Nollaig Shona Duit

Nollaig Shona Duit means Merry Christmas in Gaelic, and since we just came back from a short and very intense visit to Dublin, I had an excuse to headline with these beautiful, strange words. Now, if for some reason you cannot feel the seasonal spirit or the Christmas vibe - you could go to Dublin to fix that. The whole place is lit with fairylights and glamorous decorations, and the shopping streets are brimming with people and buzz. Okay, we were there on Black Friday, so perhaps no surprise, but it was really quite cosy. Dublin is beautiful (it was my first visit), people are downright charming, and it all felt very relaxed.

See - doesn't it look rather okay to you?

We liked it a lot! The Gaelic language was very prominent everywhere, signs were all in both English and Gaelic, which is something I was ignorantly unaware of. It is a mysterious and dramatic looking language. The last image is from one of the many festive streets in midtown, and the banner says Baile Átha Cliath which is the Gaelic name for the city of Dublin.

24 Patterns Advent Calendar Gift Wrap

December 1st is a week from now, and some of you are probably making advent calendars for your lucky dear ones. I am making one for my son, as I usually do, but this year I felt like making a bit of a wrapping concept (otherwise I just wrap 24 gifts in as many different types of paper as I can find in my drawers). 

Remember the four Sundays gift wrap I made last Christmas? I thought that was quite fun to make, so I decided to go all the way this year!

Here is the 24 Patterns Advent Calendar Gift Wrap - click here for the PDF.
I have decided to make a new version of these, so stay tuned for news when Christmas is coming!

 

2021 update: Please go here for absolutely free download of the new version from 2015. These were a commercial product, I had them printed in a small batch and sold the kits online, but now they are yours for free - only trouble is that you have to download each sheet individually - but they are pretty! They are scaled for print on A3 paper. 

The idea is super simple of course: wrap 24 small gifts, each one meant specifically for a certain day, and your kid might have some fun finding the correct one. That happens to be fun, when you are five and in the process of learning numbers! All of you who have the numbers down, might just enjoy the colors and patterns.

Okay, they are A4 and thus suitable for, well - rather small objects. But you may just wanna print an extra sheet for the larger gifts, and if you have access to A3 printing, just hit the 'scale to fit media' button.

Happy wrapping!

November nagging

We have this arrangement in my household - we live two places; in our flat in Copenhagen from October to April-May, and all summer we live in our little cottage - kolonihavehus - half an hours drive north of Copenhagen. It's really very clever. We live in the middle of the city, which I have done all my life, and still get to have a garden with birds, flowers, fresh tomatoes, wonderful neighbours and only a ten minute bike ride from the beach. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The only thing is, that in September, when we move back to the city again (and since we usually have someone else living in our flat during summer, it is a quite literal move, with clothes, personal stuff, work things, books, toys - SO many things. Think a car stuffed to the brim - at least twice. Something like that.), well, when we move back, we always get into our project mode. Sigh. We start all kinds of optimistic things in the flat - and then we kinda loose pace. And then comes November. And I feel like welcoming the wretched, depressing dark season with a home that is at least in some kind of working order. But we usually have cans of paint, toolboxes and bits of wood lying about, waiting for us to finish whatever.

Last year it looked like this in November, since we moved our bookshelves (many, heavy and very full) to another room. The stacks of books were everywhere for weeks and weeks, and as you can see, I started christmas decorating in the middle of chaos. Eskild is helping me, I can see, and he is about to hang some Hama hearts!

Now, a year has gone by and the bookshelves are in place - but this year it is something else. There is always something, and we are never done by December 1st. Not that you have to be, particularly, but that date is a kind of deadline for me, since Christmas is just too much, if you have to deal with the home improvements as well. Okay, this is boring - let's talk about something else.

My son is five now, and has become a very passionate producer of everything Hama. In fact, at the moment he gets up early weekend mornings and starts making perleplader, before breakfast even, and with the rest of us fast asleep. Here he is, working hard, Sunday morning.... He will wake me when he needs the iron!

He is super productive, and I think it is so funny, because I just recently discovered - quite by chance, through a random back link - that the post about Hama hearts I hint at above, is the most visited post I have ever written on this blog! Almost two thousand visits up till now, which is a lot for this blog. And I have studied the statistics, and it seems to just have a steady stream of visitors. How about that. Hope some of the Hama fans visiting here, also check out some of the other Christmas projects I have designed myself!

But let me show you the work of the next Hama happy generation in this household. Cool, huh?

Feed those birds, won't you?

I love feeding birds, because I love watching birds, but my downstairs neighbours are bothered by the bird shit on their balcony beneath ours (which is okay, I guess), so I don't. We have a lot of small birds that are quite seriously hungry during the colder winters - house sparrows, great tits and blue tits are all very normal here outside our inner city windows. They are adorable. 

I would feed them in these, if I could. It's a Danish webshop, and I think it's a Danish product. They remind me a bit of my beloved himmeli - they are sweet, don't you think?