hey 2015

It's 2015 - yay!

I'm excited for a new year with new opportunities. A few things:

There will be some posts showing you the Christmas presents I made but never had a chance to share on here.  I'm talking the 3 S's - socks, shawls & sweaters.

I'm embarking on a new creative journey in 2015 called 4 out 1 in. Basically it means I'm gonna use up(or sell or give away) four items from my stash before I can buy materials for a new one. That way I'll - hopefully - reduce my yarn stash a little and use up some of the lovely fabrics I have. Ideally, I won't have any old WIPs at the end of the year. Feel free to join me. The more the merrier!

Do you have any creative challenges planned for the new year?

ps: The shop reopens 5th of January but there won't be a shop update until January 19.

change is in the air

Oh my, the last weeks have been a whirlwind. In between studying for finals, writing research papers, going to conferences, job interviews and lots of shop orders, there hasn't been as much time to enjoy the Christmas spirit as I would've liked.

The holiday season and the approach of a new year always makes me think about my life and what I'd like to change about it. New ideas for blog content, new designs for my shop, new knitting/spinning/dyeing techniques. But also questions about what I want to do after school. I'm all set to finish my Bachelor's degree next summer. Then what? I'll take a year off because the graduate schools I want to apply to have very inconvenient application deadlines. I want to work for a big company, grow my small business, travel the world and stay home to cuddle my cat and knit everything that's in my revelry queue. Preferably all at the same time.

Change is good. I can't wait to see what life has to offer after school. Also, here are some shop news:

In celebration of the 100th dawanda shop sale, I offer free shipping on all orders (yes, that includes international orders too!) until Sunday, December 21st with the coupon code Blog100 in my online shop. I also added a sale section to the shop to make room for new designs in the next year.

I'll close the shop from Monday, December 22nd until the new year.

an update & questions to you

Here's a general life update. First, I'm sorry I took an involuntary break from blogging. I've had a few technical problems which I finally resolved yesterday by erasing the entire hard drive of my laptop and installing a new operating system. Though I spent too many hours trying to figure out all that computer geek language, there's also a positive side to it: I'm now owner of an incredibly fast and perfectly organized laptop!
I must admit that my laptop used to be a big data mess - my download folder hold more than 2.5k files ( probably half of that knitting patterns that I'm never gonna use) at one point. Ugh. But I've figured out a system to keep everything neat and organized on my newly installed laptop. I'll share my laptop organizing skills in a couple of weeks - if I can manage to stay on top of all the downloads, files and photos.

Also, I used the start of the semester (thus a rather small workload) to declutter my closet and my food supplies. I'm challenging myself to only eat homemade sweets till the end of the year. Which, basically, means lots of baking over the next two months. I made oatmeal cookies to substitute for the pound of candy and store-bought cookies I got rid off last week. They turned out pretty good especially considering it only takes 5 minutes to prepare the dough & cookies and another 10 minutes to bake them. You can expect more recipe posts over the next couple of months :) So feel free to join my in my store-bought candy/cookie/cake free end of the year challenge.

I've also updated my dawanda shop with a couple more drawstring project bags. I'm currently looking into etsy/dawanda alternatives since I'm not a fan of paying 10% commission fee on every single item I made. I'm currently considering big cartel and tictail. If you have any other recommendations or would like to share your experience with one them I'd love to hear them!

Last but not least, I'd love to know what posts you like particularly or if there's anything you'd like me to blog about. I'm currently collecting blog post ideas for the next months. It seems like I have way too many ideas (I might get a little too enthusiastic whenever Christmas approaches...) so I'd love to hear what you'd like to read / see.

So that's it, I'm gonna spend the evening on the couch reading Harry Potter (I'm 2/3 into the 6th book and I'm having a hard time to put the book down in the evening.). I have a nasty cut on my finger (I might be good at baking but I'm not a talented cook...) so I'm taking a break from knitting for a couple of days. Or did anyone figure out a way to knit with a band-aid on? The yarn always seems to stick to mine :(

ps: I updated the header to somewhat freshen up the blog a little. If you're reading this using a reader you might want to click here and have a look at it.

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?

busy but good

The first week of the new semester is over and I feel like I could use a vacation already. There's so much going on: catching up with friends I haven't seen all summer, making lots of new friends, founding a knitting club at uni, preparing for a craft fair and trying to manage to fit double the course load any sane person would consider taking into a timetable. Life is busy but good. I'm really thankful to have this cute lady to come home to every day. Coming home to a cat makes all the stress and worries from a long day go away.
Have a great week!

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'.

feels like sumer

It's starting to feel like summer over here - yay!!! Here are a couple of pictures I snapped in my parents' garden today; I just looove the colors nature has to offer. Seriously, if I had any yarn dying skills whatsoever I'd be inspired by nature and I'd try to recreate as many of these awesome color combinations as possible. In fact, I might try to dye some fingering yarn in the colors from the top picture once the term is over and I'm officially on summer break. I just have to hang in there for three more weeks...

Hope you're having a great summer so far :)

oh hey

Just checking in to say hey. Life has been pretty crazy lately with tons of assignments to do and finals to prepare for... only two weeks till my first final! I'm officially back to my '6 hours of sleep and lots of coffee' finals mode. But hey, only six more weeks until the term is over and I'll have two months off. Yay!!
Lina looks pretty much as exhausted as I feel right now. Not to mention that I had a crazy idea of sewing a quilt in between this whole study madness - you know, after finishing my dress I needed a new big project to work on. So I have a finished quilt top laying around that still needs a border but it seems to be impossible to find a matching white fabric. How difficult can it be to buy a solid white fabric? Apparently pretty difficult considering there only seems to exist 'white white' or 'yellowish white' fabric in Germany. Sigh. But I have two more local fabric stores to check before I start buying random white solids online hoping at least one of them matches my quilt.

In other news, I have a new roomie!!
Her name is Julia and she is the cutest. I have the feeling that we'll be getting into lots of mischief together. I'll introduce her proper on le blog when a) I have taken a picture of her and b) I have confessed that I'm one of those crazy bloggers who reveals some parts of her life online. So far she's handled my craziness (as in crazy cat lady, sewing addict AND funny knitter who regularly meets up with people twice my age and thinks it's normal to call them friends) just fine and even mentioned she'd love to learn how to knit. She's seriously awesome!

Gangnam Style

My friend Hyunji organized a 'Korean evening' last week. There were tons of interesting information on the Korean culture(including a Gangnam Style tutorial), the current political situation, studying abroad and of course lots of delicious food. Hyunji wore traditional clothes and we've all had a great time.
The following day, we met at her place to cook butter rice together. Or rather my friend Alina and I watched Hyunji cook and asked her millions of random questions on Korean food. I really need to buy a Korean cookbook so I can make tasty stuff like this at home. My new roomie's mom is Korean, too - so I hope that Julia inherited some of those awesome Korean cooking genes.

ps: my student life is pretty crazy right now with an exam coming up, several assignments due next week and I'll have my finals in July, thus there isn't much time to keep up with the blog community. I'll pop in from time to time but please don't take it personal if I don't get back to you right away.

around here

It's been an awesome week. My custom rubber stamps from simon's stamps came in the mail today and I'm in love!! There are only some minor German bureaucratic things I have to figure out before I can open my shop. I'll talk more about it in a separate post next week.
I finally got a proper solution for my broken Expedit desk. I love the shelf + desk combo but after the desk's leg broke off due to some minor kitty incident I temporarily added some desk legs my dad bought a while ago. It worked out okay but it didn't look very good and it wasn't very practical either. I finally decided to buy the Alex drawer unit. I love all the extra storage it adds to my sewing table and Lina loves sleeping on it :)

My seedlings are doing great and the first batch of zucchini plants is already planted in my parents' garden. I can't wait to harvest the first zucchinis in a month or so!!
Remember how I promised I'd try to take a picture of the cinnamon pull apart I made for our knitting club meeting last week? Well it's only a quick instagram snapshot but looking at it makes me wanna make another one. Anything with cinnamon never seem to survive more than a day around here.

lazy saturday

My kitty is having a lazy Saturday, staying in bed all day and even refusing to get up so I can make the bed. That's basically her daily routine; waking me up eeearly and terrorizing me until I get up to feed her. The minute she's done with her breakfast she goes back to bed and won't leave it until something exciting happens (either another meal or a visitor).
What a hard life...
I'm off to a knitting breakfast with some deliciously smelling cinnamon pull apart bread. Yum! I'll try to take some pictures before it's all gone - no promised though.

Have a great weekend!

a sad story

The summer term started almost three weeks ago and pretty much all the classes I'm taking this term seem to be very time consuming. But having classes from the early morning till the evening is pretty rad because it means lots of knitting time! (Also lots of walking across the campus and thinking 'I need to bring my big camera' whenever I see all the gorgeous trees. I still haven't gotten around to taking proper pictures so I snapped some with my cell phone the other day. I'm so happy it's finally spring over here!)
Yep, I'm one of those annoying knitting in class advocates ;)
So well I've been knitting the still light tunic and it's knitting up much quicker than I had expected. I took this picture two weeks ago after 3 days of knitting. Not bad considering it's knitted with a small needles and thin yarn, right?

(I got much more likes and comments on this picture than usual on instagram - maybe I should show bare skin more often? haha)

Add a short knitting break while I was studying for an exam and one week of intense in class knitting and I was just two rows away from dividing stitches for the pockets. Which basically means I was done with 3/4 of the body. Then I had a social club meeting (during which I knitted of course) and we went to a bar afterwards. Unfortunately, my knitting project bag didn't make it home afterwards.
I suspect that it must have fallen out of my bike basket on the way home because it wasn't found at the bar. Five skeins of gorgeous alpaca yarn, my bag with my scissors, spare needles, crochet hooks, my row counter, my cute handmade knitting bags... all gone. Not to mention Two weeks worth of knitting.

When I realized it was gone the next morning I was hoping that I had forgotten it at the bar or one of my friends found it and took it home. But so far, nothing. I rode the streets like 10 times, hoping I had dropped it and someone had put it on the sidewalk or something but apparently it's just... gone?

The guy at the lost and found bureau told me to call again next week but I don't think it'll show up again. As you can imagine, my motivation to start something new is pretty much non-existent and I'll need a couple more days to 'grieve' for my knitting bag. So please excuse the non-creative blog content for the next couple of days.

To cheer us all up, here's a short Lina story:
My parents have this really ugly 'Jägermeister' reusable bag that magically appeared in their house one day. Nobody admits to having brought it into the household but just getting rid off it wouldn't be ecologically correct either, so it gets some use occasionally. The other day I collected all my flats and flip flops that were still at my parents' house and the Jägermeister bag was the closest one so I grabbed it. The minute I got home and unpacked my shoes Lina jumped into the bag and whenever I try to take it away from her she gets mad at me and give me the look.
Jägermeister means 'master of hunting' which is pretty ironic considering Lina has been an indoor cat for her whole life and hasn't even managed to catch a spider (at least not since she moved in with me...). Isn't the master of hunting adorable? hehe.

Damp

This is just a quick 'in between classes' post. Here are some pictures I took during our short trip to Damp - a tiny village by the Baltic sea. There are two things in Damp: a rehabilitation center and hundreds of vacation homes that look alike and were built in the 70s and 80s. We spent three days up there visiting my dad. He's doing really great after his hip replacement surgery but giving him his camera wasn't a very good idea. He tends to do funny poses to get great shots - not a very good idea if you're using crutches and you're not supposed to do awkward poses.

On my birthday I went to Flensburg with my sister and mom to go yarn shopping! Can you imagine a better activity for birthday?! Here's what I got:

Drops Alpaca yarn for the still light tunic I've been wanting to knit forever. I casted it on a couple days ago and it knits up great! Easy pattern (I wasn't too sure if I'd like it because I wasn't too happy with Veera's instructions for the color affection shawl but so far I really like it!) and lovely yarn - as always. You seriously can't go wrong with drops alpaca!! I wanted to get a light gray color but the yarn store didn't have ten skeins of gray so I went with this gorgeous color. I'll share an update as soon as I have more than a couple of rows to show ;)

This yarn is actually more of a raspberry color - my favorite!!
I wanna make a long cardigan with some lace details. I didn't find a pattern I liked so I'm going to design my own cardigan! So excited!!!
But first I have to finish the tunic / dress....
I couldn't pass this yarn either... I wanna make the olive sweater by Helga Isager but $8 is rather pricy for a sweater pattern... maybe I'll try to improvise?

Last but not least:
a kitty picture to brighten up your day :)

around here

The other day I started some spring cleaning in my kitchen. I didn't take any pictures yet but my kitchen shelf is super clean and organized now. I bought some ikea food containers when we were at the h+h to store expensive yarns (I don't want any moths among my fibers...) but as I was reorganizing my baking ingredients they came in pretty handy to store nuts and cupcake decorations etc. Guess I'll have to buy some more containers for my yarn next time I'm at ikea.

During the spring cleaning I found three opened packages of walnuts. Whoops, I didn't know I have that many! Naturally I wanted to get rid off the two halfway empty bags so I decided to make walnut bread!
I didn't find any recipe that matched the ingredients I had at hand (it was about 9:30pm and I had no desire to leave my warm and cozy apartment just to get some walnut oil) so I had to improvise.
I ended up using four different kinds of (mostly whole wheat) flour (all aaaalmost empty bags!), dry yeast, water and oil, some salt and many chopped walnuts. I just mixed all the ingredients together and added olive oil until the dough felt right. I might buy walnut oil to taste the difference but the result with olive oil was pretty damn good, too!

Next time I make it I'm gonna write down the ingredients I used and put it into my 'approved recipes' book. I love baking bread and finding new recipes/combinations that work is so much fun!

Besides my bread baking adventures I don't have much to share. I'm working on a big and exciting project that is taking up much of my time and energy but it's probably gonna be a couple weeks before I can share the exciting news. Spring has finally arrived in my bedroom; the orchid I bought when it was pretty much dead started to bloom in my favorite shade of pink.

My kitty wasn't very convinced when I started exchanging my winter clothes for summer clothes. She prefers using the opportunity to sleep in my closet instead. Well I guess she's right and I can wait a little longer... if you follow me on instagram (@froggeddesigns) you might have seen that the clothes to yarn + fabrics ratio in my closet is almost 1:1. Luckily there's a lot more space in my yarn boxes now than it was last year. But I'm looking for projects to use up some of my worsted weight leftovers. Any pattern recommendations?

Hey there

I'm one of the gals who's most comfortable behind the camera. The rad thing about digital cameras is that you get to delete the pictures you don't like. I haven't taken many pictures of myself recently. Well let me rephrase that. I've taken a bunch but never considered any of them blogworthy. But whenever I see pictures of people who's blog I've been reading for a long time I think 'hey, it's so cool to see him/her from time to time'.
So yeah, here I am. Wearing my new color affection shawl. Which, btw, I blocked (it took over my whole kitchen. Thankfully my roomie wasn't there so I could make sure the kitty stays away from it.) and it's straight and really long now.
In celebration of Easter, I've painted my nails in a matching color to go with my outfit. But half a day later it's already starting to chip off. Apparently my nails aren't compatible with regular nail polish.

Happy Easter (if you celebrate) to you and a long and relaxing weekend!

around here

It feels like spring around here. We've had a couple of sunny and warm days that were real mood lifters. Remember my 'to do list' for March? I've made some real progress these past days; I filed my taxes (woohoo, feels so good! I've had this one on my mind since last fall and everyone in Germany makes such a huge deal out of it though it's no biggie at all if you just sit down and do it instead of just talking about it for months.), handed in an important paper, organized my craft shelf (I'll post a room tour soon, promised!) and started looking for a job.

Studying and painting my nails seem to go together so I've had many different colors these past days. Also I finally figured out the perfect raspberry banana smoothie. I treated myself to a new lipstick and it's officially my favorite - I've worn it every day since I bought it and got so many compliments. Also, I ran (at least) one mile a day since Saturday. It's only been five days but I feel so much better already. I love running because you don't have to feel bad for eating lots of cake afterwards ;)

Lina seems to have realized that spring is on its way, too; she's been super active lately. She used to just sleep on my bed/chair/windowsill all day long but lately she's been playful and active. Her favorite time to play of the day? The second I go to bed to read a couple of pages before I fall asleep. As soon as I lay cozily in my warm bed with a hot water bottle she starts running across the apartment and leaves a trail of destruction.

What have you been up to?