Frog on my blog!

After a weekend full of parties (a High Tea Party and a Venetian Ball! How Cinderella-ish is that!)

it's now back to reality. Tomorrow family from the Netherlands arrives...yay!

We are looking forward to that but unfortunately it means that you will not find me at my blog a lot in the next few days. So sorry for that! For now I will leave you with two of my frogy paintings.

For some strange reason I love painting frogs?!?!

I'll be back in a few days!

Work in progress

I don't like to show crafty things that I'm working on. What I mean by that is that I don't want others to see my ideas until I'm finished with them. Even when I was a little girl I hated it when teachers or family looked over my shoulder and tried to catch a glimpse of my creative activities.

I think it must definitely have something to do with me being a perfectionist. Good is never good enough for me when it comes to crafting.

Does this sound recognisable or is it just me being silly?

Anyway.... I decided to give you a little sneak preview this time. It's just two sketches for two customized name plaques. The theme is Australia as you can see...

I'll keep you updated on my progress.

Soooooo busy!

No, our computer still works, so does Internet, I have not been ill and I have not been on a relaxing holiday! It's just the time of the year that I'm sooooooo busy and I don't find the time to update my blog.

At some point this week I thought that it might be a good idea to ring my parents back home to insure them that everything is still alright and we're still up and running! I managed to drag myself out of bed early one of these mornings to ring them.

It was 10.30 pm in the Netherlands and not a common time for me to call them.

So the first thing my mum asked when she picked up...'Oh Monique, what a surprise, what is the good news!?!?!!!!'

(And we all know what mums wanna hear when they ask this question!!!. But unfortunately for her...)

'....Ehm, NO mum, I'm not pregnant and NO, we are not getting married... I just have a spare minute, that's it..!'

Anyway, no time to craft either. Therefor I thought I'll show you a few of the very nice Christmas decorations I bought in our shop the other day.

Simple but gorgeous!

Oh wow, look at this little skirt. I love it!
My sister bought a new sewing machine a few weeks ago. Now she is taking some sewing lessons. Looks like she is getting the hang of it because she made this cute skirt for her oldest daughter. The grey fabric is actually an old trouser from our granddad!

Love the embellishment!

Can I order one as well sis?!

Then there was light!

I bought a simple table light at IKEA and painted Jip and Janneke

(famous from Dutch children books) on it with black acrylic paint. This is the result...

And this is what it looks like with the light on!

Getting comfy on the sofa...

I noticed that crochet is actually relaxing for me. Life is busy at the moment and when I come home at night I just don't feel like getting crafty. But it's so nice to get comfy on the sofa and crochet away.

And that's what I've been doing the last couple of nights. Being me I just can't be bothered to figure out a crochet book and its (sometimes) unreadable instructions. So what I do is just experiment myself. And I'm getting there with my own designs.....

....look at the little strawberry and the cute Babushka doll!

Just a funny painting!

Little rascal!

I heard my little nephew feels really neglected by his aunty.

She posts all these pictures of her nieces on the blog, but there is non of him.

Oh no... and he is such a cute, little rascal!

This is Ties last year during a cold Dutch winter.

Cute!

Santa is coming to town...

The shape of this doll is based on the 'angel' dolls from the Tilda books.

But as you can see I gave this one my own twist and turned it into a funny, little Santa.

I even sewed him some tiny, leather boots!

It's a bugs life...

During one of our camp trips we came across this colorful
little creature.

Mon Crochet!

I think I mentioned before that I have participated a crochet workshop with a friend. And we are both literally hooked since then. Although the workshop has been a few weeks ago I didn't show any of my crochet attempts on my blog since then. I actually just experimented so far, doing the well known granny squares and some easy to make flowers.

But then I discovered the book' 100 flowers to knit and crochet' by Lesley Stanfield. Wow, very inspiring!

And now I can't wait to show you my first finished project (although I really should be in bed right now)....

...but here it is....A Mon Cherry Key Hanger!!!!

Goodnight!

The 'Silly Season' is coming!

I have been making some Christmas decorations.

Yep, the 'Silly Season' is coming and I love it!

I cut the shapes out of Fimo Clay with a bit of help from my cookie cutters.

The relief in the clay is made with stamps.

Happy Patchwork Painting

This happy little patchwork is painted on a canvas.

It was not an easy job.

I had to keep taping around the single squares to decorate them separately without ruining the others.

But I'm very pleased with the result!

We love Aprons!

I made my nieces these little Oil Cloth Aprons

(great for painting and baking by the way).

Apparently they love them and refuse to take them off ever since they arrived.

And they shouldn't I think....they look so cute!

Meet My Craft Room!

You must be wondering what I have been up to lately, as I haven't been around much! Sorry for that, but I haven't been crafting much lately. Fact is that all my spare time goes into 'The Big Spring Cleaning' at the moment.

I just finished reorganizing and cleaning my entire craft room. (Yes I have a whole room to myself...lucky me!!!)

Meet my craft room.....

Weekend trip

We have been camping this weekend. So much you can see in just two days!

Ladybugs...

Flicking trough a French magazine I spotted this idea and

I just had to make them myself!

Love them!

I think it would have looked even better if I had used bright white stones.

So guess what I will be collecting during our next camping trip....

Funky!

The day after I put the T-shirts my sister made on my blog a big box arrived at the shop.

Guess what...it contained funky iron-, and sew-on's!!! So I made a few examples for the store as I got so inspired by my sis.

Crafty sis!

It seems that I don't have any time to blog or craft at the moment! Oh no!

But my lovely sister is discovering her crafty personality at the moment. Wow and it looks amazing!

Look what she did with a couple of plain kids tees....

The first one she decorated with a girly application, some checked ribbon at the end of the sleeves and some funny ribbons attached to the little label....

The second one is a present for friends of her that just got a little girl:

Cut out of velours iron on.

This Tieshirt is for my nephew. His (Dutch) name is Ties....hehe.

And the last one is with an image of 'Janneke' from the very famous Dutch childrens books 'Jip and Janneke'.

Don't you just love IKEA!

It's exactly one year ago that we moved into our nice, little apartment in St Kilda, Melbourne. We didn't bring a lot from the Netherlands. Our furniture back then involved lots of donations from family and friends. We knew we wanted to immigrate at some point so we never bothered buying new furniture.

The bits and pieces we brought over here fitted in 30 boxes. 5 for Sander and 25 for me....hehehe!

Anyway, were do you go when you just move into a new apartment and you need new furnishings??

IKEA off course! Here we come! Oh, I remember how excited I was the first time we went there.
Well actually I went there first and Sander joined me after two hours, when my first excitement calmed down a bit.

It's a pretty good strategy actually. I could take my time to stroll around without frustrating my dear boyfriend who loves shopping so much (ahum). Carefully I thought about ways how to convince Sander we really needed that big canvas with the grass and fluffy flowers printed on it...and it was obvious that that light moss green rug finished the whole 'look', not to mention the lamps, baskets, and vases that were just made for each other!

Well, lets just say we spend six (Sander four) hours at IKEA that day. When we finally agreed on what to get we found out that IKEA does deliver goods (which we wanted), but they deliver immediately the next day. Oh no, we didn't move in another week from now!

That meant going back to IKEA in seven days.... 'Yay!', I thought 'Oh no...' Sander thought.

I spend the whole week studying the IKEA catalogue inside out.

Finally the day arrived to go again. Things went pretty smooth at IKEA. We knew what we wanted to get and we started collecting. Off course not everything was in stock but we managed to get most of the things we wanted to buy.

The next day our new furniture was delivered. Needless to say that there were a few damaged pieces. But well, we had to go back to get the other things that weren't in stock last time anyway. We managed to swap the damaged pieces at the service counter easily and all the other stock was in this third time we went there.
Whilst paying for these new items we kind of forgot about the swapped items which we managed to leave at the checkout. Obviously we found out after we got home.....WHAAAAA!!!

So to keep ourselves busy we went to the IKEA again that week for the fourth time to get the missing shelves. Luckily they kept it for us and within half an hour we were on our way home again.

Imagine how our response was when we found out that they had given us a wrong shelve!!!!

Lets just say that some proper violence was used to fix the last little cabinet......

No wonder that we have been avoiding IKEA for a whole year! But last Saturday we decided to finally get a new little shoe cabinet. And it was all good this time. Everything was in perfect shape and fitted at once! Yahoo, and I managed to get some cute fabric. I made these little bags. They can be used as storage bags. Aso a band can be attached with a button to turn it into a kids bag.