The finest DIY for Christmas 2011

I've been surfing the web yesterday evening for the finest DIY for Christmas this year and maybe it's me being too difficult, but it was quite a search looking for extraordinary projects that I really really liked and wanted to do myself. But here they are.

1. Lovely white scenery in a jar from Tortoise and the Hare

2. Nice white clay ornaments, could be used all year around actually. I can also see them used for an advent calender. By Fancy House Road

3.  Truly nice christmas ornaments for in the tree or on a simple branch of wood. By Voyages of the Creative Variety

4. A twinkling glass and red and white chandelier by Fun.kyti.me

5. A beautiful soft and colourful christmas ornament by Happy Serendipity

6. Excellent gift tags free to print for you by Eat drink chic

7. A rendeer shirt, or skirt if you want. Also nice for the kids. By Freckles in April

Twitter freebie

It's hard to find nice twitter freebies other than the usual, so feel free to use those two from us, the canary from the childrensfarm will be extremely proud.
Just copy the image with your right mouse and save it, and link it to your twitter address.

You want pillow, you get pillow

My god, I just came across Sew Mama Sew, with a huge pile of pillow tutorials, excellent!

These four I definitely want to make & Mo wants to make the blue big one (two please dearest).

1. 3 Punk Mom;
2. Sew4home;
3. Cluck Cluck Sew;
4. Sew Home Grown.

Cute gifttags

Download them for free via the lovely: Camilla Engman

Toffee & Advent Calender

I'm an absolute fan of online magazines. Why, well 1) environmental reason like less paper which also means for me 2) more space available in my house as I have a difficult time throwing magazines away. 3) Print only what you really want and simply read everything on your computer. I wish, wish, wish we would have them more over here.

I believe it was last month that a new Australian online magazine called Toffee came out. I meant to write about it, but simply forgot. Absolute adore this Advent Calender which you can print for yourselves as soon as you bought yourself a copy, believe it was 2.99 Australian dollars for the whole magazine at Toffee

Gifted!

This may come as a surprise to you all (think not), but we love to make stuff. Now what is the best time in the whole year to make stuff, right in the dark November, December times (at least here in Holland).

I can tell you, I used to, that was before the kids arrived. Not that my girl doesn't like crafting, she does! she makes so much in a day that we don't have room for it anymore, so now she enlightens the neighbors with her creations, some of them already have a wall full of them. Anyway, drifting..kids, crafting & December.

The problem of my December is the following: first we have this old chap called 'Sinterklaas', this man gives presents to children at his birthday. Our kids have about three Sinterklaas parties. Followed by birthday no. 1, our son. The next day, birthday no. 2, our daughter. I know, planning is everything. Than we have some work related Christmas dinners and finally Christmas itself.

So tell me, when in this horrible month do I have time to craft. I've decided to start early this year. And I'm so glad that Creature Comforts decided that the beginning of November is an excellent time to issue the Gifted Magazine to get me in the mood. More than 220 beautiful pages filled with ideas, make it yourselves (starting page 71), fashion, gifts & interviews. Eat your heart out! At the end of the blog you can scroll through the magazine.

Yesterdays trash becomes todays gift

Friday is trash day in our street, and you'll be amazed about the things people throw away. I used to bring everything home that I found still useful and could, just by some paint, look wonderful again. But at a certain point, your house is full.

On Thursday evening, a lot of people who make money out of selling old things wander around the district. I remember an evening, bringing my son to bed and while closing the curtains he saw a guitar at the trash just in front of our house he wanted to have. I ran downstairs and even in these few seconds, one of these secondhand dealers picked it up and refused to give it to me even seeing my little son crying in front of the window. I could buy it from him for 10 euro!

Anyway, yesterday I saw some old vinyl records & took one home. Today we turned it into a lovely bowl. Than we remembered we had loads of them still at the attic, so we made a whole collection of different shaped bowls. Want to try it? I must add, that 8 to 10 minutes as described in the tutorial is way to long when the oven is heated. So the first one leave it in the oven for 3 minutes, if you want make more it took a bit more than 1 minute each to be melted the right way. Another thing, I used aluminum foil on the griddle, otherwise the edges melt. I doubt this is a healthy experiment, so leave the windows open.

Some more lovely vinyl record art, haven't found out yet how to cut these excellent silhouetted shapes, but I will soon.

The vintage look

Don't you just love the way old pictures look? I do, and if you're a photoshop user, this is an easy tutorial to get the effect. Just tried it on some of my summer Santorini pictures.