Renovation continues

The paints section at Bauhaus, Berlin

The last few days were terribly intense and with daily - renovation-related - challenges. As I promised myself to operate on a very strict schedule, I spent most of my free time - which means, when I am not cooking and taking care of the baby, writing for a living and managing more than 3 blogs and other administrative works, plus sleeping and drinking coffee once in a while - advancing my project. 

It meant a lot of hours spent shopping for various things, such as paint, testing brushes, returning to the store the non-functional items, checking for the best price and improving my technical skills. I wasn't always successful, and some time went waster while being unable to find the right dimensions of pillows for the covers bought initially, or coping with using the wrong cleaning clothes for the windows. Sometimes I realized that I didn't paint properly one specific corner and had to start everything again in the middle of the night.

As for now, after a bit more than 10 days since starting this crazy project - at least for my friends who are still wondering why I didn't hire a professional team to do everything in one day. My answer is that I really wanted to take this challenge and also finally learn on my own, through my own experience, how to manage a home. Learning the hard way is always the favorite, especially when you realize it is about time.

Right now, there are only some small details to fix: changing the vinyl flooring in the kitchen - I know already the model I want to buy; changing the blinds in my room; painting the window frames and washing the windows in my room; changing the shower system and the lamp - those tasks will be kindly assigned to my landlord as we are entering school-related issues and I prefer to avoid any major accident; painting one wall and a half in the living room; changing the curtains in the living room. I have some small arrangements to make on my book shelves, but it is not too much to set anyway. 

After I will be done, I have to start to sort out the very messy situation in my storage room, especially by giving away a lot of things I don't need. But this will be my work the first week after the big renovation is over.

As for now, I am optimistic to have a much modern, cleaner and functional house and looking forward to an extraordinary home - and a storage room too - by the beginning of June!

My next posts will be dedicated to specific issues I encountered during my works, such as finding the right paint and brushes or the right ingredients to have clean windows, or some small interior design tips.

Looking forward to it and keep in touch with good news!

Animals collage for the baby room

This is a DIY project I wanted to do for a long time, probably more than 6 months. The idea sprung after I realised how many empty boxes of napkins with cute animals figures I have left. As I also noticed that the baby love them, the idea of creating small landscape collage started, but as usual, it got lost on the back of my head, overwhelmed by other less important, not-baby related problems. Two weeks ago, I decided to move forward with it and purchased from Idee store, some background paper, yellow and green, and some glue - Rico - which I do not recommend because it requires extra action to make its job. Today, I woke up with a lot of creative energy and started the work. 

The images on the packages were on two categories: countryside and wild life. I decided to create one busy wild life board, where I also wanted to include the lion - he is also wild, isn't it? - but gave up and reserved him a spot on the countryside board. My idea is to be able to tell a story to baby D. based on the images. I already tried to put together some sentences and he enjoyed it which seems a small success for now. As we did a lot of hiking and nature outing this year, it might connect with some recent memories too. This board is really crowded but there were too many funny characters on the boxes to be left behind...

The countryside board is very relaxed, it can tell a simple story - about a party, yard gossips or/and the upcoming visit of the lion. It is more relaxed, looks less creative, but has many vivid colours and funny characters.

I already showed to the baby the two creations, as his biggest disappointment was of not being included in the working process...Couldn't afford to leave his tinny hands foil near the scissors...As for now, I am looking to create two nice frames for the works. My next DIY creative assignment. 

The entire work lasted around 1 hour and was a lot of fun and relaxation time, while trying to match and cut the animals and find a place for them in the story. 

Winter scarfs knitting ideas

I am a bit fan of knitting, particularly during the cold winter months. I acquired the ability of knitting at an early age, from my nanny and although I am not a dedicated knitter - I can easily spend more than five years of my life without practising it - my basic skills, plus the art of knitting without looking at the stitches, while reading or watching TV - are still with me, since being seven years old.

Now, with a baby that needs a lot of new things all the time, I brought back from the memories closet my stitches and started various simple projects - as for now. My main focus is to create simple things that are needed for the cold season, done with a touch of style and fashion. I also don't plan to spend too much time by trying complicated patterns, as I am overwhelmed by too many personal and professional projects.

I checked in my and baby's wardrobe to see what we are missing for the season and realized that the scarfs aren't necessarily suited for the minus two digit temperature that we are supposed to expect sooner than later. As the project is a beginner level, without a bigger financial investment, I also decided to buy some cheap products from the 1 Euro shop in order to check my skills and achievements first. I've found a very convenient solution, the 100% polyester micro by Gründl, a German company. 

It was a challenge though, that I fully accepted: how to deal with the pompons. At the time of finishing my scarf, I already knew how to do it, without looking at the stitches. The secret is to don't cast the stitches in the usual manner. You need to use the bar to position loops round the needle. Ager a couple of rows, the pompons are setting by themselves and you learn how to offer enough space for a better result. For a basic scarf you need two lots of 50 g. The scarfs should not be ironed, and need to be washed at 30 degrees.

Me and the baby, we are very happy with our warm scarves and I look forward to create more knitting works in the next weeks and months.

Happy knitting!

Creative DIY project in Lübben

During my travels, I always pay attention to various creative discoveries. If you follow my blog, you might notice that I share my discoveries in terms of interior design or decorations, or some specific art of a local creative mind. 

 As I was visiting recently the Lübben locality in the German Spreewald, on the way to the train station, I noticed the hall entrance to a block of houses. Massive wall paintings were made not only out of drawings, but by using natural materials, such as tree rind, for creating the image of a tree.

 For the bicicle, a real row was added to a fine wooden silhouette.

The fine crafts and details of every landscape makes everything more real and almost a slice of real life. Some details, like the cats here add a note of humour to the work, but also succeeds to go beyond the common. 

 It is more than a children painting and more also than a piece of street art. It is a mix of imagination and creativity using mostly natural ingredients provided by nature.

Sometimes, you don't need too much to be creative. Just a focus mind and the desire to create. The rest will slowly but firmly come by itself.

Understanding urban gardening. Berlin experiences and more

Once the first signs of spring are in the air, Berlin is becoming a completely different city. It is not about the good mood and the sun and the flowers in bloom, but also about the little corners of the city turned into improvised gardens. Especially in the Eastern hipster part of the city, it is usual to find on the street small patches of earth used as flowers or vegetables garden. You run your bike, stop for watering or picking up some fresh salad and back in the kitchen you go. But it starts to happen in the fancy Western part of the city too, as a message that the divisions do not longer exist. 

Berlin is part of a bigger European, and recently USA trend of urban gardening, as a way to increase awareness about healthy food and improve the environment. It is a movement taking a critical stance towards fast food and supermarket food culture. Another famous place for gardening experiments in Berlin is Prinzessinengarden, in Moritzplatz, a big space in the middle of the city used for growing vegetables. The place opens around April and is a hub not only for passionate gardeners, but also for various cultural events. There are many other such organised or spontaneous projects in Spandau or Neukölln or Prenzlauer Berg. The fancy Ritz Carlton Berlin not only has its own green supplies but also uses the honey produced on the roof beehive for treating its special guests. 

Politically, I am quite far away from the people involved in this movement, but cannot ignore the merits of such projects. Besides healthy food on the table - always a very good personal choice - increasing the presence of green areas is changing for good the quality of the air we breath. One of the many things that kept me in Berlin for such a long time is the fresh air I breath regardless the season, due to the green lungs that around or inside the city. More and more cities in Germany or in the world are following the same path. And it seems that Munich took even over Berlin, as from 1996, it requires every new construction to have a fit green roof. In Freiburg, in the South of Germany, the roof of the central train station was turned into a huge garden. In Madrid and Barcelona, there are buses running in the city with mobile garden roofs. Many years back, Frank Lloyd Wright created the Midway Gardens in Chicago or the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, with its roof terrace used as a garden area.

Gardening is not easy though. When my neigbour suggested me to get involved into a gardening summer project, I openly said 'no', due to my both lack of time and experience. As a kid, I grew up in houses with huge gardens, whose maintenance was not a transient hobby to practice when nothing else to do. Especially if you want to create your own ingredients for the salad, every good looking tomato is the result of a lot of gardening knowledge. Hopefully, there are more and more books dedicated to help people like me do the right gardening.

Annie Novak's Rooftop Growing Guide, recently published, is a practical guide based on the experiences of developing the Eagle Street Roof Farm in Brooklyn. The knowledge and lessons learned go beyond, with many tips about how to do the regular maintenance, be aware of the local authorizations, how to build a subirrigated container, calculate the rooftop sun exposure. It also has a consistent colletion of websites and other references where everyone can find inspiration and advice for his or her rooftop project. 

With a baby in the house, I may think differently about food culture. Also I would love that my son shares at least a part of my joy for nature and good love so maybe gardening is not such an utopic project after all.
Disclosure: I received the book for review, but the opinions are, as usual, my own

Presents for friends: Jewellery and a special box

Every time I should buy a present for a friend, I cope with the same question: what will it be the best idea? Especially when it is one of my girlfriends, there is quite a big problem to find something she will really enjoy, because in most cases, they are persons having a lot of nice things and makeup and almost everything you can dream about. So, the question will be to make a very special present, eventually something made by my humble own hands. 

As I am working a lot of DIY projects lately, I spent some good time at the IDEE shop trying to figure out what I am about to do. I set up for making up a box, with some mosaique tiles - mirror like, two sizes. The box looked very poor, calling for a dramatic redo. Although the small mosaique tiles can glue themselves, you better buy a wood glue too - actually, it was the most expensive item from the basket, around 5 EUR. The whole price for the entire shopping was around 8 Euro. As I do have water colours at home, further investment was not needed. 

The remaking of the box was slow - around 2 hrs.30. I was trying to be very careful to the small details, keeping the tiles clean - the best is to try to fix some dirt on the spot and do some more serious cleaning at the end of the project. 

I tried to be as creative as possible, but also to keep in mind the need to cover as much as possible from the wooden part. To be honest, maybe it was better just to paint the wood blue before applying the tiles, but this will be the lesson learned for the next time.

The blue interior looks really better, not only because I am a fan of the blue colour. For the tiles and for the colours, some waiting time is needed before everything is fixed and dried up.

Looking from all part of the box, everything was nice at the end, and I was very excited to finish my first complicated DIY project in a long while.

Now, it was about time to create some surprises in the box, using one of the kits made by Rico Design. Guidance for creating the pieces of jewellery are provided online and thus, if you are out of imagination - not my case - you can simply use the models recommended by them. In my case, I tried to be a little bit more creative and although I followed some technical steps, I preferred to make my own models.

 The jewellery creation process did not took too much time - around 1 hour of quiet work. As in the case of writing, I love how things are well put together out of very small little pieces.

Sometimes, the results can be beautiful but even more beautiful is the feeling of doing things with your own hand. Plus, making other people happy too!

A very simple DIY project: colouring the owl

Although I keep learning about cooking and food, and even took an awesome class of food writing lately - more details as soon as possible - I am glad to be back to one of my oldest hobbies: DIY projects. As a kid, I learned a lot of very useful women skills: from tailoring to knitting, and how to make my own jewellery. By growing up, I gave up such hobbies, more focused to make my way through complicated schools and sophisticated exams. After all, with my education I am supposed to pay other people to do a lot of things for me, from cooking to jewellery. 

However, a couple of weeks ago, while entering the Idee shop, I discover that it's never enough to feel creative and free again and since then, I keep working a lot - since the silence on the blog and on social media - learning again - how to work with metals, objects and colours.

This funny bag, ready made from Tiger and coloured by me, is just a small distraction from a generous sea of many projects in the making right now.  

I bought and finished it having in mind the daughter of a friend of mine who is quite a little lady. It took me less than 15 quiet minutes to finish it. All I had to do was to coloured the white shapes with the textile proof colours. The result is great and can't wait to keep working more projects of this kind. 

DIY: A flowerly phone purse

I used to do a lot of DIY projects as a kid and during my early teenage years, but since then, more focused on the writing and learning, I completely neglected my skills. One of the last days, before Rosh Hashana, with the long nights of winter in mind, I decided that it's about time to go back to my very old not-practised habits. Thus, I paid a visit to my local Idee shop branch and left with a lot of small little colourful packages. 

For warming up, I decided to start with the building of a phone purse. There are many small little pieces that I needed to put together, but everything is logically explained and did not have any hard time to arrange it. My only big issue was the thread which was not enough. 

The purse is made out of symmetrical small pieces, that should be attached on the clearly marked spaces. 

I loved a lot the colourful mood and the combination between butterflies and flowers, as well as the pastel colours of the purse. Inspired by all those elements, the work went pretty fast and without any significant problems. The material is very fine and should be careful to always follow the little holes and not somewhere else.

Although I haven't practised for a long time - except some basic home reparations, I succeeded to finish everything within one hour. The final result looked good and is very practical. Encouraged by this first success, more visits to the Idee followed. More DIY projects to be shared on the blog soon.