Planting wishes

I bought this for my niece who has grown beans and helped plant herbs and bulbs, and picked tomatoes – and, having recently moved into her new home, will soon have a garden to grow.

It’s a handmade greeting card which when planted grows into a bunch of mixed herbs. The card is made from waste paper and embedded with seeds, and the design is printed with water-based ink.

It’s made by a local company called Growing Paper and you can see a range of their other paper products at http://www.growingpaper.co.za.

She can plant it with all my wishes that it’ll soon grow into a thriving pot full of basil, wild rocket and thyme.

Matryoshka

I bought this matryoshka or Russian nested doll at a market in Abu Dhabi. These sets of wooden dolls were first carved in Russia in the nineteenth century and the creator was apparently inspired by a Japanese doll, perhaps a daruma. (Though I don’t know who made this particular doll or where it was made.)

Typically the outer doll is a Russian woman in traditional peasant dress but here she is an Arab woman in an abaya – I think this abaya is meant to suggest a traditional burqa worn by older married women (and those in rural areas) in the UAE (and also in Qatar and Oman, and by Arabs in southern Iran). But I don’t think an older and more conservatively dressed woman would wear her abaya open like that – though she may have something as garishly bright and patterned on underneath, who knows..?

Living in the Middle East, I was often surprised at the range of abayas (and other kinds of outer garments that women and girls there wear to cover themselves) and how colourful and intricately patterned they can be.

Perhaps that’s why I like the colours of these – that and the flash of what lies underneath..!

You can find out more about matryoshka and hijab on Wikipedia.