Tchotchke Tuesday: Eggplant lady

Origin: somewhere in Africa

Apologies for the break in tchotchke regularity—sometimes you just don't have that bric-a-brac feeling. Taking the slot tonight, however, is this thing. An eggplant with a face and appendages, she serves no function whatsoever. My dad brought her back from a business trip to Africa when I was in seventh grade. Somehow she seems to have made her way into my current apartment—there's a nice little ledge for her in my bathroom, so there she sits, waiting for something better to take her place.

Flea market finds

Flea market season is ending, and I just made it back with some good scores. This tea towel was $2! I liked the colors and the design of it, though I'm not quite sure what it's meant to be—is the queen a chess piece? And what on earth does "no yours" mean? May have to do some investigating. Whatever she's on about, this queen has an hourglass most of us can only aspire to. The squares are brill too and something similar could work for a quilt.

I've got a bunch of Queen Elizabeth II stuff in my bathroom, so the towel may live there, but I worry that might dilute the cultivated strangeness of abundant QE2 kitsch. Hmm.

I also picked up a couple of DIY furniture books from the seventies. How to Make Furniture Without Tools has instructions for lots of furnture made from single sheets of plywood, which might be useful if either 1) Lowe's could be trusted to make precise cuts, or 2) I had the space to do my own cutting. More immediately inspiring is Nomadic Furniture. The authors say that some of the projects predate the book by a good twenty years, so the designs run the midcentury gamut. The two tables below were a couple of my favorites from this book, but there has to be a moratorium on tables until I'm in an apartment with more floor space.