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…

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.)

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Good idea.

Really.

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

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).

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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

Another P220 Amazon Estate, parked in Västerås:

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

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

A Morgan Roadster on Södermalm:

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:

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

Updates will follow on this one.

Apparently it’s German.

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.

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

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

(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!)

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!

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.

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.

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!(!)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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).

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

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.

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.

K thx bye *666*

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…

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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!

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.

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?