Day 209 – The Värmland Spoon

No special occasion here, just a pretty spoon. Värmland is a county in west central Sweden, smack dab between Oslo and Stockholm. It is the birthplace of Selma Louisa Lagerlöf, the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it shares a border with Västmanland, the ancestral home of my people.


The hand-painted flower in the bowl of the spoon is Värmland’s flower, Skogsstjärna, or arctic starflower. 

Day 22 – The Stockholm Palace Spoon

On this day, January 22, in 1849, the Swedish playwright (and novelist, painter, and poet), August Strindberg, was born in Stockholm, Sweden.

One of Strindberg’s other creative pursuits was photography and judging from the number of self-portraits he took, it’s not hard to think that he may have been the first person to perfect the art of the selfie.


To celebrate the anniversary of Strindberg’s birth, here’s an enameled gold-tone souvenir spoon from Stockholm, Sweden. The building painted in the bowl is the “Stockholm Slottett” (Stockholm Palace) and the Stockholm city hall is shown at the top.


For a more amusing (and entirely fictional) look at August Strindberg, check out the animated web series, Strindberg &Helium