Small kitchen - small decoration!

I really like our kitchen. It's awfully small and sometimes a pest to cook in because as soon as there's something more elaborate, you have to do the dishes in between and that gets annoying. But all in all, I'm very happy with what we made of our 300€ cheap kitchen. There are still a few things that need to be done, but once everything is alright, I'll update the blog with pictures of the complete kitchen.

For now, there's one thing I want to show you - my little wall of fame.

Please excuse the bad quality of the picture - it's too dark to take a better one at the moment! There are a lot of different things to be seen here, let me break them down!

On top, there's a really old grater we found in our old apartment. Same goes for the one on the right below it - that's an old cutting board. I really liked the floral design on it and wanted to incorporate it somewhere. The small pot lid was just too cute to throw away, another thing I found in the old apartment (and yes, we really did find so many things when we moved out tat we'd never used or even seen before!)

The three picture frames that have handwritten things inside them are old recipes. The one in the lower right corner is from my mother's first cookbook, she let me have that page because she never cooks it, it's a recipe for cheese soufflé. The one in the center is from the lady that lived in our old apartment before we moved in, I found it together with a super old Dr. Oetker cookbook and since she left us so many things in the apartment, I wanted to take at least a small piece of it with us to our new home.

Now, the one on the upper left is the one I'm really proud of. I found it in my grandma's old recipes. My grandma's father used to have a butcher's shop, he passed it on to my grandpa, who passed it on to my uncle. It closed a few years ago because of the economy, but this recipe keeps it alive! It's the recipe for our famous Fleischwurst (pork sausage) that we won a few prizes for and that I ate every day. And now I have it in my kitchen!

The frame with the wooden spoon contains a page from that old Dr. Oetker cookbook I found, the page describes everything you ever wanted to know about soups - and what people back in the 1950s thought of it! The spoon isn't quite as old as that book page, but it sure looks like it!

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!

Slap a map on that table!

Living together with a partner means that sometimes, different tastes collide and you've got to work around it. We decided to do that by combining (industrial and shabby chic for example goes rather well together), choosing things we both like and creating different corners. We don't have much room to work with that. If we get the apartment we're hoping for (which might be decided tomorrow, so I'm crossing my fingers so hard it's nearly impossible to type), we don't really have much more room than we do now. In fact, it's about 4sqm. But the overall layout is very different.

Anyways! While the man will get his own little room for his music (he has to give up on the basement room because the apartment doesn't have one, so he's at least getting that), I'll make do with a corner for myself. We started making a little corner like that for my desk and things like that in our current apartment and used the bedroom for it, but since the new bedroom will be smaller and we're getting a bigger bed at some point, that won't work. I'll have to find a corner for myself in the living room!

To get to the point - we built a small desk for that corner. I don't have tutorial pictures or exact measurements because we just used what we found and I didn't think of photographing the process. But it went like this: We went to the hardware store to get some wood. We used a long rectangular pole and had it cut to pieces that were each 70cm long. We also took the rest of the wood back home with us to use it on the table. While looking through the cut-wood-for-cheap section, we found the perfect piece for only 2€ and took that with us as well. We still had white paint at home and I recently bought a book with old maps on ebay (it was an accident, but I knew it'd come in handy one day!), so we were all set.

The Doctor put all the pieces together, drilled holes, screwed it tight. He used the leftover wood to secure the table legs in the front and in the back to give it more stability. In the meantime, I cut out the maps that I liked and made sure they had the right proportions. I measured the piece of pole that secures the table legs in the front and then sized the map pieces accordingly. With all that done, I painted the table completely. True, I could've done that beforehand, but we don't have much room for work like that as it is and wanted to get it done quickly.

I let the paint dry overnight, laid the map pieces out in the order I wanted them to be and then started on the table the next morning. I used mod podge to secure the pieces and sealed them with it afterwards. There was one line of maps on the front pole and one on the edge of the tabletop. Now, while I did my best to make sure all the pieces had the same size, there were a few that were just a millimeter longer or shorter and it didn't look as nice as I wanted it.

And while I was restlessly strolling through the apartment, trying to think of a way to fix that, I remembered the gold paint spray we used on our balcony. I masked the desk except for one small stripe on the edge of the maps, sprayed it, let it dry and tadaa- you can hardly see where the map pieces end and it's a clean stripe now.

That's the finished project! It has a few wrinkles and you can see the wood texture through in some places, but that's what I like about it. I wanted it to be imperfect and since I'm not a perfect furniture builder, that's pretty much what I get every time I build! It was super easy and fun to build and I love it. 

Sing, Birdie!

Today was my first official university day. While there were only speeches and it's all really starting tomorrow, I was super nervous and had to calm down afterwards. I had this little bit of canvas left and was working with old book pages for another project, so I decided to make a birdie picture without really any preparation.

I first wanted a baby blue background, but I didn't have any blue colour. While looking for a substitute, I came across the gold spray I used for my map desk a while back (I'll upload that one at some point because it turned out great).

I sprayed it lightly on the canvas. I didn't want to have it all gold, but just a few sprinkles to give it some texture. When I was done with that, I drew a bird on an old book page (poems by Schiller, to be exact. I bought that at a one-world-store ages ago), cut it out, traced the outlines with black marker and added eye, beak and wings.

There was still room on the canvas so I next drew a speech bubble on another page of the book, cut it out, traced the outlines and wrote "lalala" into it. I know, super creative, but I like it. You can see the result below - it took me about 15 minutes from the initial idea to the finished "painting." I'm sure you could try something similar together with kids, too! It's easy, doesn't take up much space and looks cute!

The DIY TV mirror

There are a few little treasures in this apartment that have been here longer than me. I'm not the only builder in this house, the Doctor is pretty awesome at it as well. One of my favourites is the TV mirror that hangs on our living room wall.

It's really simple. At least so I was told. All you need it an old TV frame (you can probably find those at the dumpster or buy a cheap broken TV on ebay or something the like) and a mirror that preferably has the same size/fits into the back of the TV. If you don't have a mirror that size, you might think about cutting it if you want to make a TV mirror.

When you've got what you need, you're only one step away from completing the TV mirror. Use silicone (the kind you would use to seal your sink) to glue the mirror to the TV frame. It's a fool proof way, you just need to let it dry thoroughly. It might be ready after a few hours, but since we're talking about a mirror here and those shards bring bad luck, I'd recommend letting it sit for a day before you hang it on your wall.

As you see, it's super easy to make and looks great. Especially if you have a man in your house who's into technology. And what man isn't....

And yes, I do realize the irony in the TV visible in the TV mirror...