Quarantine20 Scavenger Hunt!!! ...The winners...!!! :D

[fairywarriorcat]

Lita with my current read:


Sakura with a pin my friend in Indonesia sent me. Also her jumpsuit is from an Etsy creator from Spain! 



And here she is again with my house number (the only one I can take without being a snoop ^^ I painted some new doll faces and this is my favorite of the bunch! 



Lita with my dad's mask collection for oldest items in the house. A few of them are reproductions but one or two is Very Old 

[Elfy]

A few of our crew went hunting yesterday to see what they could find and this is what happened:



House number: Timmy climbed up our letterbox to show off the number.



Something old: by comparison with others this vase is not that old. It came from my great uncle's pottery, and he retired in the 1950's. I haven't got an exact date on the vase itself, but I figure it's got to be between 60 - 70 years old. Toni likes it, because it's red and therefore matches her hair.



Current read: I only read Cat Valente's Space Opera last year and have already reread it at least once, Nova decided to see what the fuss was about.



Something from another country: the little chef and the figure with the green hat, mug of beer and pretzel come from Munich and the hairy little elf is from Austria. Lottle quite likes them, she thinks they're cute.

[Elfy]

Ah, everyone's photos are so great. This has really brought out creativity in people. (Not me, I am a boring person, as we all know.)

I haven't been able to catch up properly, but here are a couple more Basil and I found!:


"This cup came from the United States, see it even says which state! We live in Scotland, so that does make it foreign. It'll fit a lot of tea in it. "


"These are our two newest reads. There's some stuff on the Kindle too, but these looked nicer in a photograph."


"I'm not sure how old this is, but it belonged to the maternal grandparents before it came here and they had it a long time."

Love the clock and very much approve of Basil's taste in books. I've read all Becky Chambers' books and To Be Taught If Fortunate is brilliant as are her Wayfarer books.

[Alliecat]

What cute little treasures from abroad everyone has  And that mask collection looks super interesting.  I see one that looks like it could be west-coast-Canada (or Pacific Northwest?)... where are the others from?
Is Nova hoping to find something about herself in a book set in space... ?  
And Basil's been busy!  He's been a good helper on the scavenger hunt.  I also have a big old clock from my maternal grandparents.  It hasn't run in decades... too loud for our house

***

Welllll...lll...  where has April gone???  It feels like we just started this, and now it's coming down to the wire.... This might be the last "batch" of prompts, although I do have an idea for one more.  There's still time to shoot some more before hopefully the quarantine thing peters out!


Find a hat!  Theirs, yours...



A magnet!
Followers of Sunsette's adventures may recall she & Aloalo got surfboards in Kona last year... one is a magnet & one is a keychain.  And yeah, we're reduced to photos of tropical beaches this year...  



Your smallest denomination coin.
Penny is holding a ... penny  
Canada phased out pennies in 2013.  So Ika has the next smallest, a nickel.



I think we would be remiss if we didn't include.... a cat.
This little guy came from an unbelievably stuffed fabulous antique shop in Chemainus, B.C.
You can use any sort of cat.

[Lejays17]

Next batch of Scavenger Hunt Photos.  And we've already started hunting up entries for the current batch!

Our House Number.
The Red Panda usually hangs out on the end of the bannister holding the shopping bags


The Oldest Thing in the House.  We don't have anythign nearly as old as some other people do, but i do collect early to mid 20th Century school stories, so I figured that one of them would be relatively old.  This particular book doesn't have a published date, but a quick search of the cover gives me either 1918 or 1925 as possible dates.
So Jo-Meg is dressed appropriately to show off the book,



Something from a foreign place.  We have a number of small souveniers from different countries that we have visited.
Here's Izzy (dressed in Greggia's outfit as I thougjt it worked thematically), with a few things from Switzerland.  A milk-can, a chocolate cow, a goat and holding a cow-bell.



And What I'm Currently Reading.  Felicity is with the fiction books, and Becky has the knitting-pattern book.

[neon_jellyfish]

So much interesting stuff!!! Sorry guys, I'm having troubles with keeping up with my own photos, so I fail to comment most of the time, but you're all doing amazing job finding these items!

---

#16 - a purple doll / toy



A small selection of my purple dolls. I knew I didn't have a purple Pullip / Groove doll, but this made me realize it on a new level. I need to fix that!

---

WARNING
The rest of the post is going to be a lesson about Czech/Czechoslovak history yet again, sorry about that, seems like I can't help myself. Feel free to skip the rambling!


#17 - a house number

Fun fact - European house numbers are usually quite high up, so I had to ask my mom for help, she always held the doll for me, it would be hard to hold the doll high up and take the photo at the same time (I have small hands, I need them both to handle my phone camera).

That is also one of the reasons the dolls are in focus, but the signs aren't. The other being the sun shining in the wrong direction, so I couldn't really see what I was doing.



The blue and red plates are the regular house numbers, but Prague has a large amount of examples of another house marking system - house signs. House signs can be seen all over the world, but Prague is unique in how many of them are here. They've been a thing since early medieval times, most of the preserved ones are from 17th and 18th century. Like the one on the pic. This is 'dům U dvou slunců' (yeah, our system of putting caps in names is crazy), I guess the proper translation would be The House of Two Suns, but more literal translation would be The House by Two Suns. It's in Nerudova ulice (remember the J-Doll?), and it is the house where Jan Neruda, the poet after whom the street is named, was born and created some of his most important works. The house itself was built in rennaisance, probably in place of an older gothic house (judging from the floor plan that was typical for gothic houses), but it was renovated in baroque style between 1673-90, so it's hard to tell anything specific about the older phases. The sign is from the renovation time.



One more, this one is 'dům U zlatého klíče', The House of/by the Golden Key. It has similar history as the previous one, but the current form of sign is from 1844.

I want to do more with house signs, but I don't now when I'll get to it. I will also, of course, return to Nerudova street (Nerudovka for short) and take more proper photos, it is Prague's most famous street, after all.


#18 - something from another country



The two 'certificates' in the background are from our family vacation in Mallorca, where we, among other things, went for a trip in a hot-air balloon and in a submarine (30m/98ft deep, you guys!) and each of us got a certificate with our name and the date of the trip as a memento. They're some of my favorite memories!

Origins 2pack dolls were Mattel Shop exclusives, and Mattel wasn't willing to ship outside of US, but I got them anyway, thanks to an extremely kind fellow collector from MH Arena who got them for me, and I'm very grateful to have them in my collection.

The little butterfly is a souvenir from Vienna's Schmetterlinghaus. It's a magnet - I actually took the photo before today's batch appeared, so this time, it's a souvenir, but it will appear again in the role of magnet.

The rest of the stuff is and at the same time isn't from another country. History lesson incoming!!!

You see, because of various political circumstances, this country went through an awful lot of changes. I myself have been a citizen of three states without ever moving - Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and finally, Czech Republic.

The red book is about Czech gothic architecture and was written in Third Czechoslovak Republic, which was our country between 1945-48, after the WW2, before the communist coup d'état. It was published in 1948, I'm not sure which part of the year, so it could be either from Third Republic or Czechoslovak Republic, which was the communist state until 1960, when we became Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

From Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, specifically 1982, is the purple book, it's Czech translation of Alexander Grin's Jessie and Morgiana, one of my favorite novels.

The fake bisque figure is from what used to be this country, but isn't anymore - Slovakia.

If you read all this, you have my kudos!

[werepuppy]

Oooh, those are all fantastic!

(Sorry my comments are so short - I'm blown away by all your amazing photos)

[Lejays17]

I always love the little history / social lessons you give with your photos. How interesting about the house names rather than numbers.
And how nice of your mum to help with holding the dolls up to take the photos of.

Your purple girls are gorgeous as always.

I e never been ballooning or submarining, how cool is that! And getting little certificates to celebrate it. Best we’ve done is Pudding Club certificates, which were for eating 4 different desserts in one night

[fairywarriorcat]

Yay more prompts! Elfy, I have those same little German figures as ornaments, they're my favorites on our tree.

[neon_jellyfish]

And I'm back with one more item!

#24 a cat





I didn't use any filters on these, the couch naturally filters itself on photos.

[davidd]

That's a cat and a purple fig! Double score!

(Ooh! I see another "Czech History" post preceded this! I'll have to check back later! Pressed for time at the mo'.)

{EDIT TO ADD} - That was quite fascinating about the house numbers and the house names! Are the house names still used as part of the mailing address? I find it interesting that on the occasions where I have mailed parcels to the United Kingdom, the address often includes a name for the house or the housing complex. As an example, one of my online contacts lives at Flat 1, The Stableyard Cottages, with no street name or number. I have sometimes wondered how, in a country of many millions of people, such an address is deliverable. But I guess it works. Here in the States, we generally have a house number with a street name. Pretty dull by comparison.

Well, you are certainly a personage of considerable ex-perience living internationally in numerous countries... all without leaving home!

[dargosmydaddy]

Purple
Violet12 by tisue999, on Flickr

Magnet
Larkin4 by tisue999, on Flickr

Cats (didn't realize until later that maybe it wasn't the best choice to have a girl wearing a blue shirt hold the blue cats...)
Quinn17 by tisue999, on Flickr

House number
Iris41 by tisue999, on Flickr

Hat
Sab23 by tisue999, on Flickr

Penny
Phoenix9 by tisue999, on Flickr

Finally found a spring!
Daisy by tisue999, on Flickr

[fairywarriorcat]

@ Alliecat, yes there are some NW Native American masks in my dad's collection, some from Seattle and Vancouver from when we went as a family in 2010, a fantastic trip.

@Neon Jellyfish love learning tidbits about Czech history from your photos! Looking forward to learning more

[Lejays17]

Oh!! Where did you get that Dale T-shirt?? I want one for my dolls!and did you crochet the hat too? The stripes look so cool on it.

And blue-on-blue doesn’t work all that well, I’ve found out before

[dargosmydaddy]

Oh!! Where did you get that Dale T-shirt?? I want one for my dolls!and did you crochet the hat too? The stripes look so cool on it.

The Dalek shirt I made awhile back; the fabric store had a bunch of Dr. Who fabric. I made a Taeyang sized one, too. I need to get back to dolly shirt making; I have a bunch of shirts half started, and a bunch of fabric I bought specifically because it would work well for doll-sized shirt decorations (including some Harry Potter stuff). Hopefully this summer!

The hat I got on ebay, in a lot of Blythe stuff... I really had to pull hard to make it fit over Sabriela's voluminous hair!