Little Sister, in the Kitchen

I'm always envious of people who actually love to cook, I can cook and actually quite good, but I don't love doing it, especially thinking about WHAT to cook is the hardest part, if you ask me. Mum hates it, and hate is actually pretty underestimated for her afair with the kitchen, you can understand it better if you read the blogpost, 'Mum decided to cook...'.

And if you wonder about our kitchen, you can see it here.

This week I peeked in 4 different kitchens, funny thing, all 4 are very happy with their kitchen, and are all so pretty and different...

Mitsy of ArtMind obviously has something with the color lime, you will understand me when you check her lovely shop and blog. Mitsy and her partner live in Belgium, she has a passion and art degree for ceramics (clay) and makes lovely felt jewelry and handmade cards (which you can find in her shop).

Their kitchen is very new - it took them ages to have it placed and now they regret it that they didn't do it sooner as it makes for a lot of comfort.

She describes her kitchen as:

'In the first picture you see the vidé - it's where my little workspace is - so it's connected to the kitchen. In the second picture you see the stairs (temporary) to my workspace. The kitchen is the beating heart of our home. We both love to sit there and even when I'm working in my workspace, it still feels like I'm in the kitchen. I love cooking & baking and having a comfortable kitchen to do so is super fun. The feature I love most? The dishwasher of course!'.

And she shares a yummy recipe of sand cookies here.

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Zsuzsi aka panyizsuzsi is a Hungarian architect and a self-taught glass designer who makes beautiful, bold, glass pieces with colorful geometric designs. She is a wife and a mother of three, living in a little Hungarian artsy town called Szentendre.

Somehow you can see the style of her jewelry back in her kitchen, which shows her style. She loves to cook and loves her kitchen. Her favorite parts of the kitchen is the orange Nelson clock, which you can see at the first picture and the shelves, seen on the second picture.

Zsuzsi shares a delicious recipe of Rice Souffle.

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Carita aka Jealousydesign lives in an old farm house in Sweden, build in the late 1800's. She and her boyfriend have been renovating it theirselves, of some places they have removed 8 layers of wallpaper to get the original wooden walls back. When they bought this lovely house it still had the kitchen from the 40's. Just think strong green colors and everything was sitting so low, they had to sit on their knees to reach the benches.
The kitchen is an unfinished project, in the future the fridge and dishwasher will be black and the walls grey, very handy that Carita runs her own company as an interior/exterior house painter she paints, repaper, and things like that. She says: 'It is not easy for a female to run a business in a man´s world but I love my job and I hope I will keep going.'

About her kitchen and home:

'I fell in love with this house at first sight. I have never felt home anyplace else in my life, just think the feeling when you stand in the kitchen and cooking dinner and look outside and the deers or the elks are just a few steps away and eating the grass on the land outside'.

Besides her company, Carita makes very unique sterling silver jewelry which she sells at her Etsy store.

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Ale, owner of the Etsy shop Ixela, architect at day times, knitter, crocheter and jewelry maker at night time lives in Torino, Italy, in a little flat under the roof near the center of the city. They don't have a separate kitchen, but a cooking corner in a quite big living room which overlooks a tiny and lovely roof garden.

Ale says: 'One of the things that I love most of my kitchen are the icy chairs Bloody Mary ... a funny model made in Italy by Sturm und Plastic... a funky interior design company.'

And about her city: ' Torino is famous for the many chocolate manufactories, when we think of quality chocolate we often think of Swiss or Dutch versions however Italy has a strong tradition in the production of chocolate and Turin was the birthplace of the Italian chocolate production. The art of chocolate making is celebrated each year with CioccolaTO’, a two week event held in the month of March that is devoted entirely to chocolate. You can find more information about the chocolate history of Torino here.'

Ale is sharing a delicious Italian recipe of Chocolate Cake:

*INGREDIENTS:

- 400 g. DARK CHOCOLATE

- 180 g. BUTTER

-70 g. FLOUR

-150 g. SUGAR (or even 200 g. if you love sugar so much)

-4 EGGS (yolks and egg whites)

-1 package of VANILLESUGAR

Break the 4 eggs (yolks and egg whites) into a bowl and mix them very well with sugar, then add the flour and the vanille and finally the butter with the dark chocolate which you had previously melted together, cooking them in a double saucepan.Pour the mixture into a cake tin (diameter max. 24-26 cm.) that you have previously covered with oven paper. Preheat the oven at about 200°C and bake for about 18 minutes.The cake core must remain a little bit creamy, then attention to the time cooking... it may change from one oven to another.If you love it you can also sprinkle some icing sugar on the cake when it will be cold.

Wish you much fun and bon appetit!!

Next peeks, next week!
Thank you Mitsy, Carita, Zsuzsi and Ale for sharing your photographs and little bits of your lifes!

I'm Hot

We have some I'm Hot earrings in the shop, and have been wanting to make necklaces with the bigger peppers. Sometimes it takes a while to find out what we want to do with a material, when I looked at the peppers once again, Dindi came on my mind. She makes great jewelry with Sterling Silver tags. So I contacted her right away and she made these awesome 'I'm Hot' tags, every thing went fast and smooth, she is perfect to work with so please check her shop!

Red hot peppers are very populair in Turkey, in one period these peppers, hot or not, become very very cheap and every household buys at least 20 kilo's to dry them and make all kind of food of them which stays good for months for the winter time when the peppers are extremly expensive. So in summer time you will see all these red peppers decorating many balconies.

A typical Turkish meal is Biber Dolması, Stuffed Peppers (paprika)

Here is the recipe to make these delicious Biber dolması:

Ingredients:

-8 big sweet red paprika's

-400 gr of minced meat

-20 spoons of rice

-2 onions

-2 tomato's

-2 spoons of tomato's concentrate (sauce)

-2 spoons of (sweet) pepper concentrate (sauce)

-2 cloves of garlic

-2 dessert spoons of dried mint

-parsley

-olive oil

-black pepper

-salt

How to make it:

Cut the onion, parsley and tomato's in tiny pieces. Wash the rice with water and then add the spices, pepper and tomato sauses and minced meat. Mix all these ingredients together (raw). Cut the tops of the red peppers and clean the inside of them (the seeds) and fill them with the mix you've made (make sure you don't fill them completly as the rice will get bigger). Put all the peppers in a pan, make sure that the tops are up so that the filling does not escape.

Add water to the pan, fill it half up, and add then a little olive oil. Let the peppers cook for 50 minutes on a medium heat stove, check if the rice is soft before you take it of the stove.

Enjoy your meal!

Recipe and picture are taken from here.

Love and Fire

We hope that everyone had a lovely Valentine's day, nothing exciting happened here, except that my Treasury made it to the frontpage of Etsy!

And maybe you all are aware now, but just a little reminder, incase you haven't donated or bought anything from OzBushfireAppeal, you really should help for this great cause. I love the idea as you buy something for yourself and help others with it!

Incase you wondered what happened with this famous Koala, Sam, she is in good care and has found her Love, Bob....

Little Sister

I was starting to run out of subjects for Friday Findings and had been thinking about something new that I could investigate and share every week, and I think I found it :)
People (including me) are often curious about little things. Especially now that we are all alot in cyber world we often do not know a lot of things of people we talk to, daily. Not a suprise that the TV program 'Big Brother', where you could watch people day and night, was such a huge success.
I'm not going to be Big Brother, but I do want to find out and share tiny little pieces of peoples lifes, all of them will be connected to the Etsy community, world wide.
To start with something welcoming and warm, I sneaked in to 4 different bedrooms from different places of the world....


Devi of Glasfaden makes gorgeous unique jewelry of felt and lampwork beads, not the average things you see daily. She also has a passion for photography and shares her pictures often in her photography blog, besides her other blog. She sings in a chore and has a 'normal' job too, busy girl.
She lives in Germany with her son and has moved in to a new house a few months back and has been renovating and decorating ever since. Her bedroom is not finnished yet, it might take a while as she likes to do it right and slowly. Devi descripes her room as 'You can see that it looks more like a studio than a bedroom or maybe like a student's room? Well, I always think, if a bedroom is there to sleep only.. what a waste!! So it is actually my sewing and drawing room, as well as my wool inventory room with a corner to sleep. Later on it will be my beading room too - at the moment I'm doing it in the dining room. :)'


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So who is the owner of this -jealous making beautiful- bedroom? Charmaine aka High Desert Diva has two big passions, the first is her Interior Designing bussines and secondly Vintage, no worries she does love her husband (who is a very talented metal smith), cat and dog too :)!
Charmaine moved with her husband to High Desert of Central Oregon, USA, and made of a trailer a dream house, with their own bare hands and very hard work, you can read their story and more pictures at her blog.
Their trailer became so beautiful that it has been professionally photographed by Philip Clayton-Thompson of Blackstone Edge Studios, as part of her portfolio.

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Inger aka IngerMaaike makes gorgeous felt creations and felt toys.

She, her husband, 3 sons and 2 dogs recently moved from the Netherlands to Norway, and has been one of the luckiest persons ever since.

Houses in Norway are mostly made of wood as there is so much of it. You can see that outside the window that they have lots and lots of snow. I noticed a gun in the corner and of course had to ask about that, imagining wild bears attacking them, but it is a very old airgun, they practice with at summer time (on painted targets, not animals).

Their tiny bedroom is just enough she says, nice and cozy and enough room for their bed and a tv, the art photographs on the wall are of MatchStickGirl, they are each others huge fans.

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Speaking of MatchStickgirl, owned by Frances. J. Melhop, I sneaked in her bedroom too.

Frances, originally from New Zealand, lives in the fashion town Milan, Italy. She is a very talented professional fashion photographer and has recently been chosen as one of the worlds 200 best add photographers by LUERZERS ARCHIVE 2008/2009.
She also has another shop for her open editioned works at EnchantedPond.

As she is used to the wild open nature life in New Zealand, she often finds Milan too small and crowded, but her little apartment is her way to escape from that world and live in her own, when she is in Milan. She says she likes it because:

'It's nice and warm and packed with my things...all the things I love ...
I need more rooms like this :D but for the moment as a transient photographer on the move it is a nice little nest to come back to.'

You can find some fairytales and gorgeous photographs at her blog too.

Next peeks, next week!

Thank you Devi, Charmaine, Inger and Frances for sharing your photographs and little bits of your lifes!

New Project Part 2

Ten days ago we mentioned our new project.

Today was the day when the glassers came to close the veranda.

It is always hard for me to accept that the standards of quality that I was used to in the Netherlands, will never be reached here in this corner of the world.

Nevertheless they made good progress, and after swallowing and conforming to the level that can be reached, it was great to see the new workplace starting to take shape.

Now that there is a visual barriere with the outside, you can fully appreciate how big the place is. Yaay!!

With the falling of the evening, they 'discovered' that they did not have enough sandwich panel for all the openings -at the underside of the windows-, and tried to lure us in accepting some inferior material instead. Seasoned as we are, we said 'no-no', so they will come back and finish in a couple of days (???).

To be continued...

When it Rains, it Pours

After an extra long, extra hot, extra dry summer and a non existant (equally warm, etc.) autumn, we have now an ...

EXTRA WET WINTER. YAYY!!!

Yes, we are very happy with all this rain. Who could have thought when we lived in northern Europe that we would love rain so much?

Every thing is clean and luscious green.

We won't have water shortages this summer, I hope.

Yes, rain is precious, rain is ...life!

Friday Findings: Bamboo

Here some Etsy findings which are inspired by or made of Bamboo.

carpedraco

helenascloset

Mocahete

Ahpeele

decorette

akalinop

joanschaumburg49

yukijewelry

MashedPotatoMosaics

Tenderness

The big pointer in the picture is a girl called Zeyno. Zeyno is short for Zeynep, a turkish girls name that somehow gets asociated with wholesome, innocent village girls.

The name couldn't be more appropiate in this sense. Zeyno is 80 pounds of goodness. The small dogs use her as a matrass in winter, and despite her size, she waits patiently for all the others to feed before she takes a turn.

A friend of us found her, maybe six weeks old, trembling in terror on a night when a small earthquake ocurred here. She was tiny, I brought her home with her belly snuggly fitting the palm of my hand. She grew like overnight, we don't even have a picture of her puppy time, it happened so fast!
Big innocent Zeyno, the best natured friend, the true image of tenderness.

New Project

Estella and I are most of the time busy with projects larger than ourselves. Like two ants, by shear obstinacy and many little steps, we eventually reach our goal.

Do you remember our new work place? It was so neat in the beginning , but now, most of the time, it looks like this:

We simply have too much stuff and too much ungoing work for this little room, so it is time for the next project...

This is the veranda, beautiful, but we don't use it much. It is too hot in summer and in winter the rain comes in from all sides. It is 45 square meters and with great light, so, if we close it in with double glass, we will have a much larger studio...

Of course, nothing goes as planned, that's a law. When we removed the wood coverings of the poles that hold the roof, we discovered that they were not iron, as I supposed, but pine wood and totally rotten at that.

So, first the smith had to come and replace the wooden poles with iron ones.

That went surprisingly well. Each rotten pole was removed, the roof slighly elevated with a jack, and a new pole slided in place. Pheeeww, that was that...


Next month, the glassers will come with the PVC windows, than the electricity, than new tables, airco, etc. It will take several months to complete, but it will be great in the end, all that space...

To be continued...