Enjoying fall to the fullest

For some reason the weather last weekend turned beautiful here in our parts of Germany and I enjoyed a weekend full of fun with my son.

Saturday morning we took my older sister´s offer to go to the indoor pool with her. Since she is a volunteer at the local DLRG (a life-savings-organisation), we were allowed to go for free. Good start, wasn´t it?

For my son it was a first going to the indoor pool and he had a lot of fun jumping into the water for an entire hour.

After lunch we decided to make use of the beautiful weather and to visit a small zoo nearby. They have a few larger animals, but mostly its chicken, fish, pigs, rabbits, and the like.

From the rabbits we went on to visit the curious tiny mini pigs.

Next on the agenda: Camels and geese.

The whole zoo started out as a petting zoo at a local farm and has grown for the last couple of decades. I remember coming here when I was still very small.

After watching the different animals, we stoppend at the playground to take a break.

After watching this beautiful moment between mama and baby lama, we went home for cake and tea.

On Sunday the beautiful weather continued, so we went to visit the Biebertal (Beaver-Valley), which is a beautiful valley with a forrest and a lake to go for a walk.

Another break at the playground:

I mean, who doesn´t like to have fun on a playground?

I´ll be back tomorrow with updates on my 2 projects in the making.

2 Projects in the making …

 There are two things I started working on. Here is a sneak:



Would you like to have a closer look?
Here is Number 1:



In a moment of craziness, I decided that it is time for me to learn how to knit. Last night I spent hours trying to figure out how all this works when you have two left hands and all of the instruction videos on youtube are by right-handed women. I´ll share my “progress”  soon.

Project Number 2 includes these items:



I´ll share soon what I am going to do with these items. But maybe the colors are a hint as to whom will be the recipient of my creatitivity ….

Happy Wednesday everyone!!!

It´s Pinterest Challenge Time!!!

For the second time this year Katie Bower and Sherry and John Petersik invited all of the DIY-bloggers out there to participate in the Fall Edition of the Pinterest Challenge.
Well, at first I was up for the challege, but had no clue what to work on..... Until Friday evening, when my older neighbour came over and asked me, if I was interested in a little wooden chair for our son. Sure I was.
Off she went to get the little stool from her basement and came back with this:



 
Here is a snip from my `Boy´s Room` Pinterest board:




As you can see, I decided on making a little time-out-chair from my neighbour´s gift.
I had to think for a while about what I would do exactly with this chair, but then decided on using a bit of an Ikea curtain found a few months ago at the `as is` section for $3.00.
Here is the fabric with all the other supplies I got for about $10.00 at the hardware store:



I started by detaching the ´pretty´ peach colored seat from the 80s:



Then I lightly sanded the wood:



After that I used spray-primer (especially since this was the first time I ever used this brand of spray-paint).



While the spray-paint was drying, I worked on covering the seat with new fabric.



Just make sure you have a bit of fabric overlapping on each side.
Once that was done, I started giving my chair two light coats of blue spray-paint.


         (This was after the first coat)



Here you can see the chair coming together, but maybe you can also see from the picture that the white primer was coming through the blue. I decided to let the paint cure over night and to get on another 1 or 2 coats the next day. (Yes, I had to go out and buy another bottle of spray for that plan).
Once all that was done and the paint had time to dry another night, I reattached the seat to the base. Ready for the small reveal?
Here is the chair before and after:



How cute is that? For sure this chair is going to fit right in with the color scheme I have in mind for my son´s room. Here is another close-up of the seat:



For sure I love how the chair turned out and the Pinterest Challenge is accomplished :).

Linked up at the Pinterest Challenge, November Before and After Party, Frugal Friday and Show and Share Day.

Here are the outfits

As promised, I went through my collection of work clothes to make inventory of  possible outfits. Upfront, here is a picture of many of the items I currently own together in one picture:

As you can see, so far I have lots of black and gray clothes, but not that much white or blueish items. Either way, the collection of skirts, dresses, shoes, blouses and shirts already provides for a whole bunch of outfits.

Here are a few examples of outfits I can create from the items above:
First, three outfits using the gray knee-long skirt.



Now, an outfit using my black dress:

Finally, two outfits utilizing my black knee-long skirt:

Raiding the Basement

I went into my family`s basement the other day and found a few pieces of furniture that are no longer used and which I will be able to take to our new apartment.

First of all, there is my old desk, which is made of solid wood and still in great condition:

Since every piece of furniture is parked in between a whole bunch of other things it was a bit difficult to get adequate pictures. Either way, here is my old desk. It has 3 drawers on the left and a door with deep storage on the right.

Since it is solid wood, I might stain the desk. However, since it is so old, I also might as well paint it and give it some pretty new knobs. At this point everything is still undecided but I will keep you posted once I update the piece.

Another item I will be able to bring to our apartment for free is the old table from the breakfast nook - also a solid wood piece:

As you can see, the table has beat up legs and had to suffer through a flooded basement a few year back. Other than that I plan to achieve a two-toned effect with table. The top will be stained dark and nice rustic-looking and the legs will go off-white. I plan to find parson´s chairs at a good price for these and I already found a few sites online which offer decent prices on quality chairs.

Finally I also took pictures of old dining chairs which I might work on as an alternative. I am not too sure yet if I want these or not but maybe you can give me your opinion whether they are worth the effort of recovering the seats:

We´ll see. They kind of look hard to take apart so I am not sure to start the recovering. But it just might be worth a try.

Dressing up for Work

Just about to start a new job here in Germany, I have been playing around with ideas for filling up my work wardrobe. The thought of having to buy a whole bunch of new outfits left me nervous, as I didn`t bring too many items with me from the United States (due to my previous job´s dress code, I had nothing but black items and I didn`t want to waste important suitcase space with all of those black suits).

I started searching around on youtube for tips on how to create a wardrobe with many outfits and low upfront cost. After watching many videos I stumbled upon this one which seems to be an excellent start:

For those of you who can´t watch the video, here is a short explanation:

1) Select 4 colors, each of which can be combined with all of the other 3 (e.g. Black, Gray, White, Red)
2) You need 5 tops in the selected colors
3) You need 4 bottoms in the selected colors
4) You need 1 good jacket (blazer)
5) Additionally: Black Pumps and a Trench Coat

Now, you will be able to basically combine any of the tops with any of the bottoms, either with or without the blazer jacket.

Great! That works for me. Since I love to wear teal and blues, I created a moodboard with clothes in the color scheme Black - Beige - White - Teal:

 

I have to admit I chose more than 10 items, but I can already see how verstile a wardrobe like this would be. Most of the bottoms can be combined with any of the tops and shoes. There won´t be much of a problem when finding something to wear to work because everything works together.

Here are a few possible combinations drawn fromt the board above:

The white shirt can be tugged into the skirt and worn with or without the jacket. Pumps and a cute purse complete the outfit.

Here I combined a black skirt, with matching pumps and blazer. To add some color, I matched the basic items with a colorful blue shirt and teal purse.

 

Last weekend I spent some time going through my own pile of clothes to take invetory. I realized quickly that I have a few gray items but nothing in beige, so I didtched the beige and decided instead on this scheme:

Black - Light Gray - White - Teal/Blue

On yesterdays trip to the mall, I found some great items following my new color scheme and tomorrow morning I will work on creating a few outfits with the things I already own.

Stay tuned ...

Bye bye summer!

We had beautiful weather in Germany the last couple of weeks, and everybody wanted to spend as much time outside as possible.
This included several bicycle tours and visits to the ice cream place.

On Saturday we went to the close-by "Möhnesee", which is a relatively large lake in the area with beautiful bike-ways along the water.

It was just the right temeperature to ride our bikes and the tour was just fun.

One of the many spots we had a break and took pictures.

Towards the end of our 20 km bike ride we crossed one of the bridges that spans accross the lake and found this:

Can you see the locks that are all over the protective fence?

Another close-up:

People attached those locks with their names engraved on them. These locks were all over the protective fence and I thought this was a very cute idea. Instead of writing stuff with pens all over the beautiful brick-tower, people got creative and added this fun little detail to the bridge.

Imagine going back every once in a while and searching for "your" lock!

Anyhow, welcome to fall, apple pies, cooler temperatures, fallen leaves, and the return of hot chocolate. I am so excited!