Vintage bracelet.

I bought this Japanese damascene panel bracelet about a year ago at my local bead shop, which also carries a lovely variety of clothing and some vintage jewelry.  Other bracelets like it seem to be from around the 1930s-40s.  This one in particular has 7 panels, with European-style motifs of roses and irises, as well as the more traditionally Japanese bamboo, temples and torii gates.

I like how Japanese interpretations of old-school European and American imagery are frozen in time, a relic of the importation of Western culture to Japan right before the Meiji Restoration.  In a way, the styles of the time - pasta, tea, English tea-garden patterned textiles - are better preserved in Japanese, Western-style customs and ideas than they are in contemporary Western cultures.  I think in America we tend to see tiny floral prints and tea cookies as a sort of quaint, dusty novelty, where in Japan they are quaint and novel, but treated with a distinct measure of joy.

Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to appreciate the ordinary and the old.

Also, the socks are coming along.