refashioned shirts: t-shirt yarn version

I'm not entirely sure how it happened.. I blinked a few times, and all of a sudden my youngest niece, Eefke celebrated her fourth birthday..

short summer series: a miniature bride

I may have mentioned it before: my little nieces love absolutely nothing more than dressing up.

For the oldest one this means imitating her favorite Disney princess of the week.
For her little sister, it usually implies putting on her hot pink rain boots ( your guess is as good as mine on why she does that..), wrapping herself in whichever kind of fabric is at hand as "a dress" and skip off to chase the cat. So, when I had to think about birthday gifts, it wasn't a difficult decision: dress-up clothes!

dress up, girl

It's past 10 o' clock in the morning, and while the rest of the world is already at work, I'm still sitting on my bed.Inky is fast asleep next to me, I'm balancing a plate with a sandwich with chocolate sprinkles (I know! How Dutch of me!) on my left knee, there's an enormous cup of tea on my night stand, and Nick Drake is playing on the background.
If there is a better lazy morning, I surely can't think of one.

blog-ception 

It all vaguely reminds me of the way we celebrated Mothers and Fathers day when we were young, when me and my brother would make breakfast in bed for our parents, which usually came down to a breakfast of boiled eggs with golfball-like properties, sandwiches with a mountain of chocolate sprinkles on top of them, tiny hand picked bouquets in coffee cups, and a trail of orange juice and tea on the stairs, where we clumsily and excited carried the breakfast upstairs to my parents' bedroom, who would always pretend to be still asleep and completely unaware of our surprise. ( and looking back, I can only applaud them for always eating everything).

But though I feel very motherly towards the cats and chickens, I'm not a mum, and this isn't mothers day, it's just a lovely lazy free morning, after pulling an all nighter for work, and instead of doing chores, I decided to write a bit. So, hereby!

helping out my nieces' homeless dolls.

Hi there!

Today's a special day, my friends! Not only because for the first time in weeks I'm able to write a new post (huzza!) , but also because today the Netherlands is recovering from a party called sinterklaas!

Sinterklaas, for those of you who don't know it, is (and my mum is going to kill me for what I'm going to say next) kind of the same as santa claus/christmas. Different, but also the same. There's a lot of gifts, the main guy wears a lot of red and has a beard, you know the drill.

But the amazing part of sinterklaas is that it includes little poems that go with the gifts, where you can utterly and completely roast your family members, for all the mischief they have done last year.
So, what happened? My dad got a few potatoes thrown at his head -all in good fun of course-, I accidentally set fire to a glass full of coffee beans, my little niece produced a diaper so vicious that we almost had to take to poor kid outside, so nothing out of the usual there!

a geeky rocking horse

Last Saturday, Joost and I looked at each other in slight panic: we had a birthday coming up for the son of one of Joost's friends, and we had completely forgotten to buy something for the child.

In my opinion, buying gifts for a one-year old is a headache anyway: they are too young for the really cool things, and too old for the baby-gifts. Fortunately, the father of this child has a not-so-subtle hobby: Star wars.

Well, yeah.. something like that!

So instead of doing the sensible thing and just buy a book or something alike, we decided to thrift something and turn it into something Star wars related.
So, ( with a trunk loaded with things to donate) we happily hopped off to the thrift shop!

And there we found this faded little friend:

a rocking horse! We thought it was perfect for a one-year old, but the paint was a little faded, and the wooden rockers were slightly spotted.
So, we cued the Star Wars music ( PAM PAM PAM PAMPAPAM PAMPAPAM....) and set to work!

queens of scraps

First of all, a belated happy easter to all of you! I hope you're having a great weekend. I have very fond memories of celebrating easter as a little girl at my parent's house: all the flowers in and around the house, the egg-hunt in the garden, the lovely breakfast (breakfast is my favorite meal) and of course eating yourself sick from all the chocolate eggs.

This year, we passed that tradition on to my two little nieces, who were staying the weekend at my parents' place. I of course didn't want to miss out on the amount of chocolate eggs, wine (and dirty diapers..), so I also paid them a visit. I hadn't seen my nieces in a while, and wanted to bring them a little gift. Since my oldest niece ( she's three) is fond of dressing up as a princess, I decided to make them little crowns, made from scraps of fabric!

'everyone can be a princess'

My blog is on a roll today! It's valentines day today, so my loved one, known as Joost, and I are celebrating it properly by both working (and blogging, I admit) on our computers, while occasionally shouting inappropriate jokes to each other. My other loved ones are currently licking their own butts (my parents, okay... cats, cats!) so it is time for another blog.

My niece, Jinthe, is obsessed with princesses. She has her own incredibly cute version of 'Let it go' from Frozen ("Leddit goat..."), and dances around the house with a long scarf on her head to resemble Ranpunzel ("Rapoezzel") all the time. So last Sinterklaas (our Dutch december-tradition with gifts and poems) I wanted to give her a little princess for herself. But since I don't really agree with Disney or Barbie on what princesses look like, I wanted to give her a more down to earth version.  And so I did, with the inspiration of the beautiful lady behind Tree change dolls.