Green Christmas

Christmas shopping time has begone! While it still seems far away, time flies and when you want something from overseas (like for example from one of ours shops *wink wink) it is better to start early to avoid late arrival stress.
To start the season I made this driftwood Christmas tree, all wood is found on the beach and the foot and steel stick going through the driftwood pieces are vintage so everything is eco friendly :) Available at StarHomeStudio.

And here are some great earth and financial friendly other ideas for Christmas:

Environment friendly packaging ideas with the sources from here and here

Toilet paper Christmas Calendar, you can find the tutorial here

And finally instead of watering trees for ages just to cut them down for a few weeks to enjoy I love alternatives, and if you have a small space this one is really great:

November Revamps

So in the beginning of last month I mentioned some projects I wanted to finish for October, and we pretty much managed to reach our goal.
The first project was replacing the two rotten wooden doors of our garden sheds, which happened last week:

So much better!

As you can see there are dark borders around the new doors, the old doors had wider frames so the new ones are not reaching the painted part of the walls.
Also while removing the old frames some parts of the plaster work fell off, so it will need to be plastered and then I will paint the walls (and hang that annoying cable neatly back to the wall too).

From the inside you can see better what I mean with the plaster work, their are some gaps and ugly bits. This will all be fixed this month, in combination with the bathroom revamp I mentioned last month, I will come back to that in a bit. I was also not able to make the stone path to one of the sheds, which I hoped to finish in October but did not manage, fingers crossed for this month!

Another project I showed last month was this chair, it took aaaaages to prepare for upholstery. The wood had many holes of the previous upholstery jobs and the frame needed some extra support. I've sanded, filled and varnished it many many times in a span of several weeks before I could actually paint it.

As the wood was too damaged I had to paint it, I know wood is pretty but in some cases it just needs to be covered for the better good :)

It got all fresh and pretty after a nice white paint and it was finallyyyyy ready to become an armchair again.

New webbing, filling, foam and tender loving care.

I hand cut and sewed many meters of double piping, it took me hours but the result made it all worth it.

Tadaaaa! We looove the results, I am still banging my head for forgetting to take a picture of its original state before removing the old fabric and filling, it was a very sad sad chair.

We covered it with a vintage quilt, very Americana with the color scheme, and super cheerful without being girly.

The back side is a happy checkered fabric, all sides are cheerful and we spent many extra hours to make it pretty in each and every small and big detail. I will be listing it later today to join our other furniture pieces.

I also trimmed all our doggies but won't show before and after pictures or this will become the never-ending-blogpost :)

So back to this month and the bathroom I mentioned before. When two guys will come to plaster around our two new doors they will also do so work in our sad sad bathroom.

So this is our bathroom, window is wood and got all rotten, it is also much too small compared to the bathroom. So they will knock down a little bit of wall and put in a larger PVC window for more light and we'll finally get rid of the window to which we attached so plastic roll down curtain thingy so that we can actually shower in the Winter as we had removed the glass because half the window did not open and the steam just could not get out of the room. Also the paint of the ceiling will be scratched off as the wrong paint was used causing for ugly dark spots. A messy and busy November is awaiting us I am not looking forward to clean up the mess afterwards, but after that we will enjoy the results :)

The love she left behind

Loosing Elsie a few weeks ago  was heart wrenching. You all know how much love, respect and tenderness we feel for all our dogs, but Elsie was more than a dog and more than a human. She was a little superior being, kind of an E.T., you know?

But when we saw an ad where somebody was looking for a new home for an other little black terrier, we knew that we would love her too. 

She was the  cutest little thing, the only problem was that this cutie lived in Ankara, about 900 km (560 miles) from our home, impossible to pick up by car.

I called the owner of the dog, a sweet lady who had to give her sweet Zeytin (Turkish for Olive) away due to a family issue. She clearly wanted to give her a good home and we clicked pretty quickly. Coincidentally a friend of ours was also in Ankara and would be coming back to our town in a few days, so we figured she could bring her. Unfortunately none of the bus companies accepted animals in the passengers compartment, only by the luggage, which is cold and airless, and as the bus drive would take 12 hours totally not an option.

Zeytin's owner was so convinced that she found a good home that she did not give her to anyone located near her and actually paid and send her to come by plane, which is just a 1 hours journey. We went to pick Zeytin up at the Airport (which is also a one hour drive) and waited for her arrival.
We were a bit worried how it would go, but Zeytin arrived well and was not cold or afraid.

Once out of her bag she dragged my mum through the airport to a green part and was curiously looking to us and her surroundings. Once at our car she jumped right in and was on my mum's lap the entire journey back, you would never have guessed that we just had met.

While she got used to us right away, introducing her to our pack at home took a while, but now she even plays with some and is already feeling completely at home.

On Sunday, 2 days after her arrival we went to the beach and took her with us, as she is so small she is very portable :)

She had the time of her life, running around and even jumping in the sea, it is a great experience to see a dog who had a rough time, recouping so quickly and enjoying life so much.

You might think we're crazy with already 10 dogs, taken a new one (again), but mum needed one who looks like Elsie and although I was not very enthusiastic of taken an 11th one, I am glad we did as she makes my mother smile again :)

Zeytin is very happy with her new home and surroundings, she now gets 24 hours attention, which is a huge improvement of her previous situation and has a lot of green to jump around in.

We also came across this on Pinterest, very appropriate for the occasion, you often hear people saying 'I will never have a pet again' when they loose one, well this furry guy makes some good points:

Newly Listed: Driftwood Towel Holder

Driftwood Towel Holder, Jewly Rack Rustic Driftwood, Metal - Beach Home Decor by StarHomeStudio
On the sea - Illustration print (Medium size) by Majalin
The Weather Minders by theaterclouds
Quebec Countryside Photo Yellow Canola flower Photography Landscape Rustic art print by JessPetersonPhotos

Our Creative Space; Boatwood Project

For most people beaches are a place to swim and sunbath. We funnily enough hardly swim when we are near the sea and never sunbath, or we do get sun baked but not intentionally. During the Summer months the beaches are usually occupied by other people, and although most of them do not appreciate the beauty of the things we find, they do walk all over the shells causing them to break, or they use the driftwood for barbecues (arrrggg the frustration).

In any case in the warm months there are no storms so the amount of treasures are less anyway, now that Fall has come treasures will also appear in a larger amount, and the local fishermen and boat owners will start working on their boats to prepare for next Season.
The later gave us a while back another kind of treasure; discarded boat wood. A rare find actually as people in villages still heat with fires in Winter time so the wood gets burned. We found a pile of them at a wharf and took the pretty parts home.

For ages I wanted to make mirror frames out of some of them, and last Sunday I finally got that project going. I borrowed an electric saw of a friend and first made the wood pieces equally wide and at length. Then I made 45 degrees corners out of them.

I then had to take them to a local framer as normal staples do not work for frames. He also cut the mirrors in size for me and tadaaaa!

Some very cool rustic mirrors came out of them, only the glass and the hanging wires are new all other materials have history, making them unique and eco friendly, a win-win :)

The first frames are listed in our StarHomeStudio shop, I'm planning to make more in the future :)

Another Strange Day, Week, Month... Life

I haven't blogged for a few days, thinking that not much is happening in our life to actually worth sharing the whole world online. Then I started to think of my past few days and noticed how strange the days pass, and I realized our days are usually odd even though we seem to have extremely boring life's.
So I now decided to share a few odd highlights of these past few weeks, let's see what you think of it all.
We live in a dead end street with just a few houses, each house has a garden and it is all nice green and usually pretty quiet. Our next door neighbor has a tree right near the wall separating his garden with our ground, where we leave our car. The tree type is here called a Sakız tree literally meaning a
(chewing) gum tree, you might get the drift, it is sticky as hell and several times a year it drops leaves by the buckets which are all sticky and icky. It also drops all kind of stickiness causing our car doors and windows to hardly open and its leaves sticking to our shoes and everywhere else.
I love trees, I really do, but that tree and me, we never bonded. The branches are literally all over our car, and our neighbor only cuts the branches bothering him, leaving all the bloody sticky stuff to us to clean up.
After years of asking he finally promised to cut the tree (and plant a nice-not-sticky-one in its place), of course after 6 months he still has not kept his word and I told him that I would cut it. He did not want the entire tree to go, so we made the deal to cut the branches on our side but keep the tree alone.

Now remember the part where my car was sticky all the time? The fuel station in town also cleans your car for free when you are a customer. And when I arrived a few weeks ago with yet a bloody sticky car the guy asked me 'didn't I just clean this car a few days ago?' and I gave him the story of the tree. And he said, oh I can cut it for you, I need wood to heat in the Winter! Ahh how lucky, someone wanted to cut the tree for free and take all the messy sticky branches with him, I was overjoyed to say the least.
He kept his word, cut down all the branches, making our garden and parking spot light and airy, and not sticky. In the process a branch fell on the electricity lines, causing for our entire street to be out of electricity for a while, causing for the extra adrenaline and excitement, with lines all over the street not to me mention a huge pile of branches all over the place and me trying between that all trying to reach a phone and calling the electricity company explaining the emergency, they came in 5 minutes and luckily repaired the damage quickly.

That was the story of the tree that I never liked for 10 years, its branches will heat a family the entire winter, of course the tree will grow again but that is a problem for another time.

The other day, just when I thought that I was going to stay at home all day, in my PJ's working on new things I was called and told that I had to take some paperwork to Muğla, a city which is about a 1 hour drive through the mountains away from our town. Of course my car (which is not sticky anymore but still old) decided to overheat so I had to leave the car at the bus station and go by bus, I actually asked a guy at the station to keep an eye on my car as parking is only permitted for 20 minutes and I would be away for 2-3 hours and had no time to leave the car elsewhere as it was Friday afternoon, just a few hours before I could forget about paperwork until Monday.
So there I was instead of my PJ's at home in a bus on a windy road, dizzy and groggy as I was stung by a bee the day before, and stung by another one 4 days before that filled with injections, antihistamines and my body fighting the allergy attack, off to Muğla to drop 1 piece of paper...
I arrived 1 hour before closing time and the guy I had to speak to was on the phone so I sat down and waited for him. While he was talking I noticed that the paperwork for my mum was in front on his desk and when the person on the phone started to irritate him he started to play with my mother's picture! It was so weird and funny, there I was in an office I had never been before, with a guy I had never met who was 'playing' with my mum. As soon as he hang up I told him: 'Hey you know the picture you have been torturing, is my mum, please be gentle with her!' We both had a laugh, he straightened and even un-dusted my mother's picture, it was a weird weird thing, the whole thing would even have been weird in a dream.
After a half hour I went back home which went less smoothly as the first bus was full so I waited 40 minutes. But my car was where I had left it after 4 hours, luckily the 20 minute rule was unnoticed broken :)

So these are just a few, and these kind of things happen all the time, we have at least 3 odd days a week, and now that I have really realized that, I have realized that my life is not boring at all, and have decided to bore you all with details of some strange days now and then :)

Newly Listed: Antique Ornate Mirror

Antique Ornate Mirror late 1800's Wooden Frame Vintage Kitsch Shabby Chic Rustic Mirror by StarHomeStudio
Emerald Green Floral Art, Botanical Print, Flower Photography, Garden, Blossoms Midnight Garden by EyePoetryPhotography
green thumb (print) by ybryksenkova
The Blue Door Photograph, Garden Shed Charming Cottage Ivy Covered Walls Magical House by TammieJeanPhoto

Peaceful Sunday

With all the horrible things that happened the last few days in Turkey, a peaceful Sunday was just what we needed. Ankara is very far away from us, but even in our town people are on strike, a silent cry against the government. On November 1st we will have elections again as they have not been able to establish the government with all the conflicts between political parties. The world is far from world peace, I wonder if we will ever get there.

I would love to own this little island, without politics, guns and hate. Surrounded with like minded creative people, I sound like a hippie, I know but the phrase make love not war is close to my heart :)

We had a little walk, and I always love the wild flowers and berries we discover between the bushes, they are so beautiful. Even though it is mid October we still in the 30-35 degrees Celsius here (86-95 F). And nature is still acting like it is Spring, leaves are not falling yet.

The only thing that makes it feel like Winter is approaching are berries, I loved this natural garland here below, made out of berries.

We then went to our favorite place for dinner, where we usually go for brunch on Sundays. It is close to the water and there is always something going on. Like the water turtles and fishes I've shown before, goats and ducks and interesting birds.

This time we all of a sudden heard some loud water sounds and saw that a whole bunch of cows were crossing over. It was getting dark so they were heading home, without any human guidance, they clearly knew the way.

It was quite something to see them cross like that, they knew exactly where the water was low.

After the cows were gone another gang approached us.

They came in such a way that it reminded us of the Jets from the WestSide Story, I actually sang their song while they approached, you know; 'When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette till your last dying day' :)

But while they acted like gang members all they were interested in was sharing our meal, which we did of course.