Whoops

So, with a baby and a demanding job, I just didn't get around to posting. But I do like to share my makings here, so I'm gonna give it another go. Maybe posting pics mostly, maybe some words, but mainly pics! :)

So here are some of my mini-garden. Since we live in an appartment and only have a balcony (on which you can grow tons of stuff as well by the way), I also have a temporary small pallet-garden in a project with about 25 others. It's great! I added some buckets and stuff to grow pumpkins, zucchini and beans. I've already harvested radish, swiss chard, lettuce, and some (really small) beetroot!

First radish

Lettuce, swiss chard, beetroot, new radish

Extra tubs for pumpkin, zucchini and beans

First zucchini!

Preparing mini zucchini

Green exploding from the tubs

On the balcony:

Eggplant

Tomatoes

First homegrown meal this year! :) Yum!

It's been a while

Well, I guess that's kind of an understatement...

I had a hard time coping with some things. I had a miscarriage in the beginning of last year, two family members were terminally ill, we had to find a new home (it was our 4th temporary home within a little over 2 years) and W just couldn't finish his Masters thesis, costing us a lot of stress and money. It was just too much to deal with.

Now I'm in a much better place. I got pregnant a couple of months after the miscarriage and we now have a beautiful little girl, J, born on the 8th of february. We found a new home where we can stay as long as we want. W finished his thesis.
In between caring for a little baby, work, and housekeeping there's less time for crafting en me-time, but that's ok. I'm in a pretty good place right now! :D

I'm not sure whether I'll have the time to get back to blogging, but I do want to try. I've doing a lot of sewing lately, so there's lots and lots to show you. My family gave me a serger for my 30th birthday. BEST PRESENT EVER!! I love it! Baby clothes are mostly made of jersey and sweat fabric, so a serger was kind of a necessity. ;)

It's this one:

Nothing too fancy, but it works like a charm. I'll try to show some of the projects I've made on it so far.

It's great to be back!

For now I want to leave you with my Pinterest boards. I had a Cakes ' Crafts Pinterest account, but just didn't get around to pinning to my personal one and this one. So I decided to just stick with one account: this one.

Pinterest

Did you check me out on pinterest?

I love love love pinterest. It's awesome to have such an easy way to store all the wonderful finds of the internet. And also, you get a chance to (re)discover so many wonderful products, designs, ideas. It's the best thing ever! ;)

Some recent pins:

 

 

 

 Are you on Pinterest? Do you enjoy browsing the finds of others just as much as I do?

Rough spot

Hi there, It's been a while due to some rough spot I hit in life...
I want this blog to be a happy space, so I'm not going to go into it.

I've been trying to work on some crafty stuff, but haven't had a chance to take good enough pics, so I'll show that soon. The last couple of days have been about making invitations for our wedding.

Yes, we're getting married. Pretty soon as a matter of fact, just a couple of weeks left!

Last weekend I bought myself some lovely, tasty teas at Waar and settled down with a cup of tea and some wedding invitations:

Being a craftster and all, I had to make the invitation myself, which proved to be way more work than I had expected. But W and I did it. We just need to (spray)glue the two parts together and then they'll be ready!

How have you been? Are you longing for spring just as much as I have?

Update hexa blanket

The hexagon blanket I'm working on is coming together slowly. Do you remember all the centres I crocheted before?

I put it aside to knit two hats for a friends little girl (I'll show them soon!), and when I went back to crochet another row I made a terrible mistake...
The pattern I use is by Lucy at attic24. As you can see here:

after the third round you make 3 chains to keep the center a circular form. It isn't until the next round that you make 3dc clusters in the ch3 spaces.

As I had been working on something else, I didn't fully remember the pattern. If you crochet you'll know that a lot of patterns have 3dc's in the space between dc's in the previous round. Well, not this pattern... Worse of it all is that I didn't notice until an entire row was finished... :( My o my, stupid me...

I looked at it and contemplated what to do. Since it would take a lot of time to take them out and crochet that part again, I decided to just continue with the correct pattern. It's always possible to take that row out later, if it would really bother me.
Well, it does! Every time I accidentaly look at that row, it's just... I really have to take it out.

This photograph was taken at this angle to cover up that row, so I'm curious if you'll spot it.

What about you? What's your biggest crafts mistake?

More magimix

Last weekend I baked this wonderful almond cake. It's super duper easy and very very very delicious. What's even better: it stays nice and fresh and moisty for a couple of days!

I must say that the magimix makes it a lot more fun (and less of a mess I must admit). I just threw in some roughly chopped butter and some roughly chopped marzipan (which gives the cake the almond flavor and the moisty feel) and it was done in a sec. Well ok, I had to add some more ingredients, and beat the egg whites seperately. But still, it was done so much faster than when I had to do it by hand.

It looks delicious, doesn't it?

The recipe:
250 grams soft butter
250 gr marzipan (room temperature)
150 gr sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
1/4 tsp almond essence
6 large eggs
150 gr selfraising flour

Use a foodprocessor to mix the butter and marzipan with the sugar. Add the vanilla and almond essence. Split the eggs and add the yolks. Whip the egg whites until they form firm peaks. Stir them into the batter. Mix in the flour gently, don't beat it!

Pour the mixture into a baking tray and bake at 170 degrees Celcius (around 340 F) for 40 to 50 minutes.

I hope you'll enjoy this recipe as much as I do!

Snug

Snug is a wonderful German company with some beautiful designs.
There's these fun cutting boards:

Candle holders:

Jewelry:

 

And lots more...

When I saw a promotion on their blog, I decided to buy a brooch for myself. It's so hard to choose, and even know when I came across the birds I wished I had bought that one as well! ;)

The package arrived very quickly and these gorgeous little boxes came out:

Happy New Year!

A wonderful, loving, beautiful, crafty 2012 to you all!

Tadaaaah Heart Mittens

Winter still hasn't really started. Temperatures are around 10 degrees Celcius, and we've been getting a lot of rain. When cycling to work in the morning, it can be somewhat cold. Full mittens would be too warm, since the cycling will warm me up. That's why I started browsing Ravelry for fingerless mittens. There are so many great designs such as:

I had to start somewhere, so I chose these heart mittens. Because the chart was so small, I made my own chart using excel. You can find it here.

I used 3.5mm double pointed needles. I don't remember the brand of the yarn. Unfortunately W threw out the labels because I had left them lying around... I guess I tought him well! ;)

I bought it at Fadeninsel in Berlin, and I think it might have been some sort of Alpaca blend.
Well, never mind, they feel soft and look gorgeous. They are a bit on the wide side. And I think that next time I might shorten the finger part just a bit.

 When you check out the pattern, you'll see one of my pics on the 1st page! I received a message on ravelry a couple of days ago, asking my permission to put the pic up on the 'details' page. I'm sooo excited! This is my first project which is featured on the project description! Yay! :)

December

This are some random pictures of what I've been up to in December:

We bought this wonderful Polaroid camera at a fleamarket at the IJhallen in Amsterdam:

Do you know Jurianne Matter? She's a Dutch designer who makes all sorts of wonderful paper accessories. I wanted something to brighten up the house and finally decided to get these paper flowers:

I bought the can at the airport in London, aren't the colors wonderful?

For my 27th birthday, I asked for help to buy a Magimix foodprocessor. Because we moved around a lot, and we have a very very very small kitchen, I decided to wait for a more spaceous house. That was until there was a promotion where you get a juicer if you buy a foodprocessor. So now I'm the proud owner of this wonderful, powerful, beautiful, (and a bit big) foodprocessor:

It's really wonderful! Last weekend we decided to make raison buns for breakfast, the dough was processed in a blink. I watched it in total awe!

When my little brother visited, we made our own pizza:

Don't get me started about the juicer! I don't have words for how great it is. Carrot juice is one of my all time favorites, add an apple or an orange for a fresher taste and I'm the happiest girl! ;)

More more more pics to come. December was a busy month, and with all the Christmas shopping, I came across soooo many fun stuff. I even allowed myself to indulge in some shopping for myself! :)

Christmas

Hi! How was your Christmas? Did you celebrate it with friends or family?

I haven't been feeling very 'merry' lately, which is why I didn't blog. Not too much about that. Let me show you our christmas tree:

 

This is the tree at Groningen train station, which we passed through on our way to visit the family. I really love the grand hall at the station. Isn't it beautiful?

My week is full of work and not too much fun, but I will try to upload some pics, 'cause I've got lots to show you!!

Winter tomato

Somewhere last summer I sowed some tomatos. Can you imagine how sursprised I was when finally, months later, little teeny tiny tomato plants came up!?

Unfortunately it was rather late in the season when that happened. And with the cold setting in and all, I decided to take one of the plants out of the garden and take it with me to work.

We had just moved our office to the 8th floor with a large window-sill and lots of sun. I didn't expect too much out of it, but if it would have any chance, it would be there.

And look at what it got me:

Some weeks ago these beauties had grown and where actually turning red! Who would've thought!?

With lots of sun and the nice airconditioned environment, they soon developed in decently-sized real red tomatoes!

And when they were bright red, we picked, washed and ate them! It's a wonderful idea being able to eat something that you've grown yourself. Well, ok, not really 'yourself' of course, you know what I mean, right!? ;)

An extra pic of the view of my new office, it's wonderful. I can see lots of airplanes, and the colors at dawn and sunsets are totally awesome.

Hexagon blanket

As I told you in the previous post, one of the projects I'm currently working on is a Hexagon blanket.
You probably all know Lucy who has a wonderful blog over at attic24. Over the years she has published some wonderful patterns, of which the blankets are the most wonderful to my opnion.
Previously, I made a squares blanket using her pattern and I started a ripple one, but wasn't pleased with the colors and the yarn, so I tossed it out.

The hexagon blanket has been on my to-hook list for a while now, and with the colder weather, I found it a good time to make one.

I ordered some acrylic yarn (Populair fin) in 16 different colors:

 

When I started working on the first rounds, I discovered that the yellow yarn, which you can see in the middle of the top row, didn't really fit in. So that left me with 15 different colors to make the 3 inner circles out of.
To make sure that all colors are represented equally, I started with a number of small circles per color:

I then made the second round with all the different colors around the smaller ones of which I forgot to take a picture...

After that all third rounds were added

 Then, I laid out all the circles in a way that it was sort of random, but without certain colors being over- or underrepresented in parts of the blanket

 For the last round/border per hexagon I chose to use only one color, a purple-blue, which wasn't used in the previous rounds. The first round of the border looks like this

It makes it look like a beautiful flower, doesn't it?

I'm working on bordering all the hexa's up and putting them together now

I love how colorful it is, but that the purple border holds it all together. :)

I'm off to continue joining the hexagons now, can't wait for it to be finished!