A peachy keen lamp and springy plaid...

Hooray! This weekend I finally got the lamp I've been wanting for so long. It's been really hard to find those 2-3 armed 1940's lamps, and if you do manage to find one listed for sale online, they've usually already been sold. With the help of my boyfriend I found a beautiful lamp that actually was still for sale! The teak wood body and brass details match nicely with my 50's makeup table and the peachy lampshades look great against the minty bedroom wall. It will be so nice to have a little extra light when I'm sitting at my makeup table in the morning!

Some details. How cute is the flower on the base of the lamp?!

So Friday night my boyfriend and I drove out to the seller and bought the lamp. After we brought the lamp home we went out and had a nice dinner. It's always great to have a casual date night! Saturday was pretty luxurious, too. It was a day filled with shopping and an evening of delicious homemade pizza and fun with friends. Such a long day calls for a super comfortable dress, so I wore one of my "new" old dresses: a 1950's day dress from JCPenney that I bought from DustyLuck on Etsy.

There's the JCPenney tag along with a close up of the fabric. The plaid! I am such a sucker for plaid. And I love the color combinations! A shopkeeper told me yesterday that I looked very springy in those colors, which was nice to hear. Well, I'll do anything I can to help spring hurry along! When I was out in the country the other week I got to see the very first flowers of spring opening up: blue crocuses, yellow buttercups and white snowdrops. Come on, spring!!

Hello there!

Aloha mai kākou!

I suppose it's best to first introduce oneself. My name is Milan and I'm a Hawaiian girl born and raised on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi who has transplanted herself all the way on the other side of the world in Malmö, Sweden. I do miss home (and I highly expect to be putting up photos that will further my homesickness), but I really enjoy living in Sweden and having the opportunity to travel in Europe. It is an interesting challenge to learn a new language and create a life in an entirely different place than where you've grown up. I've been living in Sweden on and off for a total of about four years.

I decided to keep a blog so that I could have a place to collect and share my interests and thoughts, particularly around my love of vintage. For as long as I can remember I have always loved old stuff. Anything! Homes, furniture, jewelry, kitchen stuff, you name it! If it was beautiful and old, I was sold! Perhaps it started with spending childhood summers in my great-grandparents' home in Kapaʻa, Kauaʻi. It's a charming 1920's Hawaiian plantation style home that was and continues to be a total time warp! When I was little I would take bubble baths in the jade, pink, and black art deco bathroom. As a preteen I spent lazy mornings on Kauaʻi digging through closets in the house, looking at my great-uncle's 1950's college yearbooks, admiring the hair and outfits of all the students. I thought the styles then were just great! 

When I was a teenager, I found a beautiful dress of my grandma's that was hidden away in her closet. It was a sleeveless turquoise dress with a white bubble pattern and white piping and bows on the bodice. It fit me perfectly and I just loved how I felt in the dress! But since nobody wore dresses like that anymore, I thought that the only chance I had to wear it was for Halloween. And to be sure, people thought it was a costume. A beautiful dress indeed, but quite obviously not "normal" clothes. I would have loved to have more dresses like that, but I thought that surely beautiful clothes like that just couldn't be found anymore. I started collecting 60's - 70's psychedelic / aloha shirts and 1960's airline bags. My mother thought I was nuts!

I moved back to Sweden three years ago to live here, not just stay for a year as I had done before as a grad student. Generally speaking, i think finding vintage is a bit more accessible here than in Hawaiʻi. That was when I realised that it was actually much easier than I thought to find beautiful vintage dresses. I now prefer to wear 1950's - early 60's clothes as the small waists and full skirts fit my curvy shape much better than many of the straight styles available today. About two years ago I began collecting more and more vintage clothing and I haven't looked back. The retro craziness continued when I moved into an early 50's apartment (funkis style, for those of you into Scandinavian design) that is in need of a little renovation and is an ongoing process. Anyway, I'm so excited to have a place to collect and share my love (and never-ending hunt) for all things vintage. Welcome to my blog!