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...

from photograph to art: painting for dummies

Although I hardly ever do it anymore, I love painting.

The way in which a few splotches of colour are able to create an image or evoke a memory, are quite magical. 

I do not think that in painting we have to strive for resemblance; in fact perfect resemblance usually creates boring paintings. 

However; while we shouldn't be bothered by not being able to create picture-perfect paintings, it is a reason why most people stop doing it. I mean: there is a limited number of times where you can start out painting and hoping to create a beautiful portrait of the person you love, only to end up with what can only be described as: Gollum with severe constipation. 

And being surrounded by people who stopped being creative just because they weren't able to reach perfect results, I decided to think of a way to get adults back into painting, and getting the fun of painting without worrying over the results.

So, are you one of those people that has ever said: " I can't paint?" Then I urge you to grab your paintbrushes, and read on! Because I've got news for you: you can! 

bleach polkadot trousers.

Long gone are the days that bleach dominated our kitchen cabinets. My Grandmum -not really known for her casual disposition towards hygiene,- would clean her entire house with it, like a criminal wiping down a crime scene.
Luckily, these days, most of us are a little more careful with such aggresive products, and Pinterest offers us plethora of ideas to clean our houses with products that don't make polar bears cry.

I've been busy to make my cleaning habits slightly more sustainable than my grandmothers' routines, and usually endeavor to stay away from bleach and its nasty companions, but somehow I had a bottle of bleach leftover somewhere in my cleaning stash. With the rate I'm using it now, this bottle will probably last until 2040, so, feeling all good and fluffy about myself and my greener cleaning habits, I decided to treat myself to a little bleach-powered refashion: polkadot trousers!

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..