New life, new start, new list

Long break since september, but for a good reason. I've been busy with the Ultimate DIY Project: having a baby! Lots of new things I have learned from all that, all of which I will share, like decorating our nursery and using modern cloth diapers

There's also been some new developments regarding our ecohouse. Talks with our architect will start in a few weeks, so I will brainstorm quite a bit about this in the near future. With pictures, of course, like this one from the magnolia mom

And talking about a new house naturally leads to talking about our current house and most importantly: getting it ready for sale. There will be a seriously long to-do list coming up soon, including a bit about lighting (what a mess)

And besides all this, I also need to make two wedding guest outfits for july. One things for sure, none of this is as important as taking care of my baby boy and recovering from bringing him into the world. So I'm not pressuring myself about how often I'll be blogging. We will see how it goes.

 

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Dutch apple pie

It's been a week of extreme highs and lows, so the big reveal of our study has been delayed. To warm our hearts and get our minds back on track I made a classic Dutch dessert: my famous apple pie.
Apple pie is the easiest thing to make, everybody likes it and as an extra bonus your house will smell amazing.
There are many recepies and a lot pre-mixed stuff, I'm just showing you how I make it. You'll need:


(The commercial for my cake mix was on tv as I was writing this!!!)
- 5 to 6 apples (I use Jonagold)
- raisins (150gr)
- vanilla sugar (50gr)
- cinnamon
- butter (175gr)
- flour (450gr) (I use Koopmans, a pre-mix with some sugar and salt)
- one egg
- a cake form (I use a 27 cm spring form)
Make sure everything is at room temperature.
Cut the apples in quarters, and make sure you get ALL of the core out. My biggest issue with apple pie is that people use a core drill and then leave the
tough membranes around the seeds. Good apple pie = NO hard bits!!!


Next, peel all the apple parts, cut them in roughly 2 cm pieces and put them in a bowl with 30 grams of the vanilla sugar and the cinnamon. You always have to taste to check, because apples can vary in acidity and you have to balance that. Mix everything through and set aside while you start on the dough.


Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celcius. Cover the bottum of the cake form with baking paper, coat it with a bit of butter en then cover it with a bit of flour (this will prevent your pie from sticking to the form). Mix the egg, the flour, the rest of the vanilla sugar and the butter into an even dough. Roll out the dough and place it in the cake form. Put the apple-raisins mixture into the form and put the form in the oven.
It takes about 45 minutes, but you'll smell it much sooner. If it looks like the apples color a lot faster than the dough, turn down the heat to 150 degrees Celcius after about 30 minutes. But it's important to get the dough fully cooked (see picture), because otherwise, aside from the not-so great taste, it's gonna fall apart when you start cutting.


When the dough is a nice golden brown, you can take the apple pie out. Let it rest for a little bit, but make sure you eat it warm! Maybe with some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, mmmmmmmm.
Enjoy,
Fleur

Home Office update

The last few days of our summer holiday, before getting back to the madness controlled chaos that we call work, we got to work on our home office. As usuall with major DIY stuff, things became a little worse before they started to look better.
First, we had to prime the walls for plastering, and this stuff is a "lovely" egg yoke yellow. Then we plastered the walls, leaving them a patchy grey. And that layer also needed to be primed in order to get the final layer of paint on without patches. This is what it looked like half-way through the process....








Boy, were we glad to finally be able to paint everything a nice even slightly off-white (with Histor Powerdeck, best.wallpaint.EVER). Now we finally had a blank canvas to work with. So much better!!!!








We already bought a new 2 meter long Vika desk
and a heavy-duty Volmar office chairfor mr.Fleur, both from IKEA. Volmar the office chair was supposed to be black and grey, but I found a brand new one in black and blue in the discount corner, which saved us a whopping €60! Just because the original box was missing.




Source:IKEA
Since I already had a similar black&blue office chair form my days at university, we decided that for 30% off, this blue version was more than welcome.
Since this room is also our guest bedroom, we decided that we needed something more than the simple roll-up blinds that are there now. So I went out to find a warm yet not too girly fabric to make new curtains. And I did!!!




This fabric was only €3 euro and is was ceiling height, so instead of 1,40m high, it's 2,80m. The pattern is very warm, lots of leaves and flowers, but the colors are neutral. I also bought a new curtain rod, with a nice Fleur de Lys (French lily) at the ends. I looked like I was running around the DIY store with a spear, which was fun (for me, maybe not so much for other shoppers and the lady at check-out....)




The next step will be to make the actual curtains, install the rod, clean out the DIY stuff that is still cluttering up the office, set up the folding guest bed, sort out the bookcase and the built-in storage and......get to work.
The big reveal is planned for the next week, as we're still catching up with work after being on holiday for 4 weeks. But it will be worth the wait, I promiss you!
Fleur

The Vogue giraffe blouse

Yes, I've been sewing again!!! My foot has recovered enough so I could finally finish this lovely Vogue 8747 blouse pattern last week.




This is actually the first of a stash of fabric I bought a while back to make some key outfits for Fall. This Fall is all about bold grafic prints, so I'm combining the classic Vogue blouse with this slightly giraffe-like print.




The fabric is a light cotton, batist or maybe even very thin linnen. It was very nice to work with, not too slippery, not too see-through. I'm also very happy with the fit of this pattern, especially in the waist. That is often a problem for me with blouses, but this pattern curves in enough without being to narrow in bust, shoulders or hips.




So I'm also going to make a nice basic white blouse with a full collar. There are two things I will have to fix on the next version:
- the stitching on the inside of the collar (a bit messy)
- the pressing and stitching of the button facings (I have to make it sharper)
I'm most proud of the button holes. I finally figured out how to make them completely symmetrical. If my machine goes too fast (this sometimes happens on the second part of the automatic button hole) and the stitching is too far apart, I carefully slow the fabric by pulling in the opposite direction a little. And tissue paper underneath also works very well.




And that's of course, what I aim for: Perfection every time!!!

Ciao!
Fleur

Missoni Madness

One of my favorite things to do on Saturday morning, is go to the fabric market (de lapjesmarkt) in Utrecht (beautiful city in the center of The Nederlands). The fabric market has been held in Utrecht at the same location for over 400 years. And although most of the stalls offer inexpensive fabrics, like printed cotton or tricot, you can find top-of-the-line fabric and notions as well. Most of the time you can bargain a bit, and a lot of the fabric is cheap stuff starting at 1 euro per meter. For the real high quality stuff you have to bring serious cash and a bit of luck. But it's worth the money, especially for designer fabrics like this one by Missoni.


A more detailed shot. I don't think you can see it, but there's also gold and silver woven in every now and then.


Missoni is an Italian fashion house and they are famous for the multi-colored zig-zag knits. This fabric retails at about 40 to 50 euro's per meter, but you know me......of course I bought it for 25! But that is still a lot of money and so a lot of pressure to "make it work" (haha, Project Catwalk sneaks in at last). Lucky for me, the fall collection of McCalls came to my rescue with this great dress pattern.



As you can see, this is also in Missoni fabric! I don't have enough to make this long dress, so I'm going for a short sleeved sixties look. Something I can also wear with a turtle neck and tights when it get's colder. I'll keep you posted on my progress.
Next up.....the Vogue blouse!!!
Fleur

All that glitters...

...does not have to be gold, but it should definitely sparkle! I'm a real magpie, I loooooove glitterly things, to the point where as a teenager, I drove my parents insane, especially on holiday. I would run to every store that had beads, juwelry, semi-precious stones and silver. Oh, and seashells, and everything that was blue or turquiose. You get the picture, I think...
Right now, I'm suffering from a sports injury on my right foot, which happens to me my "sewing" foot. I can work the peddle with left, but it's not comfortable. We also getting ready to go on holiday and my sewing machine is not invited :(. So I needed another hobby (yes, you can never have to many hobby's, shoes (or boots) and.....jewelry!
Craftsy.com came to my rescue by offering an online beginners class about making jewelry for only 4 euro!!! So I reconnected with my ongoingchildhood obsession fascination and dove into the world of beading and wire wrappng. And it's awesome!!! Check out my first ever wire wraped earrings:




Are they not absolutely to-die-for!!!!! I'm so proud (and really surprised). These are actually partly recycled from a pair I already had that were too heavy and so I never wore them. Here are the originals in white.




(If you're interested, I can make one more pair in white)
The turquoise blue glass beads on the new pair I bought at our local Friday market, but I also bought a lot of stuff from this awesome webshop www.edelsteenkralen.nl(everything is English and German, too). This website deals in the best (semi)precious stones and beads, including cultured pearls and sterling silver wire. My initial order ran up to 35 euro, but there's enough there to make at least ten pair of all-real earrings and a necklace of those great pearls.












Here's some ideas I played around with after unpacking:








Other supplies I could easily find in a local book&crafts store, like these pliers, lay-out tray (beads need a good working surface, they go everywhere) and organising box. I bought them all on sale for 5 euro and 2 euro (also the box!)








I have many more great earrings to make, and I love it so much already, I'm strongly considering maybe starting an Etsy shop. But first I have to get a bit better at wrapping and work up the nerve to go all sterling silver (I working with silverplate or nickel-free wire now, silver requires a bit of an investment). So female friends and family, you know you're my favorite try-out audience. Get ready for some serious bling coming your way!
Happy wrapping.
Fleur

A hole-in-one

Nope, this is not a post about golf, this is about a dress I bought really really cheap because there were holes in it. And how I fixed it so it's as good as new.
Some inside information
In many clothing stores, there's a "B-choice" or "special discount" rack tucked away in a corner, where the store sells items that are damaged. Most common problem: broken zippers. They are really easy to replace, and if you don't want to do it, bring it to a seamstress and you have the exact same dress, usually for 25% of the original price.
If you find something that's broken, but not yet reduced in price, ALWAYS ask for a discount and don't settle on the usual 10%. It's broken, it's effectively worthless to the store, so make sure you get at least a discount that would cover the cost of having it professionally fixed (even if you'll fix it yourself)
On to the dress!




This particular dress had a more complex problem than a broken zipper: it had two holes/rips in one of the pleats in the skirt, made by a burnmark from a lamp in the store's display.








I loved it, it fit me exceptionally well and it was only 15 euro. If all failed, I could replace the entire skirt, but I had a different plan in mind. Brace yourself......




Yes, I gutted the dress, ripped it open, like a fish. Don't worry, it get's better. Because the skirt was pleated, it gave me room to move the damaged parts out of sight. I did stabilize the rips with iron-on fabric interfacing first before I started making new pleats. Next, I redistributed the fabric in two new pleats, hiding all the nasty parts.




Then, I measured the result and did the exact same thing on the other side.



Finally, I stitched every pleat and then restitched all the seams. And that's that! Nobody would ever know this dress was destined to be thrown away.


Now all I need is to wait till I finally go on holiday and the weather is nice enough to skip around in this dress in some gorgeous Italian town. Yay!!!!
Did any clothing fix-ups latey? I would love to see them.
Fleur