Quarter of a century

After spending about two days in our little kitchen, my result was as follows:

Left to right: Roses Cake, Vanilla Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting, S'mores and Sweet Potato Caupcakes, Sour Cream Cake (with 8 layers) and New York Cheese Cake

The Sour Cream Cake had 8 layers and was made by my lovely mother. Everything else was made by me with help from the boyfriend and we had loooots of backup in the kitchen left.

Overall, it was a really nice party. We had many a laugh and everybody died of sugar shock I think. As the evening advanced we all had Long Island Iced Tea as part of my tea party. Obviously I make pretty decent ones, because some people even drank two glasses. :)

For dinner we had pizza delivered, because I didn’t want any more standing in the kitchen. Some people even stayed over-night and we talked until 3 in the morning. When I got up after six hours of sleep, two of my guests had already done the dishes and cleaning up was really easy afterwards.

Anyway, I wanted to introduce you to the new member of the family, Corduroy‘s Action Mole!

She’s still a bit shy and doesn’t want to be photographed (that’s why she’s so blurry). Hopefully this will change in the future! But I guess she had lots of fun already yesterday, when one of my guests built her a flying carpet and her own private jet. It’s all so easy if you’re only 1 cm tall!

I hope all of you have a lovely Sunday!

Four more days

I cannot believe it’s the 26th of July already! Can you?

On Saturday, when we actually planned to go to somebody else’s birthday party, I suddenly thought of making a petticoat for my own birthday. I don’t know why but I had to make one! Actually in the one year that I own a sewing machine I haven’t had much experience sewing clothes (speak: none). I’d much rather sewn some small things, garlands, tea cosies etc.

Now I searched the internet but was a bit disappointed about what I found, so I made up a bit of my own version, but pretty close to the one you see in this image.

Sunday we spent almost the whole day doing these:

It’s a Martha Stewart Pom Pom Garland (not quite finished yet)! The Boyfriend had to seperate the layers of tissue for me and I did all the “assembly”. Now all that’s left is hang them. And from the tissue that’s left I hope to produce some cupcake toppers.

Yesterday I finally got around to realize the petticoat idea and bought some fancy tulle fabric, bias tape and a bit of jersey to round it up. This is what I have so far.

It's not finished yet, as are all other preparations... >.<

It looks pretty dreamy, right? Hopefully I can finish it tonight without having to cut much more tulle. I thought it would be more fun to produce clothes to be honest.

I wish you a pleasant Tuesday!

Love note #02


Although it has a forbidden photo of me without glasses on it, I like it.

Love note written for the Boyfriend. Needed a good picture, because it’s going to be gone soon.

Written on a piece of wood that’s covered in chalkboard paint in a frame at least 100 years old. Yes, I’ve seen the evidence of its age. We tried to restore it lovingly and hope it will survive a long time with us!

Which one do you like better?

Fuuu, my last post is more than one week ago! Did you miss me already? ;)

What have I been up to lately you ask? Well, I sewed a lot as part of my birthday preparations. There was a 20% off-weekend at my favourite fabric store because of its 10 years of history. Good enough reason for me to buy 6 times 60cms of fabric! And here’s what I made with these:

Tea cosy no. 01
My very first tea cosy! The fabric with ballerinas on it is a Japanese kokka fabric.
Cosy no. 02. This is the Boyfriend's favourite, because it fits all sizes of tea pots. It might not look that way, but it's 4cm higher than the red one!

Which one is your favourite? You can find directions here  and here and if you decide to make one, please show me yours in a comment.

On the other hand, we went to the city flea market on Saturday, where we bought yet another tea cosy from the 1920’s (the other two are presents), an art deco-style wall clock which always shows 11:55 (so it’s not too late!), and an old painting for this DIY, which I can hopefully finish before my upcoming birthday. I love design*sponge‘s DIY tutorials! If you like craft and using old stuff to make something new, go have a look.

Oh, and yeah, lately I got myself a ravelry-account, too. Add me if you like!

Polaroid collection

Woohoo, today another package arrived at our lovely home. Some ebay-sellers are really quite fast at sending out their articles. It took us almost an hour to unpack these lovelies and inspect them. Then we spent the rest of our day to test them out.

From left to right: Polaroid SX-70, 1000, Supercolor AF 3500, Supercolor 670 AF, 636 Close-Up (new are No. 1, 2 &3)

We were thrilled to discover that all of them are in perfect working condition, although the SX-70 had once a meeting with some kind of floor. You can feel that the SX-70 is a real SLR-camera, because the lens focuses when you press the shutter button lightly and it makes that clack-clack sound upon taking a picture.
Here’s one of the first shots with an PX 70 Color Shade film:

The little Pterodactyl and me. Look how awesomely the SX-70 focuses on just the fingers and the plastic figure. Also: I have new glasses.

The Polaroid 1000 and 3500 already came with the flash, we just needed to insert 4 AA-batteries and they were working, too.
The autofocus of the 3500 works perfectly well, too. But unfortunately you cannot see what it focuses on and makes kind of unforeseeable pictures.

That's what I meant by unpredictable: The boyfriend wanted to take a photo of the weed, not the balustrade.

Anyway, I guess we will have lots of fun with these new cameras, especially because all the “new” ones use SX-70 film. ♥

Finally~

Yes, finally my Fuji Instax 50s arrived! It already arrived yesterday, but I didn’t have time to open the package. And don’t forget I had to pay customs. Now it’s Friday, it’s the weekend and I have all the time in the world now, just my Instax and me. :D

See the first snapshot I took:

It’s a little Pterodactyl that was included in the box the camera came in as a little gift indicated as “Rawrrrrr”. Unfortunately I forgot to apply the close-up lense, otherwise it would’ve looked a bit cuter. I remember these plastic toys from my childhood, and I loved dinosaur plastic toys! What better way to make it look angry than the moment it starts flying from a mountain of sweets? ;)

Taking the photo was a bit irritating at first, I got used to these 30 year old Polaroid cameras by now, where you have to wait for at least 4 minutes until you can see a result. Plus, it was all-white at first and I got a bit confused if I did something wrong. Of course I didn’t read the manual…

Anyway, I guess I will have lots of fun with this cute-y camera!

Party inspiration

At the moment I’m planning a tea party for my birthday.

So after I had a walk today together with my mother and our dog I went through some magazines and found this beautiful glass dome I so want to buy right now. Of course there’s only the source for the left one, not the right I fell in love with.

20110701-102150.jpg

Unbelievable there’s stuff like this in a mag bonus concerning balconies. ;)

Btw, happy Halfyversary, darling!