an explosion of green

Yesterday, my roommate Julia and I spent the 'golden hour' outside taking pictures. We had so much fun and spending a Friday evening outside in the fields is great to unwind after a long and stressful week.
This weekend I have all kinds of fun things planned - organizing my craft room, cleaning and decorating my bedroom and spending quality time with friends, family and my sewing machine. I also have some not-so-tiny-anymore zucchini and pumpkin plants sitting on my windowsill that are aching to be planted outside.

Happy weekend!

a typical morning

Mornings are my favorite time of the day. The love the quietness, the beginning of something new, getting a fresh start and having all the possibilities of an awesome day. I usually get up at around 7am although my alarm clock doesn't ring until 7:15.

Lina is always the first to have breakfast. Sometimes she wakes me up at around 6:30 because she's hungry but I don't mind an early start.

After getting ready I make or reheat a cup of black tea. I usually make a pot and save a cup for the next day. I know that it's not 'the proper way' but it works for me.

Depending on when my first class starts, I either have breakfast on my couch (while catching up on mails/readings the news online/writing a blog post) or in the kitchen while simultaneously preparing my lunch. I definitely prefer slow mornings on the couch. Another essential routine is writing my daily to do list. Without it I often feel unorganized and since my daily planner is also where I write down my to do lists I also see my appointments for the day.

After breakfast I often make a pot of tea (rooibos or in this case white tea) that I either take to school in a tumbler or enjoy while studying at home.

Are you a morning person, too?

52 craft projects // camera strap cover

So my camera strap has been 'naked' for the past months because my old one shrunk quite a bit in the washing machine. Don't worry, my mom's camera strap is smaller than mine so it still fits hers and it didn't go to waste. But I was left with a bare camera strap for months and although I love my Nikon, I have to admit that the color combo black/yellow is not my favorite.

So today I decided to finally make a new camera strap cover. I got out some of my current favorite fabrics and started following this tutorial. I don't need the lens cap pocket because I use this pouch but I wanted a quick project and it looked rather easy and quick to make.

The fabrics I chose are all linen or linen/cotton blends. I LOVE the texture of linen.The two fabrics I used for the ends are kokka fabrics that I bought in Munich last summer. I only bought 20cm of each fabric because it was ridiculously expensive (24€ for one meter of fabric - crazy!?!) but I love them so so much I couldn't walk away from them. They are from Ellen Luckett Baker's 'Stamped' Collection - I love the entire collection. Thankfully they only had three fabrics from the collection, otherwise I would've spent much more...

The inside is just a coordinating, plain, thick cotton fabric. The cover is rather large so I hope it will still fit after the first washing - if not I don't mind making a couple more covers to have an excuse to use some of my favorite fabrics!

ps: sorry I was too lazy to take the camera strap off the camera to take a picture of the entire strap. But you've seen the most exciting parts ;)
This is project #28 of 52 craft projects I'm attempting to complete in 2013. You can see all the other projects I've complete so far here.

Day In The Life: September 2013

I think it's fun to document my daily routine from time to time. I'm still on summer break and my roomie isn't at home. An average day in e.g. November will look very different. So here's what Sunday, September 15 looked like for me.

7am Awake ahead of my alarm. Checking mails, texts, instagram, etc. on my phone before I get up. It's incredible how many texts I get at night although my friends know that I won't respond until the morning.

7:15am Cat food for Lina and black tea and a super quick banana smoothie for me. Yepp, the only straws I have are the ones I 'steal' at starbucks. Their size is just perfect and I don't like flexible drinking straws.


7:30 checking mails, reading blogs and cleaning my kitchen.

7:55am watching a Tom Odell concert online(I had never heard of him before Saturday when I saw him live in my hometown. But I'm pretty hooked since the festival!), drinking a second cup and writing a to-do list for the day. I don't seem to function without to-do lists... even on Sundays!

8:00am sewing. I'm currently working on a Christmas quilt. It consists of 24 log cabin blocks so far... not sure whether I wanna add more or add huge strips of a solid white fabric to make it more of a blanket size rather than a dishtowel size...

11am second breakfast and vacuum cleaning the apartment.

11:30am kitty play time!


11:45am taking a shower and getting ready for lunch at a fancy restaurant.

1pm lunch with my grandma, uncle, dad, sister and brother at a fancy restaurant. There was much more food than we could've possibly eaten. My favorite? The crème brûlée :)

4pm at my parents' house for some tea and homemade cookies (yupp, I can always eat cookies. Even after just spending two hours at a restaurant eating non-stop!). Also using the opportunity to wind the rest of the wool I need for my current knitting project. I don't have a yarn ball winder so I always use my mom's - one of the many great things about sharing hobbies with your mom ;)

6pm back home. Collecting some apples from the garden, checking on my very pathetic-looking plants(ever wondered why most bloggers stop sharing backyard pictures in September? It's not pretty, that's why.) and taking a short walk to stretch my legs.

7pm washing apples so I can make fresh apple sauce for breakfast tomorrow. Some more kitty playtime while talking on the phone to a friend. Also checking my to-do list what's left. Putting my timetable for the next term together. These are just the lectures, which means there will be like ten discussion groups added to this. I'm trying to squeeze all my classes in from Monday-Thursday so I can have Fridays off to work. We'll see about that...

9pm watching 'Tatort' (a very popular German TV series and the only television I watch because you can legally watch it anytime you want for a week after it has aired.) and there may have been a couple of sheep cookies involved... Also drinking one last cup of tea (rooibos this time) and knitting. There's a sweater in the making :)

11:30pm talking to my mom on skype who's currently in France working at a quilt show. Of course Lina is always close. Finally going to sleep at 1:30am.


I mainly documented my day because I realized that I've been taking hardly any pictures this summer. I've thought about printing some photos for my project life album (I have almost two months of catching up to do. Yikes!) but really, there isn't much. I can't wait for fall because fall means MAKING stuff and having stuff worth taking pictures of. Hopefully there will be many things worth photographing in the next months :)

some sheep and a lighthouse

I'm back from a two-week vacation to the land of the sheep and lighthouses - also known as Denmark. The lighthouse pictured above is called Rubjerg Knude. It's been mostly covered by shifting sands for the past years and it attracts lots of tourists every year. To get to the lighthouse and the dunes you have to walk for about 15 minutes. On the way to the lighthouse we found some sheep. Should I mention that we didn't actually make it to the lighthouse because we considered the sheep to be more interesting?

We spent quite a while watching and photographing the sheep. There was a huge variety of sheep in all different colors and with different furs; not to mention all the different characters.

Watching sheep always reminds me of 2nd grade. My elementary school class had 'adopted' two sheep that were in the school yard. We would feed them and take walks with them across the yard. They were definitely responsible for my love of wooly animals and all things fiber related.

This particular lamb reminds me of alpacas - doesn't it have the same cute, friendly look as alpacas usually have?

a murder.

I have something very sad to share with you today. I witnessed a murder today. It happened right outside our bathroom window. The murderer tied his victim up and waited until it stopped moving before it sucked the life out of the victim.

I'm not too fond of flies but I felt sorry for this one. I also feel sorry for myself because this is the most exciting thing that has happened to me today. Being stuck inside buried under textbooks kind of lowers the standards of what I consider to be 'interesting'.