Birds Bring Spring

A fun little experiment gave some lovely results. Yesterday I burned some copper scrap wire to remove a plastic protection layer and give it a rustic vibe. They have these funny wiggly shapes as they were tests from our course from 2 years ago where we had to exercise making sharp hooks :)
After that the entire mass got cleaned in the tumbler.

After a few hours of figuring out these adorable earrings were the result.

The flowers and leaves are very fine mother of pearl. The eggs are pearls and finally vintage plastic birdies.These pretties are available at StaroftheEast.

They are one of a kind and I can't get over how cute they are :)

Funny enough I had this book right near me when I made it but I did not realize how much they matched before mum pointed it out. I did not look at it so it is just a fun coincident.
As a Potter fan I had to have it of course :)

Childhood memories and Alice in Wonderland

I was born in a typical Amsterdam house, 3 floors with steep stairs. People who are not familiar with these old stairs are often surprised how steep they are, but those are typical in Amsterdam. Our house had a garage on street level, then 2 floors and the attic, with lots of stairs in between. In the center of the staircase there was an empty space where my mother had bookshelves installed, throughout the entire height of the house it was books books and more books, thousands of books. Beside adult books there were at least a thousand children books as well and one of my most vivid memories of childhood was that I would sit on the stairs, pick up a book and read it then and there. As a single child with a working mother who needed sleep during the weekends I spent my weekends quietly escaping to all kind of magical places, learning English with Dr. Seuss and producing a colorful imagination.

Alice in Wonderland was of course one of my favorites, I actually dressed up like her for a school event, but I am not close to be a fan like Dina Fragola who shares her HUGE collection of Alice in Wonderland themed memorabilia on her blog. As I have been seeing her collection every week I remembered those old days back in Amsterdam, the stairs, the books (which are now due to lack of space mostly in boxes in the attic and we desperately need something like this) and was inspired to create something 'Alice' themed.

We have been creating Little Red Riding hood, Snow-white, The Seven goats and the Wolf, The Puss with Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel themed fairy tale clothing so Alice in Wonderland was bound to happen!

With a gorgeously detailed Japanese fabric, a fluffy petticoat lining, a lace trim with on top a red roses trim, the skirt is like a fairy tale itself.

While we were at it we also made one in black :)

Both skirts are available in our clothing shop!
What is your favorite fairy tale?

Hogwarts Library - Book Review and other Magic

As a big Harry Potter fan I treated myself for Christmas with the Hogwarts Library book set, which contains three books:
Fantastic Beasts & where to find them
Quidditch through the ages
The Tales of Beedle the Bard

All 3 books are mentioned in the Harry Potter books which makes it extra fun, however these books are not Harry Potter related but more extra details of the Magical world for us Muggles to enjoy :)

The books have some fun details, to my surprise I enjoyed Quidditch through the ages most, it explained in so much lovely details how Quidditch started and evolved.
I bought the set on Amazon, and highly recommend it, also a lot of the profits go to charity of these books. P.s. did you know that J.K. Rowling is the first Billionaire who lost that title because of the huge amount she donates to Charity? Something more to admire her beside her amazing penmanship!

During Christmas we sold out our lovely Feather Wingardium Leviosa inspired bookmarks, but they are back in stock and even more fun now.

Now you can choose the color of the house you belong in, if you are not sure if you are a Griffindor, Ravenclaw, Slytherin or Hufflepuff, you can do this quiz to see in which house you fit in best :) (I came out as a Ravenclaw).

While magic is still in the air we made this magical dragon necklace, we bought two of these dragons in Spain a while back and they have been waiting to be made ever since. While I was reading Fantastic Beasts & where to find them I remembered them again and now finally it turned in a magical necklace, I think Daenerys Targaryen would approve too :)

It is a limited edition of 2 and available in our StaroftheEast shop.

The Highest Tide

I've never recommended a book before here on our blog, which is actually quite weird when you know that mum and I are both avid readers and not a days passes that we don't read.
The reason why I am doing it now is maybe because this book, The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch, is all about the sea which is a topic we love and of course the sea inspires a lot of our creations.
Although it is a bestseller I never had heard of it but it caught my eye in our local second hand book store.
Mum read it first and was totally in love with it, but she wanted me to wait so that she could print out images of all the marine creatures mentioned in the book.
The book is so magically written that you'll think that the animals mentioned in them are fiction but they are in fact all real.

I was especially shocked to find out that the Giant Squid was actually a real thing, also known as The Kraken. I'm sure you have seen a movie with the Kraken, like The Pirates of the Caribbean (a movie I totally love btw) where it destroys an entire ship. But before you get nightmares about it, it is a deep sea creature which actually hardly has been seen in its natural habitat and is mostly found in the stomachs of stranded sperm whales or sometimes they get stranded on the beaches of New Zealand, Norway and Newfoundland. Also they are not as huge as shown in movies, but they are impressive non the less.

(Kraken (version 2) by Chris-Garrett)

So if you decide to buy/ read the book, have a source of internet near by to checkout the animals mentioned as it makes it even more amazing. Jim Lynch does explain them all very well, but images does make it more impressive.

I decided to blog about this book way before this necklace came to life, but as it matches it so well and as we are very proud of the result I thought to show it off here :)
To give the impression of a pirate ship on sea we surrounded the beautiful vintage ship with large pieces of Variscite, small pieces of Lapis Lazuli and Pyrite as treasures hunted by the pirates :)
Available in our StaroftheEast shop.

Flickr Favorites

1. , 2. Handprints, 3. #fifty two - the voice of an artist, 4. Photocopied (Day 53)

Yesterday I started reading the book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo written by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. My mum just finished it. The first thing that caught my attention is the fact that Stieg never wrote a book before but was a journalist. He left his trilogy at a publisher and soon after that died of a heart attack at the age of 50. He never has known that he became world's second best seller in 2008, that his books sold more then 27 million coppies in 40 countries. What I do like about this is that he will be remembered as a great writer, and that he left something beautiful to the world.

This mosaic is about leaving 'marks' before we die. Most people are not able to do so, and I don't dream about leaving something so that I will be remembered a 100 years after my death. I do think that art and literature are the best assets to leave before we say farewell to this world...

See more beautiful mosaics at ArtMind's Blog!