London

Yesterday I went to London and met up with Nancy. We saw so many nice things, I don't know where to start or what to show. I've put all pictures on Flickr, so anyone interested in all details of my London trip can see them there. I'll post my favorite photos

This little cake carrying elph

I love these santas

Christmas decorations

Just look at the candy

At Fortnum & Mason they had the best Windowdisplay. Unfortunatly there is some glare on them, but in all the windows they had displayed the song "the Twelve days of Christmas".

In Liberty I fell in love with the wallpaper they used where they have the cards

I splurged on Liberty fabrics. Four pieces of 30cm (12") each. That was the smallest they allowed.

I hope you enjoyed my London trip with me.

Nice friend

Today Nancy from Belgium came to visit me. We know each other from way back when we were both in University and were able to stay in Leeds for 9 months, thanks to the Erasmus program which enables students to do parts of their studies in another European country. That is where I fell in love with afternoon teas. Nancy makes these beautiful jewellery

and I was so lucky to receive this gorgeous necklace. I love it soooooooooooo much. Thank you Nancy!

She's in the London area for 10 days, so tomorrow we're meeting up again to see bits of london. Of course I'll keep you posted on what we'll see tomorrow.

tagged

I was tagged by wonderful Marnie to name 5 facts about myself, some random, some weird. I'll let you chose whether you find them random or weird.



i - my brother once said "there isn't anything Shin doesn't collect". It's true, there are a lot of things I like having and I start a collection. Only after a little bit I start thinking what to do with it all and stop collecting more. Yet I don't throw them out, so I have a lot of little collection of everything. The only collection I never tire of is my bookcollection, hence the picture, which is really only a very small part of my bookcollection.

ii - One day when the kids are all grown, I want to try Leonardo's sleeping rhythm, which I think was sleeping for 20 minutes, stay awake 4 hours, all day long, every day. You can get a lot done with all those extra hours of awakeness.

iii - I'm the exception to the rule, that a bi- or multilingual person is said to be able to pick up additional languages more easily than others. Even though my Dutch, English are in the range of very good an very fluent and my Korean is quite reasonable (this is what you get with Korean parents, who move to the Netherlands when you're one and your parents get by by using English), I've never managed to master any other language, even though they (German, French, old Greek and Latin) were offered to me when I was younger.

iv - I like having a skull in the living room. Not a real one, but one for drawing purposes. I've had a few weird looks from people from this unless it's near Halloween time. Funnily enough though children seem to think it cool regardless the time of year.

v - One day A Mermaid's Tale popped in my head to use as my website's name. I could hardly sleep that night, wondering whether it was still available as a website's name or not. The funny thing is that I don't even like swimming. So one day I'll write a book about a mermaid who can't swim. :)

I'm supposed to tag 5 new, but I'm not so good at that, partly because on pure mathmatics, chains would cover everybody with a blog within no time at all. So instead I'll give one two three four five of my favorite bloglinks

Saint Nic

Last year I posted a picture about how the Dutch celebrate Saint Nic. He always arrives in the country around this time of year from Spain by steamboat and the kids are allowed to put their shoe in front of the fireplace and they get something. Anything ranging from chocolate letters (their first initial) to pepernoten. Our oldest two are in the age that they loooooooooooooove the celebration. So tonight was the first time they were allowed to put their shoe in front of the fireplace. Tomorrow they will find their initial in chocolate and a book. These are the drawings they made for Saint Nic this year.


My daughter of seven


My son of five (his skills have improved so much over the last year, both of them make me so proud)

The pictures are a bit crumpled because the youngest of almost 18 months walked away with them (he makes me so proud too!)

Oh and I managed to place my designs on Etsy

... and another

I didn't think I'f finish this one tonight, but I did. So here is my third. I'm trying to get them in my etsy shop (which is empty right now) for tomorrow.

Another card

Another Christmas design which I posted in the Moo group

Holiday card

It's always so nice to brows around and see someone has read your blog. And before I forget, dear Constance and SomePinkFlowers, I haven't forgotten about these, but since I never managed to make them in time for Halloween, I thought you wouldn't mind if they got delayed a bit. I'm trying to get all the Christmassy things out on time for Christmas.


Like my intention to participate in this competition, which I finally did with this card. I'm making a few more and I'll post them on etsy. It might be a bit on the late side, but better late than never.

Busy times

Main priority in my life is to keep everybody in our family happy. The three kidlings come first. Then comes the basic necessities of keeping a household going like cooking (which I actually enjoy a lot) making sure everybody can wear clean clothes etc. etc. After that I have time left to do anything creative. Right now my list of todo things is getting big. I think I'm no different than many of you when Christmas time is nearing. Of course I had to sign up for this

I'm really looking forward to this and I have a few ideas roaming my head. We'll see what they end up like.

My dear SIL got her PhD yesterday and I was working all last week on three collages. A triptych of her two daughters and her mother who passed away some time ago. I managed to take a glimpse of a corner of one of the collages, but then was so busy that I had them all wrapped up before I could take a picture of the finished three frames.

And after not having blogged a while, it makes me want to write about a lot of things. I'll pick just a few, because I still have so many things to do. One is that sweet Elsa posted one of my personal favorites as well. Then she also mentioned she used to have a Holly Hobby lunchbox. I still have mine, which I actually never used because when I grew up in the Netherlands, you'd get an hour to get back home and have lunch there, so a lunchbox was never needed. But I loved it and used it to carry all kinds of things in around. I loved Constance's post here.

fluffy goodness

Today I received some wonderful fluffy goodness, Felicia gave out on the halloween party. It is wonderful and claimed by my son, who started playing with it immediatly. He asked if he could take it with him to school. Now that is a compliment. Thank you Felicia, we're enjoying your vampire rabbit a lot.



I also wanted to share some autumn goodness. Everybody seemed to be drawn to this tree, as was I, and I made a Hockneyish collage.

Calendar

I always used to use my diary for any appointments, but lately I've found that I don't look at it often enough to remind me of the things I need to do. So I hope a Calendar permanently in sight will help me keep on track better. I've decided to go for one of those make your own. I ended up with the one Apple makes. It is the only one I could find that makes the picture go all the way to the end without a border. I am very happy with it and especially like how the cover turned this picture.

Initially I thought it needed some cropping, but I don't like cropping pictures and hardly ever do. By placing it on the template, it balanced the whole picture out and it doesn't need any cropping. Things like this make me happy

Oh, and I also like the spirals on top (this is just the preview, I still need to recieve the actual item).

crafts

First of all THANKS to all who came over and talked to me during the party. I had a wonderful time and hope there will be one again next year hosted by the wonderful Constance, Gilian and Lisa.

Book week has closed, so I'm late with this entry. Still I wanted to post it. I have quite a few Japanese craftbooks, and they seem to be much discussed already by other wonderful bloggers. I have the advantage of having a husband who studied Japanese and can read proficiently. I don't ask him to translate the instructions. I hardly ever follow instructions anyway. But he is very handy to have next to me when I want to order from a Japanese site, even though Amazon.co.jp has most of it's site in English too. This one I haven't seen yet (I'm sure it's out there) is what seems to be more a magazine than book.


It has lots of yummy images

Wouldn't you want to have a studio like this


great ideas for one of these, which I bought when we were still in the US here


I love this dancing pair

Another country with lovely craftbooks, especially crossstitch is France

I fell in love with the cover of this book


a little ladybug alphabet


with butterflies

And this one has pretty little motifs



with koi fish


and pretty monograms, which I tried to make for a second sail for a gift. This was just before we went to the Netherlands, but I had to abort this second sail and settle for a single sail ship, because I ran out of time