Color me lucky

....I already got my first Christmas present!

My friend and very clever textile designer Karina gave me this beautiful indigo dyed linen tote (made by her, of course) as a thanks for some little favor I did her. I made her website and her logos, and am a big fan of her work.

Her workshop here in Copenhagen has a market this weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 11.00 to 17.00 - where you can buy luxurious hand woven and hand dyed textiles from the lady herself.

Her Etsy Shop and very interesting Pinterest boards are also worth checking out!

Now look at this pretty thing!
It is itajime shibori technique - and that is some complicated stuff! But that's Karina for you.

Giant red himmeli

Readers of this blog will know that I am obsessed with all kinds of mobiles, and for a long time I have been into folksy ones, such as the Finnish 'himmeli' or the Polish 'pajaki'. I tried making various himmeli myself, and have gathered some practical advice on this page.

It's fun making them, and I keep saying that I will get some natural straw in the late summer, but for two summers I haven't been able to pick any - all the fields in my summer neighborhood seems to have only wheat and rye grown with straw-shortening chemicals. Sad, in so many, many ways. One of the lesser, for sure, is that it makes himmeli-making tricky. So I go for the plastic version, and every time I come across interesting plastic straws, I buy them! I found some silly maxi ones here (70 cm. long!) in a beautiful red, and decided to make a BIG and very Christmassy himmeli. I really went all the way, and decided on tissue paper tassels as well. Very festive.
 

Here it is, and it's almost too enormous for our otherwise relatively spacious bed/work room. 

Hey, it's December 1st! Let's make trees.

Hello everybody! It is December 1st, and Christmas is officially the theme of this blog for the next many weeks. I will try to post often, though perhaps not every day, and this year I will try to post a few projects especially for kids, or those of us who like very, very simple projects. 

So let us begin with one of those!
(And I do promise some comlicated-looking-but-actually-easy paper things as well, just as usual....)

For newcomers to this blog: My DIY's have a sort of general philosophy. They are nearly always paper designs, and simple and straightforward to make, though sometimes they require a steady hand. But that's about it. I try to do the thinking for you as often as possible, and usually you just have to print, cut and follow easy instructions. 

I start with something completely different, however, because already the other day, I talked about Hama Beads. And since we have been at them for weeks (they never leave the dining room table), I started making these little green trees, and the little plantation just grew and grew. We kinda like them, and my son, aged five, made the smaller ones. They just require a large square pegboard, and some counting skills. You could add colored beads for tree decorations and perhaps even add a star to the top. It's not that I in any way came up with this idea, but perhaps I made it a little bit simpler for you, if you save (it's just a gif) and print this diagram. 

They are a little bit different that the 'flat' Hama ornaments, and my son found it fascinating that it was so easy to make something 3D. We had a lot of different green colors, but they would look so cool in reds and pinks - or whatever you like!

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?

Paper Pumpkin Lanterns

I promise you that these are not scary at all, and neither do they contain sticky seeds. I actually made them, because I purchased these really nice LED tealights in IKEA. Usually LED tealights are really low quality with some kind of weak yellowish light, but these are really cool. They look nice, and actually have very much the warm glow and flicker of a real candle. So I have been playing around with them, because I love paper lanterns of all kinds, and it's great not to have to worry about fire hazard. 

So go buy some LED tealights, and download the PDF to make these supereasy pumpkins right HERE. And have a spooky or non-spooky Halloween, whichever you prefer! 

 

2021: I have a new location for my downloads, please go here:
Design 1  /  Design 2  /  Design 3

USA trip # 2: colorful Key West

Back in May we took at bit of a US east coast road trip, from the Florida Keys in the south up to Maine as our northernmost destination. I took about a billion pictures, and sometimes I manage to organize a batch, and phew, that's gonna take some time! Here are some sunny memories from a place I really fell in love with: Key West. 

I really thought it was a magical place. The turquoise sea surrounds it to all sides and the constant, velvety breeze keeps you from melting. The gorgeous gardens behind the picket fences are crazy exotic mini jungles, and all the colonial wooden houses are so pretty. There are all kinds of palm trees, banyan trees, hibiscus and flowery cacti everywhere - even though you are basically on a tiny strip of land in the middle of the salty ocean. 

People are of the hippie nice and relaxed variety, and dresscodes and that sort of thing are nonexistent. You eat amazing seafood, drink key lime margheritas and listen to salsa music (only 90 miles to Cuba, as you are constantly reminded!). There are lots of tourists, but the noisy ones cram themselves together in five famous bars on Duval Street - and the rest of the place is very laid back and tranquil.

Here are a few of my photos - wanna see more? Go to the flickr album!

More geology: The crystal caves in Naica, Mexico

I saw a tiny image somewhere the other day, that I first took to be a screen shot from some adventure/sci-fi movie, but something in it attracted me enough to follow the link. It lead me to discovering about this utterly unbelievable, but very real place. They are caves filled with giant gypsum and selenite crystals in the Naica Mine, one of Mexicos largest commercial silver, lead and zinc mines. They were discovered by accident in 2000, and can't be visited by ordinary tourists, but only by research teams, wearing ice cooled suits, since the temperatures are up around 120 degrees F (almost 50 degrees C). 

I just could not believe my own eyes. Can you? 

And as perhaps you know, I have a thing about minerals!

The two photos above are by Oscar Necoechea. 

Read more about this extraordinary and very weird place here, on National Geographic.

Photos:
Top, mineral detail: from Wikipedia article about the Naica Mine.
Next three: Carsten Peter, for National Geographic.