irresisteballs

Japanese Temari balls by Suzik look fab in your Christmas tree, or even better: in the snow-covered branches I saw in my garden today!

DIY - tangerine lights

Holland turned into a winter fairy tale yesterday. This is a road behind my house....
For the lovely lights you only need some tangerines, a knife, some sunflower oil and matches. Tangerines have their very own wick, you don't need any tealights, the oil will do!
If you are interested to make them yourself I could post a little tutorial tomorrow or the day after, just let me know...
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Sunday - afternoon: TANGERINE TUTORIAL!
Well, thank you all for your sweet reactions! To challenge myself I just tried to draw a 'sketch tutorial' for you in stead of taking pictures. Hope it's clear enough like this?


Cut the peel around with a sharp knife.



Remove the peel from the fruit carefully with one finger, watch out that the peel doesn’t break. Now you have a bottom and a top.


Tangerines have one part with a natural wick in the middle. Pour sunflower oil over and around this wick.


Cut a chimney hole out of the other part (which is the part without wick).




Please take safety precautions when your tangerines are lit, the garden is the best place for them. I did use them sometimes at Christmas dinners and put one tangerine lantern on every plate on the table...so fairylike!
Oh yeah, not to forget: these are the kind of crafts I learned from my mother back in the seventies! Thanks mum!

getting in the christmas mood with

Joel Henriques and Happy Doodle Land

Orla Kiely

Pingvina and Xmoonbloom

DIY- danish paper stars

Watch out: once you have learned to make these Danish (or German or Moravian) paper stars, folding them is highly addictive. Since I have to work a lot - I am in the busiest month of the year - I had to put myself on a paper star diet!

Folding them is hard to learn. And this is an understatement. It took me some weeks, surfing the net for tutorials, trying again and again. Maybe I miss an important origami gene?
Next to a lot of paper strips and the perseverance of a pitbull dog, several You Tube tuts and this website helped me a lot.

winter-pop-up-shop in my village

Sorry for all you people living abroad, but there is finally something blog-worthy going on in my rather sleepy village, so here is some regional news...
It is about 3 sisters in a lovely - yet empty - new built house in Bussum. For years they have collected the best furniture and accessoires from the thrift shops, designed lovely (baby)T-shirts, crafted toys and cushions, made jam in beautiful jars etc. And now they are having this wonderful wintersale in the empty building. Everything they show is for sale, even the house is!

The weather is cold and sunny and the pop-up shop is open today so take your bikes for a little winter shopping tour! (landstraat 223)

The flat (waterproof) wall-vases are designed by Carolien Brusse and the terracotta lampshades are sold (to me!).

DIY- free downloadable paper trees!

Before you start downloading...I would like to show you this.
This wonderful little winter give-away (see cover below) comes with the new fab December issue of our Dutch Interior Magazine 101 - Woonideeën.


A booklet full of gorgeous, easy DIY projects from dutch designers, creaters and crafters. If you live in Holland or Belgium: Don't miss it!!

And these are the little paper trees I designed for this 101-craftbooklet and that I designed - tadaaaaa... - for you! Here is my free downloadable link to the prints with easy instructions. Download the English version.

It's my early Christmas present for you. Hope you enjoy it!

children - where are you now?

My products are my paper children. And like other grown up children, they tend to leave home and go on long trips. And like every other worried mum I don't want to loose track, so I google them every once in a while.
It fills me with pride to find photo's of them taken by their new friends in Sweden, Germany, in the UK, Japan or in the US... They are obviously well taken care of and they feel at home!
From above left: Sing angels in Sweden staying at the blog of Emelie and Kicki from Havtorn, two pictures at Anneli's 'house' called Cosas in Sweden and one photo at Sabine's place called La Mesa, in Germany!
To be continued...