Japanese shirt

I love those Japanese pattern books. I got one as a present for Christmas in 2010, and finally, last month I found the courage to make a shirt from it ;) It was fine for me to work with but hey, I studied Chinese, though Japanese and Chinese are hugely different, It makes all the difference in the world if you can make up the characters for back/front left/right up/down etcetera. This made it easier for me to work with these patterns.

I really like the simplicity of those clothes in the books, though I often find that there cut is quite "Asian" or "Japanese". With that I mean, wide, or square, or however you want to describe it. Some of you will probably know what I mean.

Anyways, for Christmas I also received some fabric, buttons and ribbons so I decided to use them for this project. The colour of the fabric is not something I'd have picked myself, but it looks fine on my 2-years-old.




Initially I wanted to make the shirt using Elephant-buttons, since the eldest adores elephants.


But along the way I decided that these buttons look a lot better with the flowery ribbon. These are buttons that come of from a pair of H&M pants. My friend bought a pair of pants for her son and replaced the girly buttons, she handed them to me. Yay!


I decided to sew in a small ribbon in the neckline, I think it gives it a more polished look.


ofcourse it needed a robot... everyting needs a robot <3




tadaam... I'm not quite the neat seemstress that I'd like to be, but I'm learning ;) (neither am I a great photographer or good with photography software... should train myself in that a little more.)


And here you can probably see best what I mean with the square boxy look. Though the girl loves it and didn't want to take it off.

Home improvement -- part two

A while ago (a long while :') ) I've blogged about home improvement and how I wanted to change some things in my house. Ideally I would like 2 huge pretty bookcases, but hey, since they don't come for free, I've tried to move furniture around to create more space in our living room.

Before our table was in our living room, we've now moved it to the kitchen, the good thing is, not only do the girls have a play corner now, I also have a desk! Yay! No more putting away my sewing machine every time, no more sitting on the coach studying. I love it! The new lay-out feels better, though it needs tweaking and it needs some more posters or something on the wall.

Don't mind the Christmas-tree in these pictures, the pictures were taken last month, our tree is long gone by now ;)







As you can see our living room is not that big, but it's comfortable and homey and I like the beams. It has a nice feel to it.

Another birthday

Oh my... less then two weeks left before my baby is turning one. One! a whole year has passed but it seems to have been only a few months or so. Time flies.

She will be handing these out to her "friends" at our babysitter, I'm not in a mood for making these myself at the moment (need to have a major operation, my head is exploding with stuff to think about...), look at how cute they are!



in there tummies they hold a small box of m&m like candies. For my hyper-allergic one year old there will be a small box of strawberry pieces (Hema <3 )
Along with it some stickers and play-books for some good fun. I hope they'll enjoy.

I'll be celebrating my own birthday as well in 10 days, I'm hoping my boyfriend will get me something from this website PSikhouvanje (meaning: PS: I love you), look at what a great things they sell! <3











and sooo much more that makes me want to spend every dime I have haha. As you can see I'm a real sucker for stationary and paperworks. I just love how having a cute notepad to write down your scribbles can make you smile.

Food Waste Friday...

Okay, so I opened my fridge this morning, in order to see what I wasted this week, to discover a disgusting smell... alright... It's definately not going to be nothing that needs to be thrown out.

Turns out I totally wasted these things that once were fine, but due to my lack of knowing what's in my fridge, they've gone bad.

* a small piece of smoked chicken (could've been perfect in a salad or on a sandwich or something, why why? )
* a chicken breast. Again, why... why?? Would've been perfectly okay to use in quick a Thai-style curry, could've served 2 + 2 children...
* 3 small leeks.

So, I've wasted a lot. ARGH!
Where's the learning curve? I'm picking it up again, since we are quite tight on a budget, these things shouldn't be happening, why do they still happen? I guess I should plan my grocery-shopping a little more. Thoroughly think about what needs to be bought and what are luxuries that aren't necessary.

Well... New week, new chances, this week I'll also try to not spend as much as I did last week on grocery shopping (and nothing on take-away for that matter. Sigh.)

Midwifery training.

I took some tests today, and all went well, very well actually. So I'm quite happy with that. This trimester we've been studying everything around birth, going into labour, catching a baby, doing a neonatal research and everything. Extremely interessting, very cool to see the stuff you learn in school during your training period in a midwifery-practice.

As I'm updating this concept-message, my results came back. I'm doing really good so far, so yay me!

Anyways, wanted to show you some pictures to give you a feel of what we're doing in training here in the Netherlands.






This one makes me laugh :)


studying anatomy


This is what I'd bring with me if I'm called for labour. An obstetrics set, an oxygen set, and of course my visits bag.



A sneak-peek of the contents of both the oxygen set and obstetrics set.

Midwifery is a 4 year training program (in my case) at Rotterdam University. In those 4 years you'll be spending a great deal of time in different local midwifery practices to become experienced and to train on the job.
In order to graduate, you must've caught at least 60 babies (meaning you guided them out of the birth canal), you must've performed at least 300 follow-up appointments and a whole range of different things like examining the neonate and actively take part in a breech birth. Quite thorough!

Doll's bed and Girl's rooms

So I've been up to loads of things in the meantime, first off, our beloved Dolls have a bed to sleep in! Yay dolls! <3

I made it from an Ikea nightstand; Just drew a nice shape on one side and decided on how high it should be on the other side, then used my electric saw to cut and there you have it...



very little effort, very nice look. I'm still undecided on whether or not I should give it a colour or a stain, but I quite like the wood-look as it is also.

I made a matras to go on top of it so baby could sleep nicely. Next on the to-do list is to make some proper bedding. Preferably in the same style as my girl's bedsheets.



Talking about bedsheets... don't you just love how bedding can make all the difference in the world to a room? It can brighten up a room, or make it more romantic and girly, just by changing the style of the sheets. I love it!
I made my girl these sheets, they were made from an old double sized undersheet from our bed. Used thoroughly (and washed properly ofcourse), but the usage makes the sheets really really soft and comfy.
The fabric used comes from http://www.vanmarieke.nl and was a gift by my boyfriend. I finished it by using pink fabric on the sides to give it a little bit extra.



Fabric detail:



And on her bed. It looks so cute and it's her favourite :D which makes me smile ofcourse everytime she asks for it.


I've been searching for a certain 'style' in both my babygirls' rooms and at the moment, I'm quite happy with the results. Let me show you their rooms!











That's my big girl's room. The flowers by her bedhead are now in blue and pink, she also has a cute nightlamp since last week. I'm happy with her room, it feels cosy.

I'll show you my other's girls room what it was like when it was a nursery, but it has changed already haha so I'll snap some new pictures soon!





















I don't think I'll ever get tired of decorating <3

It's been quite a while

Since my last time blogging... My new career has taken up so much time, not leaving me much room for the updates. But also, computers have been dying on me like crazy! I don't know how I do it but I´ve managed to go thru three laptops in the past few months. Now my father-in-law has borrowed me his eee-pc, I'm still adjusting to the tiny typepad and tiny well everything...

However, a lot has happened in the mean time! I'll be making a few posts to keep things separated, as a new years resolution I thought it'd be nice to blog some more, don't know if I'll be able to do so though.

Oh yes! And food waste fridays... oh my... I have been wasting so much stuff, and I've been feeling so guilty about it then... I really should get more of a structure in our eating habbits, but we're not really the structured type of family I guess. I am planning on being more strict with that too though.

In the meanwhile, look at this! Isn't it cute? It's a felt-embroidered picture-album.