Christmas princesses

Wondering what your princess is going to wear at Christmas? Visit Moti, they have lovely dresses for your girls, made of natural fabric and out of the ordinary. Have a look! My favourite is the blue with gold. You can buy them online at Moti or at Imagine (also selling our postcards) or Lovely at the Park, both in Amsterdam.

Bidprentje

Joyce's husband found his devotional for his first communion, so cute. We're puzzled about the seven thingies at the bottom, anybody? We'll reward you with a virtual kiss!

Aalesund

Ever heard of Aalesund, it's a town in Norway and it has an excellent shop called Farmor Ingvarda selling lovely stuff and... our Liefgoed postcards. Have a look for yourself at Farmor Ingvarda's blog. It's not very likely that we visit Norway anytime soon, but when we do, Farmor Ingvarda will certainly be on the list of things to visit. Thank you Trine for having us in your excellent shop!

Who's version?

We love Raghava KK's idea for educating children multiple perspectives (and it's not only children who need it!) . It's almost a good reason for buying an Ipad. Almost...

Shopping

Yesterday a visit to Seminyak, Bali. It was on our son's wishlist to go there (I love the fact that they get to the age they actually like shopping). It's unbelievable how things can change in such short time. It's been only two years ago since our last visit and although it always was the place to be for design it's been growing and developping with many many more excellent shops.

By nature we went to our known places first, like Jellyfish , it's a kids clothing shop with out of the ordinairy designs where our girl bought her first dress 5 years ago, she has quite a collection now of Jellyfish dresses. Here showing her latetst.

Next visit was the Corner Store (unfortunately no website), I always buy the bags made of ricebags made by Madcow, every year they have different designs.

Stop for a lunch at Made's Warung, I think the best place for a quite Indo atmosphere lunch or diner or simply a drink, serving Indo, Japanese and Western food. It's a place with a long history. They even made the place bigger now, but still maintained the old intimate style.

 Made's Warung in the early days

 Made's Warung now

I pick out two places that caught my attention and are new to me. First one is
La Bijouterie of Cooperative de creation. I like the way they make simple jewellery out of basic materials using letters and natural materials. Unfortunately on the website you can only see a tiny bit of their huge divers collection.

The last one is GV Amazing Crafts, they design wonderful furniture, I'm in love with their desk, couch and old style travel cabinet.

play new design

Mark the date!

Ever heard of Handmade Heaven, it's a shop, workplace, atelier where all creatives, young or old can gather, either making stuff, getting inspired or buy lots of things to create at your own place.

I found the place only last week and I love it (my daughter even more). So good thing is they have on the 28th of May the 'Kinder Doe Parade'! and mothers take notice: it's not only for the girlies, they have the 'Toolkid Timmer Tafel' for the boys (starting from the age of 4). And while the kids are doing their stuff you can relax en enjoy your picnic.

Happy games, fase III

I knew the time would come, that our 10 year old boy wouldn't accept the pink & white childrens playroom (mostly pink I have to admit) as their domain, but I have posponed it as long as I possibly could. The girl didn't mind, but hey all has to be decided in a democratic way, well almost.

As they wanted a Game Room, I suggested we have all sorts of vintage PacMan illustrations, but no, they wanted Mario. I refuse to have a guy with a moustache on any wall of the house, and as I'm the one painting it I should have a major vote in this. So we came up with this. Sorry can't remember where I got it from, internet, but where?

And now it's done, goodbye to Peter Pan Childhood Dreams, Hello Game World. The room has been transformed to a chill hang out place, all the pink has been removed. Bit sorry, but I also love it when their friends come over saying, wow this is cool!

So I'm done, made my deadline, fase I, II & III delivered before the first of March. But I'm also very very very tired, so tired that I can't be bothered to make some more pictures, sorry.

Dinner Sir

For Rubens first

Look at

Look at these lovely hand made sweaters, dresses & cardigans for the little ones, so nice.

Not that I have little children that can actually wear them or made any progress on my knitting capacities since October, but still. Sold by Fatsheep. A shop in Amsterdam selling these organic knitwear of 100% eco Merino wool from NZ & Alpaca wool from Boliva. Nice blog as well, that's how we found them.

you know the feeling?

Selling something you hate to see go. I have that feeling with this fancy golden baby bib with soft fleece inside, not that my 10 or 7 year old fit in, but still. Wish I had made one when my daughter was that small.

Have to urge myself not to hold on to it till one of the kids might have children of their own if ever. Imagining that they only get boys and Granny doesn't care, she insist they wear this precious golden bib at her dinner table, poor lads, no no, lets wrap it up.

Party

Yesterday we had the last childrens party of 2010 in our family. Our daughters wish was to do this at the the Hollandse Manege in Amsterdam. Beautiful place & great party.

The influence of..

Look, even 'zwarte Piet' is transformed in a Little Pet Shop mega head figure.Looks like we're finally beyond the Disney princess phase, it's still wearing a dress though. Wonder what 's next.

By Tinker

If I was a little boy..

...than I would ask Sinterklaas or Santa for these.

By Floris Hovers

Via Frozen Fountain

Looks like...

...we've found the right school for our kids. Time to move! Make no mistake, we love the school the kids are right now, only problem, it's not in Bali.

Combinations

The new edition of Maeve Magazine is out, yeah! Like, like. Just read it yourselves, one thing I love the combination of photography & illustrations in this particular photo shoot. Photography: Rowe Timson, Styling/Illustration: Jody Walker

work in progress

For the new arrivals

We've kept ourselves low profile regarding making birth announcements the last year. We had several reasons for this:

1) there are plenty others who specialize in this and make lovely cards 2) pregnant women are full of hormones and judging from how I was when pregnant we felt to stay far a way from those.

We just didn't offer them, and did them only rarely on request (and than they even had to push us). As it turned out, not all women in that state are completely hormone driven & aren't impossible to work with. So when a client asked us to make some kind of leaflet giving more information on our birth announcements as they got a lot of requests, we felt it was time to change our previous point of view.

Here's the front cover. Like?

Innocent creatures

I'm always amazed by the creatures little children make. These two are made by Ernest I think at the age of 4 & 5. The racing car he made after eating an icecream and looking at stick which was the only thing leftover, he came up with this.

The other one, is a (hopefully) nonexistent creature which he created when he found this little piece of wood at my fathers shed having all the needed tools available.

As they grow older the pieces become more sophisticated but less wildly imaginative, like if the innocent way they look at everything looses its magic.
That's why pieces like these get a special place in our bookcase, so we always remember that it's an asset & a joy to think OUT OF THE BOX.

work in progress

It's always a challenge when people ask us to create something special of fabric based on the baby announcement. This is gonna be a cuddle made of a piece of fabric.