New Sewing FO

 crafts, Home and Garden  No Responses »
Feb 172013
 

See? I kan haz sewing FOs!  This is my new red wool jumper (jumper in the American meaning of the word, not the British meaning).  I bought the fabric in California 3 or 4 years ago.  I cut out the pieces about a year ago.  It just sat in a pile for a very long time before I decided it was really time to finish it.  It’s extremely simple and comfortable.  I’m sure I’ll wear it a lot.

Of course I didn’t just make it how the pattern said to do.  Oh no.  You see, the pattern didn’t call for any lining, just facings on the inside.   I didn’t think this heavy wool would feel nice this way, nor did I think it would drape as nicely without lining.  So I went out and bought some stretch lining and figured out how to put it in.  Here’s a photo of the inside:

I’m really happy how this worked out.  It feels great.  DB took the first photo last night before we went out to dinner.  It looks a little schoolmarmish for a dinner out, but hey, I AM schoolmarmish so that’s what you get.  Maybe the red makes it a little sassier.

By the way, I took a photo of my elbow this morning.  Thursday afternoon in Amsterdam I slipped on ice and fell hard on my right hip and elbow.  The hip is fine, but the elbow is bruised and sore.

This morning at the gym I really noticed that my upper arm is sore from this fall.  Otherwise, as long as I don’t touch it, it’s feeling pretty ok.  The weather has warmed up and all traces of ice and snow are gone from Haarlem and probably also from Amsterdam.  It’s starting to smell like Spring outside.  My rose bushes are putting out new green shoots.  Almost time to get the gardening gloves out!

New Look!

 Home and Garden  1 Response »
Jan 222013
 

Remember a week ago I showed you our house under construction?  It’s finished!  We got home from Berlin Monday night to find that our handyman had finished blocking up an old doorway and finished the painting.  Here are the before and after photos:

Actually, the stairs were brown, like this.  In the above photo there’s already a base coat on them.

And now?  Ta Da! The new entryway!

Isn’t that so much better?  We had all the doors in the house painted white and the stairs to the attic also painted white.  Everything looks so fresh and new now.  It’s fantastic.  He did a great job.  After 4 years living here I finally feel like it’s “ours”.  I guess for everyone that feeling of “home” takes varying amounts of time to set in.  In our previous home in Amsterdam that feeling was pretty quick, probably because it was a new renovation and we were the first to live there.  All the colors and the layout was our choice.  I feel like it’s taken longer to put our own stamp on this house.  There are still a lot of remnants of previous owners (the kitchen, the crazy wiring in the attic) but it really feels like ours now.  And now I just need to keep getting enough teaching work to be able to hold onto it.

Upgrading

 Home and Garden  No Responses »
Jan 112013
 

We’re kind of camping out in our house.  We have hired a guy to paint and to fix a wall – all things that we should have done before we moved in 4 years ago, but didn’t have time to do.  Do you know what it’s like to have this kind of work done, on 3 levels of your house, while you are living there?  Like camping.

There’s dust EVERYWHERE.  Coats and shoes have taken over the dining area.  We couldn’t go to bed until very late Thursday night because the primer coat on the stairs wasn’t dry yet.

See that strange thing sticking out of the wall on the left?  That’s the back side of a bookcase.  The front side of this bookcase is in the living room.  Who builds a bookcase through a wall?  Someone stupid that’s for sure.  We’re having it removed and the wall plastered up and painted.

Everything should be finished in another week.  I’ll post an “after” photo.  It will be lovely.

Sock WIP

 Home and Garden, Knitting Related, Weather  No Responses »
Jan 062013
 

I’m up to the heel turn on my first Mandy’s Heart sock.  It’s just flying off the needles!  It probably helps that I’ve knit this stitch pattern so much now that I could do it in my sleep.

I made the gusset increases in the ribby pattern.

I think these are going to be really lovely and fit nicely too.  More WIP photos to come soon!

On the home front, we took down Christmas decorations and put the tree back outside.  It was time.  The tree was starting to look a little bit dry (we hadn’t given it any water since bringing it inside).  The poor thing thought it was summer and has started to put out pine cones.  Having said that, it probably would have been the same even if we hadn’t brought it inside for 3 weeks.  It’s been so unseasonably warm here that my roses are all putting out buds and the birds are acting like they’ll be making nests soon.  It’s not good.  We’ll probably get a blast of cold in February, all the new growth will die, and plants and animals will not grow well in the spring and summer.  At this rate I’ll have to quit knitting worsted weight sweaters altogether and stick to lace.

Fishy Fishy

 crafts, Home and Garden  1 Response »
Dec 302012
 

Welcome to my downstairs WC, otherwise known as the toilet.  If you are American, “bathroom” with only a toilet and 4 walls.  A week ago it had 4 white walls and black and white tiles.  Now it’s full of fish and shells and sand and grasses.

This little tiny room really needs to be completely renovated.  It needs to be taken back to bare bricks, re-plumbed and rewired.  But we don’t have money for that so I really wanted to do something to cheer it up a bit and make it at least fun.  A fun toilet?  Yes, why not.

I started by painting the wall behind the toilet itself, and around the doorway, and the ceiling, white.  The walls are all papered, but I just painted over the wallpaper.

Then I went on to the fun part.  I first painted gold for sand.  Then I painted a mixture of gold/silver below that for rock.  After that I painted the blue.  It’s a shining silvery blue in color “ocean”.  I then painted some darker blue streaks through it, which looked really bad, so I painted some more “ocean” over that and it looked better.

Then came the trip to the beach to gather sand, shells and grass.

I mixed the sand with paverpol and patted it on by hand.

I had earlier in the week printed out images of tropical fish and cut out each one.  I glued them on, also with paverpol.

I glued some grasses in the corner as kind of an experiment.  I wasn’t sure they would stick.  That paverpol is pretty amazing stuff!  I was even able to glue down the sea shells with it!  It dries clear too.  And this is the final result!

I’m really happy with the final result.  I’ve never done anything like this before so it was all just a big experiment.  At least we’ll have something to look at while doing our business.  Hopefully one day we’ll have money to redo it properly, but until then this will be fine.  DB wants to somehow rig in sound so that when you open the door you’ll hear whale calls.  If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know.

Merry Christmas Dinner

 food, Haarlem, Home and Garden, Traditions  No Responses »
Dec 262012
 

Yesterday, Christmas day, we had 10 friends over for dinner.  It’s not often we have people over. I don’t know why.  I guess everyone seems so busy and most of our friends live in Amsterdam (and we in Haarlem).  Sorry excuses I know!  After having such a good time yesterday I think we really need to do this more often!

I started Monday with Christmas cookies.  They were simple flour/sugar/butter cookies, decorated with red marzipan, white cream cheese frosting and green colored butter frosting.

P & K brought the first course for dinner – bright red cold soup!  It was delicious.

For the main course we had cheese fondue, raclette, beef stew, and a couple of salads.  I think everyone liked the food.  It’s not your traditional Christmas dinner, but I thought it would be a fun change.

Here’s a sweet photo of Z. and M. decorating one of the cakes we had for dessert.

Here’s to friends and special dinners.  Let’s do it again soon!

Warm at Last

 Home and Garden  1 Response »
Oct 312012
 

We’ve lived in this house for 4 years now.  This will be the first winter that it will be warm and cozy in our living room.  Oh oh oh why didn’t we do this 4 years ago?

Here’s a before photo, Monday morning, looking out of the living room window to the front of the house.  See that radiator?  Who in their right mind thought that that thing was big enough to heat the living room in winter?  Who even thought that having such a small radiator was the least bit efficient?

Now here’s the NEW radiator.  Now THAT’s a RADIATOR!!

It took 2 workmen half a day to make the changeover to the new radiator.  There is actually a crawl space under the floor so they could get under there without destroying anything.  Isn’t is beautiful?

We also bought a new thermostat that is wireless.  The receiver sits next to the boiler in the attic.  The thermostat is a small white box you can carry with you all over the house.  That way, the room you are spending time in is the right temperature.  Our house is 3 stories tall.  Heat rises, so normally the 3rd level is warmer than the ground floor.  If I plan to spend several hours in the office at the top of the house, I take the thermostat with me and that room is the perfect temperature, while the ground floor is several degrees cooler.  No point heating a room you aren’t using!  I tested this out yesterday when I spent most of my day upstairs.  It worked perfectly.

The thermostat is also on a timer which DB programmed Monday night.  It automatically drops the temps at 10pm and starts to heat the house again at 6:30am.  Normally it’s at a low temp during working hours and starts to heat the house again around 5pm when we should be heading home.  Last night I taught a class in Amsterdam.  When I got home I walked in the door and immediately felt the difference a new radiator makes.  It was comfortable in the house.  Not too cold, not too warm.  I felt like Goldie Locks.

Why didn’t we do this before?  Don’t ask.  I don’t know.  Laziness?  Stubbornness?  We’re just plain slow to make changes?  I think that’s the biggest part of it.  But now we have a fantastic fireplace and an efficient heating system.  Bring on winter!

Grey and Blue

 Haarlem, Health, Home and Garden  1 Response »
Oct 142012
 

This is a photo with some blue in the sky.  It was taken only minutes after this other photo….

…. where the sky and the water were nothing but grey.  Our days have been very grey lately.  But, this being the Netherlands, people still get out in the grey and get on with their lives, like those sailing in the above photo.  DB went out running this morning in the rain.  He couldn’t be bothered to wait until the rain stopped.  We knew it would stop because we are keen users of www.buienradar.com.

I waited until the rain stopped, around 11:45, then I headed out to the nearby polder for a little run.  My intention was to run.  It turned into a walk.  I thought that the big muscle in my left butt cheek had healed (from being pulled back in June) but yesterday in yoga class I got a big cramp in that muscle and now it’s really painful again.  Sheesh.  It feels like my body is conspiring against me and running.  And I was doing so well earlier this year!

Anyway, it was nice to be outside and get some fresh air.  I timed it just right and missed the rain completely.

When I got home I took a photo of the last of the roses for this year.  My poor roses really struggle to bloom and not die from mould.  Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to them.  Maybe I need to put more chemicals on them to keep the mould at bay.  I’ll try to be a better gardener next year.  Until then, bye bye roses and flowers and leaves on the trees.  Winter is coming!

Neighbors

 Haarlem, Home and Garden  No Responses »
Sep 022012
 

Yesterday afternoon I convinced DB to get up off the couch and go for a walk.  We’d been hanging out at home all day, sitting in the (suddenly Autumn) sun, sitting on the couch.  I had to get up and move!

I took my camera and we walked down the street to the sloot that takes off from the Spaarne.  I knew that the black swans are there most of the time.  I was lucky and there they were.

There are three of them that live in this area.  There is another pair that used to also hang around this part of Haarlem, but they’ve moved off to somewhere else – I think along the Spaarne itself.

Just to throw in another photo, here’s the little pumpkin I’ve been growing in the front of the house.

I can’t believe I spent 10 euros on this plant!  Of course it held the promise of many more pumpkins.  There were lots of flowers on it in early July.  But the flowers fell off and the only thing left was this one pumpkin.

Yesterday I picked him.  It hadn’t changed in size in a few weeks and the plant itself was starting to die off.  I was also afraid that someone would take it out of the garden in the middle of the night.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Earlier this year someone took a strawberry plant, which was in a pot and had lots of fruit on it, out of the garden in the middle of the night.  A few years ago someone took a large flowering plant out of the ground!  And this is a good neighborhood.  It’s just a busy neighborhood  with lots of people biking past.

Anyway, he will become soup.

Summer is over.  The blackberries are finished and now the pumpkin is picked.  Almost time to get the winter sweaters out again!

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