My sweet niece

Yesterday we spent the afternoon in my sister's sunny backyard. Every year when my niece Janneke is having her birthday, there're plenty of first sunbeams. What a gift to let all the kids play outside and us lazy sitting in the garden!
My niece turned thirteen. In this age there's no more playing, but more hanging around. It's was quite hard for us to think of a nice present. So I sat down and started to sew. I changed this free pattern a bit, one of my saved tutorials on Pinterest. I'm quite satisfied with the result, especially how the striped piping detail turned out to be. Striped fabric is from Ikea. M+L added drawings they made for Janneke in the bag.

Tord

Who (except the Dutch among you) knows Tord Boontje? He's a Dutch designer, known for his floral designs on textiles, furniture, tableware and so on. If you're triggered you could go here to read more about him.
In the office I often use his floral textiles by Kvadrat, but I'm not an overall admirer. We have one little item of him in our sitting room: this long metal garland of flowers that is wrapped around a light bulb. You buy it as a flat metal sheet in which the garland is punched. We had to break it out of the sheet. Love this genius idea, so great job Tord!

Good-looking

Wannahave-beads are best found in a not-being-internet shop. I think you should feel beads in your hand to make the right choice. And nosing around in beads shops is a feast to the eye! This tutorial brings you to a necklace to show the beauties you've bought.
If you like to read more about pictured necklace, just go here. And if you like to read about different possibilities, just go here, here, here and here.

This is what you need to make a single wired necklace.

1. a handful of beads you have fallen in love with
2. wire. Length, thickness and color fully depend on your personal preferences. The wire I used was 3 meter long, estimated 0,5 mm thick and green colored. You could even lengthen the wire during the process by connecting one wire to another, using a tiny squeezable metal ring. You can get the tiny ring out of sight by positioning it inside one of the beads.
3. a small lock
4. 2 tiny open rings
5. 2 foldable end pieces.

In case the length of the necklace is that long that you can put it over your head, you don't need the tiny pieces mentioned at 3, 4 and 5. All you need then is one tiny squeezable metal ring to attach both ends of the wire.

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.