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11/15/2012

A teeny tiny gift

My coworker's wife just had a baby two days ago. I love shopping for baby clothes because everything's tiny and cute and soft and it has teddy bears and dinosaurs and unicorns on it and, to be really honest, I'd love to wear dinosaurs and unicorns, but it seems I'm too old for that.

Anyways! While I love shopping for it, I've never been good at turning it into a cute gift. Cuter than the little socks and shirts are on their own. But then I found this pin on Pinterest that turned baby shirts into muffins. They'd just roll it up, put it in paper muffin cups and then in a box and voilá - shirt muffins.

So, today I went to a baby store, found a cute blue shirt that I wanted to use as the muffin base and a beige cap that I wanted to use as topping. I also bought muffin cups and pre-made hard frosting for decoration.

I tried my very, very best to roll the shirt up and fit it into the cup, but it was way too big and looked really ridiculous. I folded some doily to make it look like a muffin cup but that was even worse. And when I was on the edge of giving up and just wrapping newspaper around it, I thought "Why not just use the cap and put the shirt in the box without being muffin-ed?"

And so I tried. It took me a few minutes, but eventually I figured it out. I pushed the top of the cap down in the middle so the cap was only half as big and then started to roughly form a circle out of the lower seam. Then I pinched and squeezed the top of the cap so it looked muffin-ish and secured the bottom with ribbon. I placed it in the muffin cup, glued the frosting on top - and there I had my lovely little baby cap muffin.

I'm really surprised that it turned out so well because as I said - I'm usually not very good at it. Once you've figured it out, it's not too hard to make. I made a gift back out of wrapping paper, put the shirt and muffin inside and then glued it shut with a doily. The results are below, I hope you like it.

The "muffin" inside the gift bag, together with the shirt I got.

Baby cap muffin!

The doily-ed gift bag!

10/14/2012

Flea Market Finds

This week, it's actually just one find and it wasn't a real flea market but an antique market. We have those in Wiesbaden once a month or every six weeks, I'm not exactly sure. I was looking through the upcoming flea market dates because we need to get rid of some things before we move as well and saw the antique market. I've been there once before, a few years ago, with my dad, who loves flea markets. So much actually that he took my mom there for their first date. Guess I inherited that.

It was awesome. There were so many great paintings, old machines (for example type writers, coffee grinders, etc.), chandeliers, furniture... I could've bought it all. Unfortunately, since it was all antique, everything cost about a fortune. I found lots of cute little paintings that would've looked great on our walls, but I can't afford spending 60€ on a painting that's smaller than my hand.

I did find one little treasure though!

It looks so gooey and romantic, I just had to buy it. I got it for 5€ even though the guy who sold it initially wanted 10, which makes me a little proud because I just started actually buying things like this at flea markets. Usually, I just gawked and wanted it all, but never had room for it.

Well, now I can gawk at my little swan and think up a story about it while I hopefully finish the stupid shelves that I've been working on today.

10/13/2012

Wall Art Inspiration

In his room back at his mom's apartment, the Doctor had a huge picture on the wall. Not photo wallpaper or anything the like, but a real picture that he painted there. He told me that he'd like something similar in the new apartment and since most of the ideas are mine and rather... well, not exactly manly, I want to give him something that's his and that he can admire. Rather than the pretty paintings I'm hanging on the wall.

I googled black and white art, paintings, pictures, wall art and wall tattoos, but didn't find anything I liked. Most of it is girlish or floral and that's really not the right thing. In my head, I have a lot of ideas. But I'm not a good painter. It all looks great when I think of it, but the moment I try and draw, it turns into a mess. I need inspiration, I need something that I can look at and then draw something similar in order to make something that looks nice. The idea I had for the wall was a sort of "two against the world" or "breaking out" theme. Two people in a house on a hill (maybe those two people will be framed) and outside of the house and/or frame, everything's crazy. I thought of flesh-eating plants, zombies, wild patterns, unicorns and all that other stuff that goes on in my brain when I'm left to think.

And then, last night when I was about to fall asleep, it came to me. Insanely twisted shadow planet! For those who don't know: Insanely twisted shadow planet is an Xbox game that's rather Indie and one even I can play. It's relatively easy to draw because it's black and white and only has a few spots that are coloured and I'm pretty sure that it would look amazing.





In our life, it's sort of tradition that I watch the Doctor play Xbox. I don't watch every game he plays, but when he played Silent Hill, for example, I sat next to him annoying him because, of course, I always know better. "There's something on that wall over there!" "Go right, not left" "Oh my god there's a monster. Oops, just a tree." So having a pretty picture that reminds us of it and looks great would be perfect for our bedroom wall.

It also fits the theme of "two against the world" because well, in this game, you're playing a little space ship that needs to fight its way through an insanely twisted shadow planet. There are tons of great looking scenes in that game that we could incorporate into the picture on our wall. I'm saving a few right here so I don't forget and can get inspired by looking at them again.











I'm planning on borrowing a projector from the Doctor's workplace (he's an event engineer so they have tons of them) and projecting it on the wall in order to draw all this - and then it's time to paint! Another idea that just came to my mind was painting the curtain that will be in front of our closet with this. I'll have to think about that, I've never really painted on fabric and I'm afraid that it'd ruin the curtains, the floor or would just look weird. But it's an idea!

I could imagine something similar for a kid's room, too. Maybe not quite as dark, but hey, I'm most likely not going to use black paint but something grayish with red accents in it. We'll see about that once we're in the apartment, we still have six weeks to go and with our teeny tiny budget, wall paintings are really the last thing on our bucket list. 

10/12/2012

Kitchen Wall Inspiration

Those past days have been beyond busy. We had our current landlord over to check out the apartment to see whether or not they want to renovate it. Well, turns out they do. We expected that but thought that we could get out early because of this, that they could just renovate it during our last two months or so. Yeah, that's not working. We get one month off but that's it.

And as if that wasn't enough, because they renovate it all, we have to get everything out. Every wallpaper, every styrofoam ceiling cover and every flooring. Well, not every flooring, luckily we left the old PVC in kitchen, hallway and bedroom. But we have to get the wooden floor out of our living room and the new PVC we put into our bathroom has to go as well.

Yep... that's going to be a lot of work. I don't even want to think about it right now. We're starting this weekend so we don't have to do it all in the last minute. The Doctor is starting with the basement room that belongs to our apartment, we pretty much have to put it all in the trash because we don't have room for it. I'm guessing that's going to take more than a weekend. Not only because there's so much stuff in there, but because it's going to be a walk down memory lane with all these boxes he hasn't looked at in years.

In the meantime, I'm continuing on my upcycled shelf, I'm hoping to finish it later today or tomorrow morning. Most likely tomorrow morning. When I'm done with that, I'm starting with the kitchen, our biggest problem because it's full of the things that the tenant before us left here. The Doctor knew her rather well, it was an old lady and his mother cared for her until she died. She gave him the apartment and everything inside it.

But now, what I actually wanted to talk about!

Once we've got rid of all the things in the kitchen, we're hoping to actually buy a new, smaller one, because the kitchen space in the new apartment is rather tiny. In case you haven't seen the post with the apartment pictures, here is one of our kitchen.

Yes, that's all. We have room for everything, even our dishwasher, but there's nothing more. The kitchen furniture goes on the left wall and the one in the front, we're not putting any furniture on the right side because then we'd hardly have room to walk through it. Instead - I can use it for decoration!

With the red tiles and the white walls (and, of course, the wooden ceiling), the whole apartment has a rather rustic look. I'm going to embrace that style and use it for the decoration. The first piece I'm using here is my favourite flea market find that I bought last week - the fat man drinking wine. After all, the kitchen is a place to eat and make delicious food and maybe have a glass of wine, so that's just perfect.


His smile makes me so happy! I rummaged through our kitchen to see if the lady left us something else that I could use and I found it hanging right on our wall! I never paid much attention to it because there just isn't any decoration here usually and I've made my peace with that. I've seen those things, of course, but I never realized they were there!

An old cheese grater is the second piece that will go on our new wall. It's super simple, doesn't take up much space and looks nice, too. It's not art, but I'm confident that it will look great once it's on the wall with the paintings and everything else.


This one is number three. A really, really old thermometer that hung on our wall. The black parts aren't dirty, that's just the colouring of the leather casing. It even shows me whether it's going to be "rainy, uncomfy or pretty", I just have to take it with me and put it up for everyone to see.

That one is just an example - a tin plate. I'm not sure whether they're popular anywhere but in Germany, but my grandma has tons of them. We found two in this apartment as well, but they're not that pretty so I'm hoping that grandma will give me one of hers. I know that she has lots of them that are in the cabinet because she doesn't have room on her walls anymore. And yes, that's how many she's got.


Those are tin spoons. My grandma has many, many of those as well. Those two aren't particularly pretty because of the weird roof thingy, but I want one or two on my wall as well. I bet it could look great after working on the wood for a bit.

I found this one right here on Pinterest and knew I had to do it right away. My grandma's and my mother are great cooks, they really are, and they've taught me a lot about it, so that's going to be my way to honour them - ask them for handwritten recipes, frame them and hang them on my kitchen wall.

There's another flea market here on sunday, I'm hoping to find more art that fits on this wall together with the other pieces. I can't wait to decorate this, it's going to be one of my favourites in the new apartment, most definitely!

10/08/2012

Our new small home

It's finally here - we went over to our new apartment again today to measure some things and take pictures. So, as promised yesterday, I'll try and de-clutter my head and post pictures with our ideas right here.

These are the stairs that lead to our apartment. The grass you can see here is part of our very own garden, which I'll show more of later. Our apartment is the one on basement-level. But since the house is on the hill, this bit of garden is the only thing that reaches our windows. The small window by the stairs is the bathroom window, the bigger one belongs to our bedroom.

Come on in! I'm not a fan of the red door knobs and everything, but our apartment used to be a kindergarten, so we've got a few of those. I initally wanted to have a bench and a huge mirror in the hallway, on the wall you can see in this picture, but we won't have enough room for the bench. I'm thinking of putting a mirror like the DIY window colour mirror in my last post up here. Maybe two small mirrors, we'll see about that!



That's our bathroom (who would've guessed!). We're upgrading from bath tub to shower, and yes, I mean upgrade, not downgrade. Neither of us is a fan of taking long baths and while it can be relaxing, nearly falling down and breaking your neck every time you need to climb out of the bath tub even though you only showered can get really annoying. We'll get rid of the red things in here, they're leftovers from kindergarten-times as well as the balloons on the tiles. Those will stay though, simply because we don't want to go through painting tiles again. Especially since they're shiny and white this time, not yellowish. We're moving all the things we had in our current apartment to this one, since we -just- renovated it all and bought/built new furniture, so we're not going to buy new things again.


That would be our bedroom. Yes, it looks bad, but that's only because the landlord hasn't put the wooden floor in it yet. Afterwards, it will look just awesome. We can look straight into our garden from the bed, which will be pretty much in the middle of the room. We're getting two twin beds, put together by a nice headboard, most likely made of pallets or something similar. In the lower picture (yes, I know, bad quality but the only one the Doctor took of this corner) you can see the little niche that we will turn into our closet. We're going for something like Martha's solution in my last post, all hidden by a nice curtain hanging from the wall.


Kitchen! Only this picture so far, you'll get the real impression of it further down, together with our awesome living room because this kitchen opens into the living room. We can see straight into our garden from the window. A friend told me that you never rent apartments without kitchens in the States, but over here, that's actually fairly common. We'd preferred to have a kitchen in there as well, but thankfully my parents are helping us out so we can afford to buy our own kitchen. We'll keep it simply and not too dark, since the kitchen doesn't have much space and we don't want it to look even smaller than it is.
On the right side, the side you can't see in this picture, there's a blank, white wall. We're not putting any shelves or the like there because then we couldn't move anymore, but I'll ask my mother and grandmothers whether I can have some handwritten recipes that I can frame and hang there. I saw this on Pinterest once and that's the perfect place to hang them!


Here it is, our wonderful living room. Together with me, super tired because the Doctor's best friend spent the night at our apartment and we were all up until three in the morning. I was taking pictures with my phone to send to friends straight away, so I'm pretty much in every picture the Doctor took. But I think you can still see the awesomeness in this room. There's one more of those huge windows on the right side, the one you can see in the upper picture. Actually, it's the door that leads to our terrace. And you can see the kitchen in the back and - oh yes - the fireplace. I've always wanted to have one of those! Our plans for this room are still a bit sketchy, we might change it up once we've put the furniture down.
So far, it goes along those lines: In the upper picture, there's the small footstool in front of the fireplace - that's where we'll put a bench and our dining table. We're closing the door between kitchen and living room with a counter that reaches as high as your ordinary table does so we can put things down here, for example plates, and use the room on both sides. On the living room side of the counter, we're going to make a little reading nook next to the fire, that's what I really, really wanted and we were worried about not having enough room.
If you look at the lower picture, that's where the actual living room will go. We are keeping our TV table and shelf above it because it's only a year old and too good to throw away. We're keeping our couch as well, but we're upgrading it. It's currently standing against the wall and since it will be in the middle of the room here, we're adding a board to the back for support. It's dark brown right now and I'm going to change that to grey and completely renew the fabric on it. That's going to take a while, but it will be well worth it. I can also use that wall for my gallery project.

Before we move outside, I'll finish up with the two tiny extra rooms we've got in this apartment.



Yep, they really are tiny. The one in the first picture is for laundry machine and other household items, we're adding shelves there to store all these things as well as things we rarely use but keep on hand. There are paintings shining through, another thing remaining from kindergarten-times. We're going to hide the room behind another curtain so those won't be a problem and if we really find they're too annoying, we can just paint the wall again.
The room on the second picture is meant as a storage room, but this is where the Doctor will keep his music things. It has the exact right size for his desk and he can keep all his guitars there as well. We might also be able to fit a few shelves into it so we have more storage room. Doctor says this is good for the sound, so I'll just go with it and be happy to have more room to put things.

And now.. the outside. Our terrace and garden surround our apartment so we have complete privacy. Combined, garden and terrace have about the same size and level of awesomeness as the apartment itself.




Isn't this great? It's huge! We can build our furniture out there rather than trying to find a spot in the kitchen, as we currently do. We can invite friends over, have barbecues, we could even run a marathon on this terrace! We don't have many plans for this part yet. The Doctor wants to ask the landlord if we could install a roof above a part of the terrace so we can keep outdoor furniture outside without having to fear for rain, dry our clothes, etc. I want to hang a hammock and possible swings from the support beams. I'm also going to try and make some tire-ottomans so we can hang out with friends outside. One thing we'll definitely do - we bought this Super 8 projector at the flea market on Saturday and we're going to use that to watch old movies in black and white one warm summer night on our huge terrace.




And finally, this is our garden. The garden hut belongs to the landlord, but we can use half of it AND we may use his lawn mower and all the other supplies he has in there. The garden continues around the corner towards the entrance, the part you saw in the first picture. The tree in the bottom picture is an apple tree that we may use for ourselves as well. And I can plant vegetables and herbs and whatever I want in there! Suffice to say, I absolutely love this. We're going to keep it furniture-free and use it only for planting and maybe lying on the grass.

I hope you like the apartment and the ideas we have for it. This will all make much more sense when we start moving and furnishing and decorating, I promise. And I can't wait for it!

10/06/2012

Inspiration and a bit of thinking.

I'm not sure whether or not I've mentioned it before, but we managed to find a great apartment, so we can now finally move. We still need to get out of our current contract, but we're hopeful that this will happen soon.

The new apartment unfortunately isn't as big as we had hoped, so we'll have to get rid of a lot of things. We don't have a cellar room anymore and no other place to store things. The Doctor will bring some stuff to his brother, to keep it in his garage for a while, but eventually, we might have to rent a garage or something the like ourselves. It's about 600sqft/56sqm, so really, there are lots of decoration and furniture ideas we won't be able to actually have. On the other hand, there are some amazing extras in this apartment so that we just couldn't say no.

To give an overview: The apartment is on basement level of a one-family-house. The house is on a hill though, so the apartment isn't actually below the surface, which is great because we never wanted that. It has its own entrance down a few stairs. You open up and the first thing you see are the dark terracotta tiles on the floor and the white walls in the hallway. Those go through the whole apartment except for the bedroom. On the left side there's the bathroom, no bath tub, but we don't need that. A few steps down the hallway, there's a teeny tiny room for our laundry machine and other household items to store.

Following the hallway to your right, you get to the bedroom. There's no floor in it yet, we got to choose between carpet and wood and chose wood, the landlord is going to fix that until we move in. And then you reach the best room - the living room. It's the biggest room and has a half-open kitchen in it. There's also a fireplace, which is one of my favourites in this apartment. It's really bright because the southern wall is nothing but glass. On the left side there's another small room, that one's going to be the Doctor's music room, I promised him that.

When you walk closer to the windows on the southern side, you get to look outside and oh my gosh! We've got 34sqm of terrace right there! It's surrounded by hedges so nobody can look in and we've got complete privacy. And as if that wasn't cool enough already, next to the terrace I'll get my own little garden. There's even a huge apple tree in it already! Garden and terrace surround the apartment, so nobody can look into our windows either!

Jackpot. We had to make compromises, but we're hoping that it's worth it. Now, all these amazing ideas I had about the things I really, really want... well some of them won't work at all. I won't have my own room for studying and crafting and whatnot and we're not even sure yet if I can even get a corner for myself, but we're figuring that out.

That's the floorplan! BAD = bath room, FLUR = hallway, KELLER = Doctor's music chamber, WOHNRAUM = living room. The space within the red lines is ours, the terrace and garden are above it all!
So, there's that. There are lots of things we -can- do though. We have to limit ourselves to the ceilings and walls, mostly, but hey, that's something! I pinned all the greatness I could find on Pinterest already, but since I pretty much pinned everything I found that was at least one tiny bit awesome, I should put my inspiration, especially that part that's possible for us, down here as well.

Martha Stewart coat rack
If you look at the floor plan again, you can see the bedroom in the upper right corner. It's square except for the left side, there's a sort of alcove there that we will use for our closet. We won't have an actual closet, but have cupboards or shelves behind a curtain there. And since I'm a fan of ladders as long as I don't have to climb them, I love this idea to use an old ladder as a clothing rack rather than just buying one. I can also paint this however I want. It looks nice, it's really simple and effective, especially for such a small space!

As seen on Dishfunctional Designs




That right there is something both the Doctor and I like. It's simple yet pretty, you can paint and distress it in whichever way you want and since we're most likely getting two twin beds that we're pushing together rather than one king size bed for so much more money, that would be a nice way to turn those two beds into one - with nothing but a pallet!

And here's more pallet furniture we love from the same blog as above! A pallet couch. Again, it's simple, easy to DIY and pallets are cheap, at least where I live. It also adds to the rustic style of the terracotta tiles. Personally, I love the door in the back, but we'll see what we can do here to make sure we've got support on the backside because we most likely won't place it on a wall but in the middle of the room.

Seen on Thrifty and Chic
Those mirrors will definitely get a place in our apartment. Mirrors make rooms seem bigger than they are and those look especially spectacular. Again, they're easy to make but add a great style to the wall.


As seen on Smile and Wave
We're definitely having a gallery. Maybe you've read the post before this one about my flea market finds - I've already bought a few frames and paintings. And since the walls are the space I can decorate, there will be a few of those galleries in our apartment.

That's today's bit of inspiration. We're going to take a few pictures of the apartment tomorrow and I'll add those with another few things we're going to put into our apartment to make it our home.

Flea market finds

We shouldn't really buy new stuff before we move because that only means more things to carry into the truck and back out into the new apartment. But today, there was a huge flea market right around the corner. One that only takes place twice a year. So really, what choice did we have?

Flea markets in Germany aren't exactly flea markets you might know. Often, it's people that sell cheap clothes they imported from who-knows-where and there are no "real" flea market things to be found. But this one didn't allow such resellers or anything the like. It was good ol' flea market things.

We talked about what we want to buy beforehand so we don't end up with (too many) things we really don't need and can't use. Our goals were paintings, picture frames, possibly spoons (for a spoon project). I also had an old window and an old fence in mind for our kitchen, but that was just in case one had an old window and an old fence that were the right size and looked nice together. Not very likely. Other than that, old bench, mirrors, other wall-decoration I can't live without. We don't have much space in the new apartment, so we pretty much have to keep all decorating items on the wall.

I couldn't find everything I wanted, but I found some real treasures!

An old projector! The Doctor being event engineer, this is his field of expertise. Well, it would've been, if he was 50 years older. But he loves this kind of stuff, so now he can try to make it work, show it off to his coworkers and have fun with it. I'm a fan of it because it came in a really cool blue bag (and yes, both projector and bag need cleaning, it looks even worse in reality than it does on the picture) and I have in mind that we can buy old black-and-white movies and watch them in our garden one warm summer night. We got it for 12€ and it should be in working condition after the Doctor has looked at it.

That was actually the first thing we bought. I loved it right when I saw it, because it looks old. It's not really gold but wooden, so it's not too heavy and we didn't collapse after we had to drag it with us for the rest of our flea market visit. It has a few small dents, but hey, that's the charm of such old frames! We got it for 2.50€.


We got those two together for 10€. Apparently the painting in the smaller one is a copy of a super famous and expensive painting, but I just loved it for being an old, fat dude who drinks wine straight from the caraffe. The seller initially wanted 10€ for each, but gave in after a bit of persuasion. The frame above has a few dents and is splintered in one place, but I can work around that. And the fat dude is just plain awesome.

That was actually the Doctor's find and I like it. Since we got an oven in our new apartment, this is just perfect. It apparently also comes with a sausage stick, so I guess we're set for whatever might happen! We got it all together for 12€.

Isn't this freaking awesome? I wish we had separate bathrooms so we could put those up on the doors. I might hang it above each side of the bed. Or just into the living room gallery that I planned. But I love those pictures. We got them for 2€ each, you really can't beat that price!