garden tools

On Friday it was suddenly spring in Heidelberg. There was a big rain shower and when I walked out of my office at 3 in the afternoon everything was shiny, green, full of flowers and warm. I've never seen spring arrive so suddenly. Since then it has been warm and sunny and on Sunday we spent all afternoon on the balcony. With bare feet!

Last week's contest on spoonflower had the theme garden tools. When we stay at my parents-in-law's house, we sleep in the garden room full of books about gardening, which is where I got the inspiration for these garden tools. 

I tried a few different designs with different colours. Which do you like better?

hot water bottle cover

Its almost almost time for no more hot water bottles. So before its too late, here's my new hot water bottle cover. I bought a hot water bottle years ago with a soft red cover. Over the years the polyester covering bothered me more and more so I decided to knit a new cover. I used this pattern I found on ravelry. I had some blue wool from an unfortunate glove adventure as well as some red white and grey from other projects.

Sew it together, fill it with hot water and life is much better.

Jane Austen chairs

Did you notice the new header? I recently painted these chairs and thought they would look nice here. They were done for a contest on spoonflower, the topic is "living in a Jane Austen novel". They made beautiful chairs in those days! And the nice thing about the computer is that its easy to reupholster a chair just by changing the colour of the fabric. I painted four chairs in different colours but decided the whole design looks better in one colour.

You can see the other designs from the contest and vote for your favourite until tomorrow! 

update: this fabric is now for sale here.

some little boxes

Last week I finally had an idea for what to make with some wrapping paper I bought a long time ago that has been sitting on my desk. Little boxes! I love little boxes. These were constructed with thick paper, covered with the forget-me-not wrapping paper and stabilised with thick matting board.

I put eyelets in and added a little ribbon as a pull.

the finished box

which is a drawer. I got a bit lazy after making two and noticed that two cadbury tin boxes I have fit perfectly. The outside bit of the drawers I made out of a box we got as a gift box for Christmas. I only needed to turn the lid into a side, add some prop-ups to hold up the middle bit and glue some sides down.

I've noticed while writing that explaining the process isn't as easy as just doing it! So hope at least the pictures inspire you to make one too. I have one of those wooden small set of drawers and wanted to get another, but now didn't have to buy one, plus its a lot nicer!

painted easter eggs

Its finally officially spring, so time to take down the paper snowflakes and hang up the easter eggs, even though there is still snow on the roof.

 Martin's grandmother painted these beautiful eggs. This is three views of the same egg. Don't you love the little bear family?

This week's spoonflower contest is painted eggs. I took a picture of each egg and arranged them into a scattered repeating design to print on cloth.

You can see all the other entries and vote in the contest here if you want :)

more macarons

A few weeks ago I wrote about the macarons I tried from the french bakery around the corner. They were so good that I wanted to make some myself. I used this recipe, and like it promises, if you follow the recipe exactly it will work! (Although I have to add that I eye-balled 36 grams, as my scale isn't digital, so it might have been 38 or 39 grams, but that should be encouraging rather than discouraging, if you want to try the recipe. Also, it only made half the amount of macarons, for some reason.)

I didn't add any food-colouring, which I will do next time. It was a lot of work, but not too hard. Basically its very important to sieve and sieve until the almonds are very fine. I put them in the blender, sieved, blended, sieved, and in the end threw away about 2 tablespoons that I couldn't get fine enough. Another helpful tip is to draw circles on the baking paper sheet to make it easier to make each macaron the same size.

For the filling I made a ganache and tried two flavours, using capuccino chocolate and white chocolate (1 part chocolate to 1 part cream, heat the cream, add the chocolate and stir until melted, let cool and then whip) :

I still have a few in the fridge, so if you want to try one, come for coffee!

inkscape snowflake tutorial

A few months ago I created a snowflake design for a contest on spoonflower. I had lots of fun making the snowflakes with inkscape. Here's a tutorial for how to do it. Three important shortcuts: Ctrl+L simplifies the path, Ctrl+D duplicates a selected object, Ctrl+G groups selected objects.

1. draw a six-sided polygon with the "create stars and polygons" tool.
2. draw three lines and group them, this will be a guide for making the snowflake. (you can delete the polygon now if you want)
3. with the pencil tool draw a shape, any shape works! experiment with the effect of different shapes.

4. the shape will be quite rough, so clean up the lines by clicking Ctrl+L a number of times until the line is smooth.
5. duplicate (Ctrl+D) and mirror the object (V and H for vertical and horizontal mirroring), using the lines as a guide.
6. group (Ctrl+G) the two objects.


7. duplicate this object, mirror again,
8. and place it opposite, again using the lines as a guide.
9. now fill the shape with colour and delete the black outline. Group again



10. now comes the fun bit: duplicate and rotate (it should rotate around the centre, so no need to move it). Do this twice, using the lines as a guide. Delete the guide lines and your snowflake is done!
11. you can play around with opacity to get different effects.



You can use the same shape starting out in a different position to make another snowflake, or draw another shape. Try different levels of opacity and different sizes and colours. This is what I came up with, a repeating pattern for printing on cloth:

ps. here's a similar tutorial that inspired me by Byteweiser

Update: This pattern is now available for sale on gift wrap, wallpaper and fabric in my shop!