a salty christmas spirit.

I'm wishing you wonderful days! 

Unfortunately, over here in the Netherlands, things are not as festive as we'd hoped: corona numbers are rising, shortly before the holidays a lockdown was announced, and to add insult to injury, the weather is as unfestive as is possibly imaginable: a crapload of rain has turned the entire country into a mushy, brown, glob, and today the wind is severe that our poor chickens were flying horizontally through the garden (they are now huddling together in the safety of our garage, looking scornfully outside).

So, we're staying inside, while the feline members of our household take endless naps, sometimes in the oddest places. 

sinterklaas pyjamas.

 

Happy Saint Nicholas' day everyone! 

Since most of you are not from a Dutch of Flemish nationalty, many of you might be thinking by now.. Saint Nicholas, say what? 

For those of you less interested in Dutch festivities; don't worry, this post also contains: 

    - a refashion

    - Joost's legs

    - and a few cats

the suit-jump-suit.

Here's a list of things I hate about jumpsuits

1- You usually look like you're wearing pyjama's

2- Even if you are lucky enough to find one that is flattering from the front, it still gives you the weirdest looking, long butt possible 

3- you have to take the entire damned thing off when you have to go to the loo (arrrgh!)

To complete it, here's a list of things I hate about suits.

1- I look like an idiot in them. 

So why, why on earth did I combine the two? 

Easy DIY black/white christmas art: leaf printing

 

to christmas or not to christmas, that is the question. Some people are just born with the christmas spirit. I'm assuming they just march out of the womb, accompanied by the beats of Wham! spreading tinsel, while eggnogg evaporates out of their pores

bedsheet extravaganza

As you might have gathered from this blog, I'm not a very extravagant person. Some people are. I love people who are a bit extra, they make excellent company.

So, yeah, unfortunately, that's not really me. If I were a holiday destination, I'd be an igloo tent instead of a 5-star resort. I'm a sensible sneaker rather than a killer heel. I'm a bicycle instead of a ferrari. It may have to do with my being Dutch; appearantly we're seen as quite a boring and frugal sensible and non-extravagant nation? And I'm cool with that. I'd be terribly unhappy if my life had been covered in sparkles.

Instead, I'm the kind of person that makes sensible dresses out of bedsheets, and you know what? I'm proud of it ;)

a prehistoric gift for a new generation.

While I think my current career suits me quite nicely, I don't think anyone would have guessed that I'd grow up to be a bioethicist. What my parents did think I might grow up to be (beside superballerina-princess, which sadly doesn't really count as a realistic career) was: a paleontologist. 

reincarnated pyjama-bottoms

Sometimes, an accident meets an opportunity. 

After finishing my stay-in-bed-dress, I looked at the leftover-fabrics, and was fairly surprised at the amount of leftovers I had. 

When refashioning existing garnments, the collateral damage is usually not too bad: a shortened hemline here, some snippets of fabric there, but most of the time nothing too major. This time I had quite a serious amount of leftover. But what to do with it? hmmm..

a stay-in-bed dress

Recently, one of my most  faithful readers send me a message, to ask where I'd been. And I thought, 'Ah, yes, my blog, I knew I had forgotten about something…

So, how have I, Joost, and our miscellaneous pets been? Well, we've.. 

Brewed some tea above camp fires..

wine-barrel planters made from buckets

Hi there!

The gears of the world may be slowly grinding to a halt, but life in our little household goes on.
I'm sweating on the final straws of my PhD thesis, Joost regularly shouts at our wifi-router to improve the connection for his many video-calls, Inky works hard to keep our mouse population at bay while simultaneously keeping her belly as rotund as possible, our roosters hold daily shouting matches, and finally, Lieve's task is to watch the garden: a task she takes very, very, seriously.

living rooms are for living

What is a home? A strangely relevant question in this day and age. At the age of 5, my answer was apparently as follows:

Beautiful leaded windows, bike, tree.. 31 year old me agrees!

mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the thriftiest of them all?

When we fell in love with our quaint little farmhouse, there was one thing we most certainly did not love...