Published!

Today I got a special email: my blog is mentioned in the April issue of an Australian lifestyle magazine, called Home Beautiful. How about that?!

Nails

We have this nail wall in our house. It's ment for temporary expositions of pictures and drawings. The first years we lived here, we did change the wall on a regular base. You can see that it has been quite some time now! But these pics are still so precious to us.
The idea was so incredibly simple: just make a grid with nails (can you see it?) on an empty wall, to hang wooden boards. I promise you the realisation wasn't that simple. The nails couldn't be hit into the concrete wall just like that. At first we drilled holes in the wall, entered plugs inside, hit the nails and plastered the rest of the holes around the nails. Long time ago...

Wannahave-beads

Too much sewing around here lately. I like it that the tags on the sidebar show me that it's time for something else, something down in the list, for instance jewelry! That's why I visited this shop in Amsterdam selling a great collection of beads. There were just 5 minutes left before closing time and I hardly managed to select a handful of beads.
Today I wore this at the office. I'm not yet finished experimenting, but for this basic model I could do a tutorial. Would you appreciate that? Maybe you're aware of plenty of such how-to's on internet. To be honest, I didn't check myself yet... I told you before I was inspired by my neighbour's necklace some time ago.

Another apron

My eldest daughter M is a horse lover, I told you before. She attends a riding school every saturday and hardly wants to leave there after the lesson. Although she's a very girlish girl, she liked to idea to go like a blacksmith to school carnaval. Our neighbour had a gold painted horseshoe for her, which made the idea even more attractive.
She knew that her best friend, of course a horse lover as well, would be a horse riding teacher. But what wasn't agreed on was the very funny purple horse, made by her mother and that her friend brought along. The heavy horse was best carried by both girls. M was happy indeed to give it some horseshoes!

This year's carnaval

Making a costume for only one special day at school? I doubted it, just like every year. But on the day itself we use to wonder why being doubtful after seeing those happy faces. This year's theme for L is 'metiers'. She really loves to assist our cleaning help, so this is what she wanted to be.

She could clean the whole house right away! To start with the mirror...
Tomorrow is school carnaval. She insists on taking a bottom of soapy water in the bucket. I decided to go by car and not by bike...

Part two

You won't believe it. Just after launching last post, I realised the reversibility of the bag all of a sudden! A second photo-shoot followed.
This bag is multifunctional, that's clear!

No plastic please

In general I dislike the use of plastic bags. A very few are such beauties (like those from museumshops) they excape from this rule and are treated like treasures. No way I would consider to give them to somebody who suddenly needs one ;).
When F and M+L leave in a hurry to attend viollin-lesson, they use to grab an aweful plastic bag to carry the music books. You understand this should be ended. Here's a new bag for all the stuff, including the new ring binder. Because in the end I was disappointed about the width of the bag, I added two snap fasteners. They reshaped the bag fairly well, I think.

Stave

Lately loose music paper was laying around. It's so easy to make M happy: I bought a basic black ring binder and she showed it proudly to her father in the evening. This made me wish to make her happy again...
Yesterday F, M and L left for a short holiday, leaving me at home because I can't stay away from the office this week. Today it was raining, this morning was a lazy one and during the day I decided to make my daughter this cover. I loved to use my piping cord experience again. Please tell me if you're interested in a how-to. I made some pics that I could share.

Fake braids

Another carnaval costume I made before. M wanted it so much, because we were into the fairytale period. I used a real pattern, even in English, which was quite hard to understand. The cape is made out of woolen fabric, the color of the lining is purple. The evening before a little drama happened: she yelled disappointedly that she looked like a witch! The cape turned out to be far too long. You understand I was busy till late that night to correct it.
She especially loved her fake braids at that time. How could she know about her beautiful real ones of today?

Yellow flower

Allthough especially the south of the Netherlands is specialist in celebrating carnaval, I made several costumes for school carnaval in the past. I'll show some of them for inspiration. Here you see M and L, four years old and dressed up like a flowergirl. Pictures are taken with an interval of 4 years: last year and 5 years ago. Everything is made of transparent curtain samples, no more of use in the office. The skirt has transparent and solid layers. The wings are made by covering a flat brass frame with transparent fabric.
This week we are thinking about this year's costumes. Maybe you too?

Sorry for the dots, they're just added to protect M and L.