by and getting the chance to show them around and go shopping. That is, if I don't get too distracted with shopping myself... 

A visit from my Danish friend Pia Storm had been long in the works. 

I met Pia at last year’s Malmö Vintage Expo in May and I visited her in Copenhagen a few times last summer. I invited her to take a trip up north to Malmö to come see me, but between both of our schedules it just didn’t happen until this past Saturday. The plan was to check out the vintage stores in Malmö, including the new Beyond Retro store, which is a vintage/secondhand retail chain in Sweden and England. 

Then Pia and I walked over to Vintage From Paris, which used to be my neighborhood vintage shop when I lived in the Saint Knut area of Malmö. Every now and then I find things that are just wonderful - and at a great price! I have particular luck there with accessories.

We ran into Amanda, another vintage gal pal I met at the winter Vintage Expo in Limhamn. She works at VFP and was gracious enough to show us some of the lovely things they had in stock. 

Happily enough, it ended up being a hat day for me. I only owned one hat prior to last weekend, but VFP had two very beautiful hats that I just had to take home with me! One was a purple pillbox hat that matches perfectly with my purple winter coat. The other was an amazing yellow, red, and brown feather confection that is topped off with yellow netting and a yellow velvet bow at the back. The yellow and red feathers reminded me of home and I loved it. 

Its not so easy to see the feathers on the yellow hat in this shot, but I promise it's amazing. I'll be sure to take better photos of it soon!

If you wondered what I meant by “it reminded me of home,” this is a traditional Hawaiian feather cape, or ʻahu ʻula. Red and yellow are royal colors and are typically used for ʻahu ʻula. Feather capes were highly prized by chiefs and the Hawaiian featherwork tradition is a beautiful example of our cultural heritage. I mean, just look at this cape!

We stopped by Shop Mani and checked out their two floors of vintage clothes! They have both women's and men's vintage clothes, for any Malmö guys who might be interested. 

This is just one floor, people.

We peeked into Flique i Underjorden at Davidshalltorg, where Miriam Parkman happened to be holding a vintage hair course at their store that weekend. 

There's Miriam working her hair magic on Lovisa, a designer of organic cakes, who I "met" via Instagram. 

Pia and Miriam know each other from blogging and Instagram and recognised each other almost as soon as we walked in. We ended up having lunch with Miriam that afternoon. It was really nice to meet her!

Sushi with Miriam! And Miss Pia behind the camera. Who even knows what I'm trying to say in this photo?

Since Miriam was visiting from Stockholm for the weekend, she and I met up on Sunday for a fika, which is the Swedish word for a coffee break. We went to Te och Kaka (tea and cake). 

Miriam's ready for a fika!

It was a cute little building in the middle of a courtyard. They have a big selection of teas and homemade cakes and cookies.

A flowering tea on their wall of teas.

This place is too cute! The wall behind me is hand painted.

It truly was a great weekend. Friends, vintage shopping, going out to lunch…what more could a gal ask for?  It was so nice to catch up with a friend…and to make a new one!

A big mahalo (thank you) to Pia for allowing me to use several her photos for this post and to Miriam for the nice photo of Pia.

The truth about Hawaiian pizza, or how I became front page news in the neighborhood.

Although I mean for my blog to be dedicated to vintage, those of you who know me know that another big love of mine is food. I love trying new kinds of food, talking about food, reading about it, looking at it, just anything really. Match that up with my love of home and, well, I could be here a while. So you might understand my excitement when my friend Erika, an editor at Lokaltidningen, a local newspaper for my part of Malmö, asked if I’d be willing to talk about Hawaiian food!

It was a nice page long article and I even got to be on the front page of the paper too! I took the chance to bust out my vintage 1950’s Hawaiian-ish dress and pretty shell earrings I got at FN92 in Copenhagen. It might be from Hawaiʻi but I actually have no idea where the dress came from. The print reminded me of lauaʻe and the buttons are made of coconut. It was a beautiful vintage dress that reminded me of home. I had to have it! Happily enough, there were a perfect pair of clip on shell earrings waiting for me at FN92 as well.

Many Swedes are curious about Hawaiʻi's association with pineapple and often think that pineapples are originally from Hawaiʻi. We talked about the Hawaiian Pizza / pineapple=Hawaiʻi myth (which actually has its origins in Germany!) as well as what real Hawaiian food is. I talked about everybody’s favorite lūʻau foods and I even provided a recipe for lomi lomi salmon! 

I showed off some of the food I brought back to Sweden with me when I was home over Christmas and New Year’s so we could get some shots for the article. It was nice to talk about the local food traditions we have in Hawai’i. We just call it "local food-" a blend of all the foods and flavors of all the cultures that call Hawai’i home. It’s a special combination you won’t get anywhere else!

I hope that people found Erika’s article interesting and enlightening. It seems many people here are curious about or have misconceptions about Hawaii. And I suppose it’s no surprise - Hawaiʻi is literally on the other side of the globe. People back home also have some misguided notions about Sweden - mostly that it is Switzerland and that polar bears roam freely, so I guess it’s about even.

The vintage violet.

Growing up in Hawai'i, there are flowers everywhere year round. Big, beautiful, colourful and often fragrant flowers that decorate the front yards of homes and give bright pops of color in the green forests. I'm talking about hibiscuses, plumerias, gingers, tiares, and puakenikeni, among others. Some of them are so common that they become part of daily life beyond decorating the garden. In high school, the first stop in the morning for many girls was to the spots on campus where flower trees grew. These were usually tiare or puakenikeni, which are two of the most fragrant flowers. We would pick a flower and wear it behind the ear for the day. The next day, there would always be another flower in bloom to wear. A beautiful flower for every day. You know, just regular life in Hawai'i!

Here I am in 2012. That's a tiare flower behind my ear.

Once I moved to Sweden I realized just how special it is to have these wonderful flowers all around you any and every month of the year. But when the Swedish winter freeze thawed off I discovered that Sweden too has wonderful flowers that were quite exotic to me. These were flowers that I had only read about in books and had never seen or smelled before. Some of my favorites of these exotic (to me!) flowers are lilac, hyacinth, daffodil, sweet pea, and honeysuckle.

My very favorite of these is violet. Violets are perhaps my favorite flower of all time. If there were violets big enough to wear behind my ear, I would wear them all spring long. I adore the color and scent of violets. To me they seem special because they grow in very particular places and always on their own terms. Most grow naturally and if you decide to plant them yourself, they'll decide if they want to grow there or not. Sometimes they spread thickly in an area, turning a patch of lawn or field a beautiful shade or purple. Other times you'll just find one independent little plant, just like the very first violet of spring that I saw last week.

For some reason, violets seem to be a bit of a forgotten flower. The flower was once very fashionable at the turn of the century and was associated with love, modesty, and faithfulness.

Not only is the violet a beautiful flower, but it also has a wonderful smell and flavor. It is edible and here in Sweden it can sometimes be found as a candy or ice cream flavor. My all time favorite ice cream flavor is violet (no surprise there) and finding it is even rarer than finding a real violet! While still available, violet confections seem to be somewhat old timey and aren't widespread. 



Candied violets were a popular confection at the turn of the century, and they are as violety as violet candy can get! The recipe is quite basic but making them is a painstaking process and really is a labor of love. I made them a few years ago when I had violets growing on my balcony. They're beautiful on cakes and other desserts or are just dandy to eat on their own, old school style.

For those of you who live in a place where you can get a hold of violets, here's how to make them: Start with fresh picked violets harvested from a clean place. No roadside violets or dog park flowers here, please! 

Rinse them gently with cool water and gently dry off each flower by dabbing them with a paper towel. You will then need to prepare a bowl of egg whites. One egg white might be enough depending on how many violets you have. Coat the violets with a thin layer of egg white. To do this you can either dip the violets one by one into the egg whites or you can use a paintbrush to coat them with egg whites. Thoroughly coat them with egg whites in order to preserve the flower. You will want to keep a toothpick handy to open up any petals that have stuck together. Place the egg white coated violets on a wax paper covered cookie sheet. Sprinkle them with castor/fine sugar. Be sure to use fine sugar and not regular white sugar as the finer crystals will melt onto the flower more readily than regular sugar. Cover the violets with sugar on all sides. Let them sit in a dry, well ventilated place until the egg whites and sugar have dried and the flowers have hardened. You can then store them in an airtight container.

Let me know if you decide to try making candied violets! I'd love to hear how it went for you!

And to follow the violety theme, I recently bought a purple 1950's dress that I just need to share. Okay, maybe it's more lavender than violet, but whatever.

I'm such a novelty print nut, so it's unusual for me to choose a solid color dress. But just look at the buttons and bow! And the matching bolero! So cute. I can't wait for it to arrive!

Do you have any favorite seasonal flowers wherever you live? Tell me about them!

A luxurious weekend

Whew! This week sure has been busy. But at least I had a luxurious and relaxing weekend full of friends, food, and fun before I then launched into a pretty intensive week.  Friday evening we celebrated my friend Lisa's birthday with Asian/Pacific Rim style cuisine at Lemongrass restaurant. I'll take any chance I can to dress up, so I wore one of my not-vintage-but-vintage-inspired dresses- a pretty Bernie Dexter dress.

I don't go out to restaurants too often, so I felt pretty indulgent when I went out on Saturday to another restaurant. If you're in Malmö and looking for a place to eat sushi, I would recommend Saiko. It's Skånsk inspired sushi (think Swedish pickled herring sushi or red cabbage sushi) but they also have really good quality raw fish. I ordered a Japanese beer brewed with ginger. The little ginger man on the label was too funny!

Off to eat some sushi! This dress I bought from FN92 last summer. I'm so excited to be able to start pulling out my warm weather dresses!