Merry Christmas!

Hoping that you're enjoying your Christmas holidays!

As I promised here is a picture of the last few ornaments.

And as a special treat I recommend to you (as last year) to read the recent chapter of the Wormworldsaga.

 

A peaceful, relaxing, joyful Christmas to all of you and a happy 2012!

Making the season bright!

Isn't it incredible? Only two days until Christmas Eve! Do you have everything ready?
Unfortunately this year I didn't have the time to make any handmade presents. But since this Christmas is the first one as little family I tried to sew some decorations for our home.
The idea was to make a Christmas ornament each day in december and show it to you... but I realised that there would be many ornaments of the same kind and it would be too boring. And to be honest, I didn't manage to make one a day... how could I've ever expected that to happen? :-) But, well, I made enough of them to decorate the tree and with some bought stuff it'll look nice, I hope.

We will have a red-white tree this year and I have some more ornaments in the pipeline... perhaps I can share them with you tomorrow.

And here's a quick tablerunner and some napkins which I sewed this afternoon. Our table is superlong and yesterday on a little Christmasshopping I saw this perfect fabric for it.

And typically this post post would end here but I really really have to share something with you.
As I told you I went shopping yesterday... I was looking for some ornaments (just in case I woudn't finish mine ;-) ) I was strolling through our little city when suddenly I couldn't believe my eyes!
Look what I saw yesterday - 21st december by the way!

Yeah! Right! Easter Decoration! Easter won't be before April 2012!!! It's crazy.
Christmas sale starts on august and Easter sale on december!?! And the best was that there weren't any Christmas articles left. Nothing but some sad little bows... But never mind. Next year I'll hang some rabbits and eggs on the tree and leave it in the livingroom until Easter. Less work. :-)

Appliqué Skirt

It´s been a while now since the last post, but I needed some time to finish my new skirt. And tataaa! Here it is:

It's the pattern of my first skirt. (You can find it here.) It's the Burda pattern 7531. But this time I used a thick wool fabric. I liked the colour and it turns out that you can simply cut the seems without sewing. That's practical :-)

The skirt consists of four parts: Front, back, and two inner borders (also front and back). The zipper is on the left hand. After sewing the skirt I ironed the applications on to the wool fabric Therefore I used "Vliesofix". But I don't know if it's called the same in english. Afterwards I fixed it with a zig-zag stich. The appliqué fabric was a printed and knitted cotton fabric.  I just cut out the elements that I liked.

This is the front:





And this is the back:




After the sewing and application work came the part that took me really long: the embroidery. Most of it was done by hand but for some edges and the decorative stiching in between the applications I used the machine.

Although I would like to embroider some more ornaments I'm happy with the result already.
Here are some detail-pictures for you. (click to enlarge) As you can see it's a real mingle-mangle of stiches but I wanted it to look a bit messy... And I have to say it was great fun and a bit liberating to sew wild! This wasn't the last time for sure!

There it is... Advent!

This year I was really looking forward to it. Christmas seems so magic when you have a kid around! Although Lucas is only 10 months old he enjoys the illuminated city with all its twinkling lights. Friday started the Christmasmarket in our town and you could see his amazement as we where visiting it.
Here are some impressions of the market for you. I hope you can apreciate the atmosphere although these are low quality mobile pics.

And today's not only the first sunday of Advent but also my nieces' 9th birthday. And she wished for an Adventcalendar. So I started crafting and made a wood deer on which I hang all 24 presents (well, better to say 25 because she has one extra birthday present on it ;-) ).

It measures aproximately 1,00 x 0,80m and is made out of chipboard.

I saw the idea 10 years ago in a magazine, cut out the foto and stored it since this year when I finally got the chance to realize it. Therefore I made a pattern and copied it onto the chipboard, then I cut it out with a compass saw, screwed it toghether and painted it. At last I drilled a hook into the back of the deer and hang the presents on it. 

And here it is. At first the front side: 

 And now the backside:

So... I hope my niece will enjoy it and to all of you I wish a delightful Advent! 

(And as my Adventdecorations are the same then last year, you can check them out here if you like :-) )

Wedding part 2

A few days ago I showed you the guestbook-masks I made for our friends' wedding. Now I wanna show you part 2 of the wedding present. I saw the idea on pinterest and thought that it would perfectly go with the modern style that bride and groom have at home. So I made a typographic design in black and white. It tells in very short terms the stages of their relationship.
For the realisation I used Adobe Photoshop but I had to compose the text word by word because photoshop doesn't support the "grouped style". It took me like three hours, I think.
At first I planned to paint the image by hand on canvas but as the surface was very uneven I decided to order it on a printshop and I was very satisfied with the result. I never would have achieved such a neat and sharp font with handpainting. So it was a good decision, I guess.

Wedding time!

Yesterday my husband and I went to the wedding of one of our closest friends. Since I was the maid of honour I wanted to make something special for the happy couple and asked the all knowing internet for help. And of course I got an answer :-)
I found some funny masks, beards, glasses and accessories on sticks which you can hold in front of your face. And as I was in charge of making the guestbook fotos it was a perfect complement to the pictures.
So I got my hot-melt gun started, drew, cut out and made more than 30 masks.
For better fotos I improvised a white bed sheet on which I put some golden dots I made of a self-adhesive film I had bought on a copyshop before.
This morning I've took some pictures of the masks to show it to you. Perhaps it would be a nice idea for the next wedding you go to?

 

 

As promised...

... this time I'll show you my atumn door wreath. I didn't want  such an abundant heavy wreath like I had last autumn. If you didn't remember what it looked like check it here.
No, this time I wanted it simpler, more reduced and a little bit folksy, too. And here is the result. Do you like it? Please click to enlarge. :-)

Back again!

Ok... help me out... when did I write the last post again? What? Are you kidding me? In august? ... 1,2....3 months??? No way! ... What did I do all this time?

hmmm, let me think about it...

At first we went on a large summer vacation to Spain and presented little Lucas to his great-grandparents and to a huge amount of relatives and showed him the beautiful forests, the beaches, the sea... This project took us almost four weeks.








But wow... this seems an eternity away. What did I do after that? Oh... yes, I remember. When we came back there was a lot of work waiting for us, all above for my husband who had to travel a lot. So I was two weeks alone with the baby and was busy mastering our daily live.

And in between I was really lazy and didn't create much. I made a wedding present for friends, but forgot to make a foto of it...*facepalm*
But some days ago I made some autumn-decorations which I hope to show you soon.

But now that the days are short, the weather becomes worse (although we have a wonderful autumn with 20°C at the moment) and I'm joining a new sewing class on monday I hope to get some things done.

So... I'm looking forward to share my projects with you again and would love to have some feedback, ideas, inspiration, critics or just some chats with you guys.

I'm looking forward to a crafty autumn or rather winter ;-)

New Baby Project

Hey!

Although the summer days kept me outside most of the time I managed to finish the nesting for the baby bed. Finally... Lucas is putting his feet (and lately his legs, too) through the bars of the bed for a while now and as he becomes more and more mobile it was high time. So I'm really released that he is safe now and I like the fabric of the nesting a lot.
And this time I haven't had any problems. I layed the white fabric (for the back) on the batting and then the patterned fabric with its right side down on top of the white fabric. Then I put the bows between the two fabrics and fixed them. After that I sewed it together (first by hand, then by machine to get a neat result) and left open 1o to 15 cm of the lower seem to turn it inside out. Now I needed to make an invisible seem (I used the mattress-stich) and then machine quilted the whole nesting. That's all. Easy, isn't it?

And here it is:

I proudly present...

...my first skirt!
I started to visit a sewing workshop lately and this is my first project. I decided to start sewing some clothes which I avoided in the past. As you know I'm kind of an improvising sewer :-) and this is ok for most of my projects. I start them with a vague idea of the result and while sewing I adjust the project until I like it.
But for clothes my strategy doesn't work! That's why I avoided to sew clothing projects, because my failure was certain. :-)
So I decided to use this workshop to learn to sew properly. I made this skirt from the Burda pattern 7531. It's a simple one, but I modified it a little bit. Instead of two front parts and two back parts I made only one front and one back part. And I changed the darts from horizontal to vertical.
I must say that it's fun to sew having someone at your side giving you advice. And I'm proud of the result. I made the zipper, the edges, the inner parts all by myself and it looks almost like a bought skirt. I will sew some more for sure.
And I hope to sew some wrap tops, too. But this depends on the pattern that the sewing teacher will hopefully make for me. I will keep you updated.

Here are some pics of my work:

Idyllic Austria!

Hey there!

Given that my husband had to go to Graz/Austria due to his work, we decided to make a little family trip out of it and found a really picturesque austrian town, which was the european capital of culture in 2003 and whose historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
What is really fascinating here is the fact that you can find classical arquitecture of the habsburgian era next to vanguard buildings.

I hope you get some impressions from this pictures:

A delicate Portuguese scent...

... spread through our house yesterday. The reason were these little pasteis de nata - little pudding tartlets. Delicious.



You want to taste them? Here is the recipe but pleeeeaaaase forgive me for the bad bad english translation... I've never written an english recipe and it's really difficult, but I hope you understand it and can make these delicious tartlets :-) ):

Ingredients:

1 packet of puff pastry
1/2 l of milk
100 g of sugar
35 g of flour
1 pinch of salt
1 teaspoon of butter
1 egg
5 egg yolks
1 packet of vanilla sugar
cinnamon

Unfreeze the puff pastry, put the single parts on top of each other and roll them out to a rectangle of 40 x 20 cm. Then roll up the pastry beginning at the short side and lay the pastry roll into the freezer to cool it down a little bit (do not freeze it again, it just has to become firm). Cut it into slices of 1 cm thickness and form little cups that you put into a muffin pan.

For the cream, cook the milk with the butter and when it's boiling add the sugar, the salt and the flour. Keep stiring it and boil it up. Then let it cool down a little before you add the egg, the yolks and the vanilla sugar and stir it again.

Fill the cream into the pastry cups and put it in the pre-heated oven (225°C - 250°C) for aprox. 10 minutes.

Sprinkle with cinnamon before serving if you like.

Bom apetite!