Tot ziens

This blog is taking a little break. Maybe see you later. <3

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Midnight carpenter

Some things in life tend to slow you down, de-activate you, make you sink into a slightly vegetative state. Like, say, Facebook. Other things speed you up, give you a push, kick your bottom and make you get out and do stuff. Like the evening course at Stockholm University I recently started following.

It’s about sloyd. Yes, there is such a word. No, I couldn’t believe it either. Yes, it’s fantastic. We carve and saw and talk and think and even eat homemade cake brought by one of the course-mates every time.

When I walked out of the sloyd hall a mere three hours ago, I was on fire. I knew what I wanted to make, all I needed were some boards.

And I just happened to know where to find some. Six years in Amsterdam definitely taught me how to spot a good street find.

So I took old bikey for a ride to the cheapest bar in the area – outside of which there was a huge bag of trash waiting to be picked up. A bag containing all the particle boards a silly girl could wish for on a dark and starless Tuesday night. I just felt a little bit sketchy going through them…

Finder's keeper

Oh, bikey. What would I do without you? Not carry these mtherfckers home, that’s for sure. (Seriously, a bike is such an enabler. With a bit of rope and a voordrager you can take anything home.)

Packaged and ready to ship

To not scare the living daylight out of pub visitors or evening motorists, I walked with it at first. But when I was alone on the road, I couldn’t resist biking.

Once home, I got out my carpenter’s rule and Sean’s hiking saw and got to work. Lucky I’ve got a light out on the porch! A smoking neighbour was much amused, but didn’t actually comment on the late hour. Instead, he explained he’d been thinking about making exactly the same thing to solve the same household problem. What it is? You’ll see…

An hour and a lot of arm work later I had my two boards.

To be continued.

See saw

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I made a flowerpot

…from a plastic white tiger mug I bought in a thrift store in New York last year, as my only souvenir from there.

It had a slogan (”greatest show on earth”) and a dotcom (ringling.com) printed on the bottom, and something pursuaded me to type in those letters and see what it was all about.

Circus, apparently. And here’s the white tiger for sale.

But on my window sill, the tiger is back in the jungle. In fact, he is the jungle.

Welcome to the jungle

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I worked with wood

I had two nice wine boxes (Amsterdam street find that served as moving boxes in the Big Move) and decided to make them into garden boxes. I started before we’d formally moved in, thus without access to Sean’s power tools – which meant hand drilling twelve holes in each bottom.

Chateau de wooden box

I then oiled them two times with some leftover wood oil from my Amstel crate project and had them dry for a few days. At the local food store I picked up two Dutch strawberry crates to use as stands, which I also went over with the oil to make them a bit water resistant.

A week or so later, I found a wooden flex winder that I thought would work well to stick some flower pots on. By then, I had the power tools, so I got the sander out and had a go at it:

Sladdvindan

Afterwards I was going to clean and oil it, but didn’t have much oil left and turned to Google. Turns out you can mix vinegar and cooking oil and get a pretty good 2-in-1 cleaner/oiler solution. I used clear vinegar and rapeseed oil, which was a pretty goodlooking mix… Before and after shaking:

Oil and vinegar solution

I then used it with a rug on the flex winder as well as my wine boxes to give them a tint of the yellow colour.

My wood works

Now I just need some flowers to go with them :)

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I made a playsuit

This old lady skirt had such nice ruffles… if they’d been ON A PLAYSUIT!

Ruffle it up

So I decided to just pull it up 30 cm, take off the lowest ruffle, and sew it back on as a pant-bottom.

A closer look

After unpicking the seam and doing the necessary cutting and pinning, I had to lol. The lowest ruffle now looked like something a stripper from the 80’s would wear as casual underwear.

Roflol

I actually finished (!) this project, but as usual I forgot to take a good after-picture. Oh, except this one. But to be frank, it’s really a picture of a beer glass.

Cheers!

Believe me when I say it’s pretty awesome though. As soon as I have a pic, I will post!

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We moved out again

After two months on beautiful Bastugatan, it was already time to move out again. Most of our stuff was in storage, so I decided to move the rest on the bike by myself, as Sean was in England.

Good idea.

Really.

This was the total amount of stuff I needed to move:

All the stuff

It was all going to neighbour island Kungsholmen – a distance of about 3 km, of which half is the feared bridge Västerbron (feared by bikers for its ability to tire you out, that is) (ok, it’s not really feared, but somehow I’ve tricked myself into giving it some kind of mythical status).

I figured I’d be able to do it in three goes, each of them carrying one big bag at the back, two at the front, and one fully loaded backpack. First go, about 8pm (backpack not pictured).

First go

So far, so good. I crossed Västerbron with a smile on my face, although I did have to get off and walk halfway up. When I got to the new place, I was rewarded with a pretty spectacular view of the nearby DN skyscraper.

Look at that light

I offloaded and biked back. Next go proved a little bit more difficult, running out of steady bags to transport stuff in. I set off again about 9.30 (backpack not pictured).

Second go

The evening light was still pretty spectacular though. View mid-sunset, mid-Västerbron:

Pseudo-mythical Västerbron

After that, I felt exhausted but very proud of myself. I also felt pretty much done. If I’d had a bathtub I would’ve wanted to go home and run a hot one, then relax with a biertje reading a cheap crime novel and light some candles (ish).

That, however, was not the case. I still had a load of stuff and it was rapidly getting dark… By the time I had biked all the way back and packed my bike for the third time (11pm-ish) it was pitch black outside. Again, I was wearing a huge backpack that isn’t on the picture, and that’s a wooden sewing box on the front of the bike with a black back on top that you can’t see in the dark.

Last go

I biked down Hornsgatan and over that dreaded bridge again, then offloaded all the stuff and headed back. Despite all my efforts, I still had some stuff left, but I just couldn’t do anymore that same night. I had already biked about 18k over some pretty steep hills, half of the way very heavily loaded.

Exhausted

I collapsed at midnight, only to get up at 8am to clean out the temporary apartment, and get the last stuff over to the new one around noon.

I’m too old to move on the bike. But it seems kinda fun, in hindsight.

Posted in Bike, Living | 1 Comment

We saw some awesome cars

Mostly Volvos – I don’t know anything about cars but I’ve tried googling the model. Please help in the comments if you know more :)

What looks like a Volvo P220 Amazon Estate, spotted in Äppelviken:
Green Volvo Amazon

Another P220 Amazon Estate, parked in Västerås:
Cream Volvo Amazon

A shiny two-tone Ford Zephyr on the Isle of Wight:
Ford Zephyr 206E

A super tiny Fiat 500, adorning the cobbled streets of Visby:
Tiny, tiny Fiat 500

A Morgan Roadster on Södermalm:
Morgan Roadster

What I think is a Volvo 1800 or P1800 (whatever the difference is) – but not quite the same model as the one Roger Moore drove in the Saint :) … My favourite so far:
Volvo 1800

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We looked at the sky

And it never disappointed us.

View from Ivar Loparken

If I got a penny for every time I biked over Västerbron and the scenery took my breath, I'd have like 7 pennies by now

View from Skinnarviksberget

Norr Mälarstrand seen from Bastugatan

Värtaverket

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I started on a lamp

When finding an abandoned mama matryoshka in a flea market, what does one do?

All by myseeeeelf...

Try and re-purpose it into a lamp, obviously.

Shine a light in every corner of my heart

Updates will follow on this one.

Posted in Upcycling, Woodwork | 1 Comment

I started on a jacket

In my never-ending fabric stash, there’s a lot of old goodies. One of them is this lining of an 80’s denim jacket in an incredible fabric with, yep, boots. Lots of boots. And motor cycles. And motivational statements.

These boots, etc

Apparently it’s German.

Who's Otto?

If I just hemmed it, it would make a pretty awesome light jacket. I got so far as to cut, iron and pin it. This was mid July. Think I’ve sewn it yet? Eh he he. He he.

Just look at it hanging there

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I fixed the Vogue dress

…and wore it to a vintage themed party together with my Gevonden op Marktplaats-bag.

No extra room now innit

Drog te me en blomsterkvast osså

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I got my sewing gear

Transported from the storage room to the temp house all on the good old bikey. I got severely sweaty on the way thanks to the Stockholm hills – it’s not easy for an ex-Amsterdammer…

1-2-3 exhaustion

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We started a business

That’s right y’all! Moving to Stockholm to follow the dream.

Reading up

Floating sofa

A TRAY!!!

Ergonomic 1.0

Biertje o'clock

Ergonomic 2.0

As you can see, it mostly involves consuming various beverages and Tobias reclining in different positions, sometimes in combination.

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We moved in

Over the summer, we stayed in the most beautiful apartment while its original owners went on holiday. Seriously, every item in it was like it was curated. And the pretty Södermalm neighbourhood didn’t hurt the eyes either.

Yeah, you know, just casually piling magazines on old school chairs tying them into place with a sailor's rope

Your average bookshelf, really

If that's not creative cooking I don't know what is

München Brewery

Prettiest flower evah

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We went camping

To celebrate my dad’s 60th, the whole family went on a three day kayaking and camping trip in the glorious archipelago on the Swedish west coast.

I looked pretty awesome in the dark of the night with Sean’s head light on.

Badass camping

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We moved out

Yep, it really happened, after a mad last week of packing and cleaning and sending off all our stuff with a big truck which we thought was going to be driven by someone called Dolf but in the end never was. The last day I had about a million nervous breakdowns running around trying to the last minute things before key handover at 12 o’clock, and finally started crying about leaving my life for the past six years while waiting for the plane at Schiphol.

A tribute to the Netherlands and my moving on Facebook

(See what I did there? The laser eyes of the Netherlands pic goes straight into my headlight on the Facebook profile pic. It’s like a never-ending loop of light… between my eyes!)

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Holy shit…

…a lot of things have happened since I last posted anything here! I’m just gonna go through a mad weekend of updating and hopefully cover the past two months’ main events :)

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To do in Stockholm

Get lace curtains from thrift store and follow this tutorial to make them GRADIENT!!! Oh and then make a shirt from them. Rad!!!

Image from Studs and Pearls

Also, sorry I didn’t post pictures of the candy cane skirt-dress, it is truly awesome (to the point where it attracted compliments from strangers when I wore it to a bar, saying it was the prettiest dress in the place and it was a loss for Holland I was moving away. In Dutch, obviously *bragging*) but my house is a moving mess right now and no pictures will be taken until after the big move.

6 days to go! Untz untz!

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Dat is pas klasse

In the midst of all packing and giving away stuff, I decided to get some professional help fixing some of the things I can’t mend myself. Just like last time I forgot to take a before picture, but I handed in two second-hand bags with broken straps, and a true gem from the huge flea market in Noord last summer, this 70’s style pair of wooden platforms with leather straps. Here seen post mending.

The loot

The shoes only cost me a fiver at the time but were in quite a state, the rubber soles underneath were worn down to the wood, the straps were a bit too long, the insole was coming off, and most worryingly, the wood was absolutely splintered at the front.

Not so anymore. Check this out.

Seamless

Ok I realise it doesn’t look so impressive but you should’ve seen them before. Also, brand new rubber soles have been attached, insole re-glued, and straps have been successfully shortened.

In full glory

Fantastic. I just have to agree with the statement on their awesome blue-and-white no-nonsense extra-exclamation marks bags: Schoenmakers vakwerk, dat is pas klasse!(!)

Pas klasse

Or as Grolsch would put it, vakmanschap is meesterschap – fackmannaskap är mästerskap, or craftsmanship is mastery (”mastership”).

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Candy cane, part I

The same night as I went to the gym I also finished the candy cane skirt. I know, what a wonder of productivity! Funnily enough this was a project I originally started right after coming back from the gym one of the first times I went this year. History repeats itself… Gym leads to energy leads to sewing.

So yeah, candy cane skirt is done! But actually, it’s no longer a skirt by definition… It’s something much, much more exiting. Which I won’t show you until I get Sean to take some decent pictures of it.

For now I’ll just show the by-product, the candy cane waist coat I made from the bodice, by simply hemming the arm holes.

Work it baby

Close-ups

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Back to the gym

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome me back to the world of working out. I’m back from exile and at it again, thanks to the fantabulous pep-talking of Cissi Wallin and her blog followers.

Cissi is a Swedish radio show host and media personality, and fellow Uddevallare, who recently decided to get fit after 26 years of not giving a damn. It hurts. And her blog is the funniest, most honest, most brutal exercise blog I’ve ever read.

So I decided to turn to her and ask the blog what to do about my own exercise issue: I start, and I am so excited, and I keep it up for quite some time and then… it dies. There’s a week when you’re just too busy and next week you don’t feel so well and the week after you’ve suddenly stopped exercising.

I got lots of replies. The best one, I think, was about not seeing it as an end. I haven’t stopped exercising at all. And if I haven’t, why am I not going to the gym anymore? So I did just that. I just went. I felt like a million euros right before walking out the door, with my newfound decisiveness.

Take on me....

Please note the photo above depicts me actually flexing my biceps as hard as I can. They are, whaddayacallit, not very pronounced.

As I walked in through the gym doors, I saw the ‘welcome back’ sign meant for those exiting the premises as a heartfelt welcome, and the smell I once dreaded of fresh sweat, rubber and metal was like a summer breeze to my nostrils.

An hour later on the way home I was feeling less like a born-again fundamentalist and more like ‘holy shit’. In the good way.

Crazy eyes

And that good feeling lasted all through the night and made me step out the door with a big grin on my face the morning after, despite it raining cats and dogs.

Happy happy joy joy

That sweet, sweet pain in my abdominal muscles lasted even longer; two days and counting.

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And repeat

Had an another go at the bleach-vinegar-sunshine routine for the dress. I hung it (and the table runner I threw in with it) to dry on the terrace, and keeping the Amsterdam wind in mind, I tied the rope between the drainpipe and our solid iron parasol stand, which I then secured with a solid iron flower pot.

Let the sunshine, leeeet the sunshine...

Which proved to be a lucky decision, because when I left home for work, they were already flapping about in the wind like unblessed spirits on speed:

Spöket Laban

Boo!

Posted in Fixing | 2 Comments

Ice-cream shirt in the park

Beyond Retro Sweden has a competition where they are giving away summery tulle skirts to those who post the best outfit of the day photos with their favourite Beyond Retro purchase. (Hey, Imma let you finish but this might be the best outfit post of all times. Of all times!)

So here’s me having lunch in Vondelpark today *om nom nom*, trying my bestest not to pull a funny face when being photographed. I’m wearing a Beyond Retro shirt which always makes me think of ice-cream because of its colours… any other Swedes remembering those triple-flavour BigPacks? (pronounced in your best Swenglish, of course: bigg puck).

Om nom nom

…and after that picture I found myself phyiscally unable to be serious anymore.

Strike a pose

The shorts are actually cutoffs from the first pair of jeans I bought after I moved away from home (hello 2004!), and the rest (shoes, tights, and top you can’t see under the shirt) is from a swapping party I had right before Queensday, the annual Dutch mayhem-turned-flea-market-turned-giant street party.

Jumping the fence

On that note – clothes swapping, not Queensday – or climbing fences unable to hold your weight in the middle of Vondelpark in broad daylight, for that matter – I have decided to try and entirely avoid new clothes this year, so Beyond Retro fits in pretty nicely in that picture. I’m quite looking forward to moving to Sweden shopping-wise, there are so many nice second hand places.

Hells yeah

K thx bye *666*

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Step 3

Would you believe it, that oxygen bleach + white vinegar + sunshine formula actually worked. Check out the dress now:

More white, less yellow

It’s just a tad bit offwhite, as opposed to being the colour of old people’s teeth. I might just repeat this a couple more times and it’ll hurt your eyes. Oh, and then it was the shoulder straps…

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Awesome dress from retro pillowcase

This is a 30 min dress from a pillowcase. The creator found a tutorial from 1992 that she’d once tried to talk her mum into letting her make with no luck, and decided to have another go two decades later.

Now here is my challenge: Can I make a version of this dress following fundamentally the same pattern and have it (1) Not look like a pillowcase (2) be a dress a 33-year-old, not a 15-year-old will want to wear (3) prove my mom wrong?

And so she did. I’m officially impressed like hell:

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Step 2

Spirits!!!

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Another one on the way…

The once-white-now-yellow dress is next in line. According to l’internet it seems like what you do with yellowed white clothes is to…

  1. 1. Soak it overnight in oxygen bleach (canal friendly!)
  2. 2. Wash it with white vinegar (canal friendly!)
  3. 3. Let it hang in the sun so the UV can do its work (canal friendly!)

Step 1 has commenced.

I'm soaked

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One down, four to go!

The bike dress was first on the list. I left my laptop at work last night to make sure I wouldn’t get distracted. The thing with the bike dress is that when I got it (from a friend – God knows where such a crazy creation was originally sold!), it was too small over the hips and too big around the waist, which would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to alter if it had had side seams.

It didn’t. So fixing it was a big job; in the end, I made about a million darts and used the seam allowance of the hem in the middle to make it wider. When I put the buttons back on I had to put another fabric at the back of the hem, since there was absolutely zero allowance any more. And then I only fastened the buttons in that other fabric, which led to a very ugly line of buttons down the front:

Before

Sean had the great idea of adding some fabric stiffener in between the two layers so I got to work with what I had, fusible interlining and a glue-on hem ribbon thing from IKEA.

Stiffen that hem baby

Then I sewed a single seam down each hem, on the inside of the buttons. Dress looked beautiful – only problem was a classic boob gap. I decided to add two mini buttons in between the crucial big buttons. I got these ones together with a bunch of other handy stuff for a few pennies at some flea market in Sweden.

Problem and solution

Only… when I’d put them on, I realised I’d put half of them IN THE WRONG PLACE, between the next pairs of big buttons down the line. Darwin Award!!! So I had to take the back sides of the buttons off again and sew them on in the right spots. After that, the dress was finished. Like, finished-finished! It was totally doable in a night as well, I spent an hour and a half on it I think.

Czech it aut!!

No gap!!! Also, hello gorgeous. Also, will try and take better outfit picture at some point, that mirror isn’t doing the dress justice.

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Five fixes in five weeks

Hello blog. Sorry I’m such a bitch ignoring you all the time.

In five weeks, I’m taking my bearded boyfriend Sean and my work partner Toby and moving to the land of the midnight sun, roaming polar bears, blonde Amazons and bathing nudists, i.e. Sweden (Stockholm to be exact).

This is no doubt extremely exciting news to the vast mass of readers out there, but I won’t go on about it – I need to get busy preparing the move. It makes no sense to bring a handful of half-finished projects 1400 km, so I’m going to try and push myself to fix one thing every week from now until the move.

1. Candy cane skirt
Yes, that’s the project I wrote about in January. If I finished it? ‘Course I didn’t.
Where the candy cane is hidden

2. Vogue dress
And yes, that’s old Voguers from last year. Mum helped me put some pins in it in August (!) to take it in a bit in the back. Did I do it? Is the Pope protestant? (Clue: No.)
Vogue dress

3. Mum’s skirt
Then I received an awesome skirt from my dear mother for Christmas (which she made from a thrifted pair of trousers!). It just needed some tiny adjustments around the waist to fit me like a glove. Did I…? To hell with it already, these rhetoric questions are getting on my nerves.
Sorry mum!

4. Bike dress
To top off all the others, this is a dress I re-moduled to fit my frame MORE THAN TWO YEARS AGO. It has been in need of an ever so tiny hem fix ever since. Because of the hem, I haven’t actually worn it since the first day after I originally re-made it. Oh my days! The madness!
That pattern is just WILD

5. Favourite summer dress
This one’s slightly different. I have worn and loved this dress ever since I got it from Carla, but it has gotten plenty of ugly, yellow stains of what I believe is sunblock over the last two summers. Question is, how do you bleach something without killing the whole effing aquamarine eco-system in the Amsterdam canals when you and your washing machine live on a houseboat that lets all the water through as quickly as an incontinent older lady? Also the shoulder straps need shortening or else the nudists are gonna see too much of my boobs.
Dainty

There you have it. All five needs to be sorted before Jun 30, or else I won’t bother bringing them. That’s a promise (which I will most likely break). Now where should I start? Top of the list? Bottom? Mid-way?

Posted in Life, Sewing | Tagged | 2 Comments

New blog layout

Trying this out for a little while. Not entirely done yet – I want to spice up the sidebar a little – but it’ll have to do for now. Always fun to do a little bit of CSS now and then… although wrapping my head around the Thematic theme framework is a bit more challenging than I expected.

Posted in Design | 1 Comment
  • Hello world

    My name is Malin. I used to live on a boat on stilts in an Amsterdam canal with my bearded boyfriend and a nesting duck.

    Now I live in a refurbished solitary cell for mental patients in sunny Stockholm with said bearded boyfriend and a handful of ants.

    During the days, I'm busy setting up my dream agency. Here I mostly blog about stuff I make.

  • From my magic drawer

    I have a little tumblr where I collect random things that catch my attention on the intrawebz.

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