And then I was hooked.

In our bathroom at home we had these two big rugs made out of this textile yarn. Before it was cool. My mum made them. From yarn she bought at a big textile factory for I believe a very low price. Which is what the price should be considering that it's a waste product. I think it was a a year ago that I found this ball of yarn in a little store in France and bought it for not such a low price but well. Not soon after I finished my first little basket. I made one for my sister as well and then some time later did a huge one for... storing all my textile yarn!

So when I went home (the rugs are don't exist anymore), my mum told me to go up to the attic because there should still be in some corner some of the textile yarn that she bought some ten, fifteen years ago. Well, there was not only a little, but masses of this yarn in several different colours! Awesome! <3 

Books for long summer days.

Summer time is reading time. No, winter time is reading time. No, summer time! No, winter time! Alright, alright, both are! I just read some really nice books lately and I thought, as I'm always looking for some good one you might be doing the same. 

Jojo Moyes: Me before you

Quite a cheesy covet to be honest but it was highly recommended by the sales person at the book store. Not quite convinced at first, the book caught me and didn't let me go until I was through. Its about a girl that lives in a tiny british village. She has never been ambitious, lives with her parents, has the same boyfriend for the last 5 years and is quite happy with the job she has at the little cafe. Until she gets fired. Forced to find another job as everyone relies on her income, she starts taking care of this guy that quadriplegic. He is super grumpy, makes her feel uncomfortable and feels sorry for himself a lot. But after some time, he slowly... slowly... opens up to her... But of course there is catch and they don't have much time to find their ways, making choices, understanding choices, trying to change choices. 

John Green: Looking for Alaska

There is this boy, a teenager, leaving home to go to boarding school. For the first time, his life is interesting. He has friends, gets enganged in behaviour like smoking, breaking curfew and falling in love with the most fenomenal girl he has ever seen. She is smart, sexy, witty... and becomes a real friend that gets him girls, gets him out of trouble and gets him some adventures.  Then suddenly a tragedy happens and nothing will ever be the same for anyone. In the book, the days are counted. It starts with "...  days before" until it reaches 0 and time is counted as "... days after". I really loved that book and read it way to quickly that I ended up on holidays without anything to read and no bookstore with English books anywhere to be found. Also, I might call my daughter, if I will ever have one, Alaska. 

John Green: The fault in our stars. 

Just finished this book a few days ago. After reading "Looking for Alaska" I wanted to read some more by John Green and my choice fell on this one. Its about Hazel who has cancer and it will kill her at some point. But not at the moment. At the moment she is busy falling in love with Augustus, who also had cancer, lost a leg but is considered fine for several years now. When she has to stay in intensive care at the hospital for some days, she realizes that she is a grenande. One day she will explode and hurt everybody that is close to her. She tries to keep her distance to Augustus which is hard for her and him. In the end its not sure who is more at risk of getting hurt... God, I love this guy, next book is already ordered! By the way, the movie is coming out 2014 apparently, which is both cool and scary. 

Pesto this, Pesto that.

I could be called a rebell when it comes to following recipes. Cause I never do it. There is always something I leave out or put in. Mostly though because I don't have everything that would be required. Might also be the reason why I'm not an outstanding cook but only mediocre. 

But this time changing the recipe worked out so well that I will share it here. So I decided to do some pesto. We didn't have any parmesan cheese so I had to send my boyfriend to the store to get some. Pesto without parmesan is really hard to pull off and even me as a recipe-abandoning-chef would not try that. I actully did two types of pesto and although only one of them is truly heavenly, I will share both with you. If you ezpect a culinary miracle I would go somewhere else though :)

Pesto Rosso with tomatoes and walnuts

• a handful of walnuts
• 4-5 dried tomatoes
• 3 fresh tomatoes
• parmesano
• 100 ml of olive oil
• three basil leaves
• salt
• peper
• cayenne pepper

So I fried the nuts in the pan without any oil (they actually burned a little which was too bad). Then I put them into a tall bowl and mixed them with the rest of the ingredients. I have a hand blender that suceeds quite well in shredding everything into little pieces. Towards the end you can add some salt and pepper and other spices as you wish. 

Pesto Verde with mixed nuts

• a good handful of mixed nuts 
• two handfuls of basil leaved
• parmesano
• some parsley
• 150 ml of olive oil
• salt
• pepper

I had a package of mixed nuts which were meant for salads. There were some pumpkin seeds, some sunflower and some pine nuts in there. I also fried them (and this time didn't burn them), mixed them with the other ingredients and blended everything. Took me much more time to blend everything into a nice sauce but taking the time was worth it. Although I don't mind tasting little pieces of the nuts in the pesto. 

So now you probably wonder which of the two the truely amazing one and which the mediocre one is. Well, my boyfriend and I both like the green pesto much better. But yeah, thats just us :)

ERASMUS - The ultimate revival.

Three years ago I spent some time in Sweden and I met the most wonderful people there. Living with on of them for a year now, the two of us thought that its time to organize a revival and invite a bunch of people that made our time there so very special. Seven of them came and spent a crazy weekend with us in Ulm.

The first one that arrived, Michal from Bratislava, was able to enjoy some quite hours before all the rest invaded our appartment around midnight. Although I dragged him into chairoplane that made him a little sick. It didn't prevent him from joining me to the "Ballon Illumination" and taking great pictures with his old school analog camera that you can see below.

The next morning, after having a beer, we went up the Münster, which is the highest church tower in the world. Yes, its true. Okay, you don't have to believe me. No one ever does. Let me google that for you. The weather was perfect although we couldn't spot the alps. Afterwards we had some pizza, sharing stories about Erasmus, who is living where now, doing what, who made out with whom...

At night we packed a huge picknick basket, went over to Bavaria and watched the famous "Lightning Serenade". That's when they put 8000 little floating candles onto the Danube accompanied by some classical music. It was the first time I saw it and although we didn't choose such a good spot, it was very nice to watch.

The next day, we went to the lake to make good use of the most awesome summer weather. We had another picknick there, swam, played some games and finally left because most of our guests had to catch their trains, cars or flights.

Thank you all so much for coming! We had a blast <3

DIY - Pompoms

A quick and easy way to bring some summer feeling into your home are these great pompoms. I stumbled across the tutorial on www.puppenzimmer.de and felt an instant itch in my finger tips. So the next day I ordered the silk paper on amazon and started folding. Its really easy and even if you don`t fold everything in a very exact and orderly fashion you will still get a great result. And as I could only order a 12-colour package, I will make several more in every colour of the rainbow. 

I am really not a hero on writing and documenting the process but on this website you will find a step-by-step tutorial for awesome pompoms! Sorry its in German but if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment (hahaha, nobody ever leaves comments). 

And if you lay beneath them they turn ever so slightly which is very calming. So its also a great idea to hang them over the bed of your kid (if you happen to have one).

This is our guest room by the way, and yes, our guests have all reported a deep and very restorative sleep so far.

Rineke Dijstra - The Krazy House

When we were in Frankfurt we went to the Museum for Modern Art and saw the exhibition of Rineke Dijkstra. She took videos and pictures of people growing up, dancing, discussing, trying... She mostly did this in a well known club in Liverpool called the Krazy House. She took pieces from the collection of the museum of which she thought match or contrast her own approach and put them next to her own work. We had a little guided tour and the woman told us about the process of setting up an exibition. Rineke Dijkstra for example requested very special rooms to show her movies. Not being able to fullfill all her wishes, they had to build some spaces within their spaces. So the visitors would walk into a room to find another room that has been put in there. 

Friendly faces.

Traveling at the moment is driven almost entirely by the wish to see people rather than visiting places. I could take a week off before Easter so we made plans to visit my old student city Enschede in the Netherlands and catch up with my former housemate in Amsterdam. We were totally excited so it was kind of a downer when our car told us one day before we wanted to leave that something doens't feel right. A lot of calls, hours of waiting and several hundreds of euros later it seemed that we can finally pursue our plan and the next day we were in the car and on our way to the great country of cheese and tulips. After 400 km though our car began to heat up, temperature of the engine rose and some seconds later we found ourselves in the nearest rest area along the highway not knowing what to do. Unfortunately, we had two passengers with us who were equally devestated. After some calls, some talking to the other car drivers at the rest area and some waiting in a very cold car, our passengers found a woman that agreed to take them to the next trainstation and our insurance called us back to confirm that help is on the way. And some twenty minutes later help showed up in form of a big yellow truck from the German Automobile Club. He found out quite quickly that he couldn´t do anything for us right here so he took us for a little ride through the nice surrounding area, up and down the hills until we arrived at a garage. 

The yellow angel coming to save us. 

Beeing a local he knew all the garages and the owners so with a quick call he called them from the car to tell them that we are about to come which was very smart as it was getting dark and the garage was about to close. They fixed it within twenty minutes because as it turned out the garage that fixed our car in Ulm forgot to close on crucial valve. Pretty stupid and really not worth the trouble!! But at least it meant that we could continue driving and reached Enschede only with a three hour delay. 

It was great to see my dear friends there again! We had such a wonderful time strolling through the city, seeing everything that had changed and everything that is still the same. We went to the Paradijs which is a very special place. You could almost describe it as a very arty greenhouse. There are huge plants growing from the ground to the very high ceiling of the former ware house. There is a pond with tortoises and fishes and there are staird made out of old bathroom sinks filled with cement leading up the the ceiling. 

Paradijs.

 The next day all four of us went to Amsterdam to visit Moa. Moa and I lived together for almost four years and havn´t seen each other for more than two years. It was freezing when we arrived but we managed to see most of the sights just by wandering along the canals. It was so nice to see Moa again after all those years! Too much to catch up on, we lacked three more weeks in order to exchange everything that has been going on. 

Having fun on the "I AMSTERDAM" in front of the Rijksmuseum.

We heart.

For the next day we wanted to visit the country side and Moa told us about a great second-hand store in a place called Broek in Waterland, not too far out the city and close to the Ijsselmeer. The Netherlands are great for second-hand shopping! They have those great shops called "kringloopwinkel" and you can get furnitures, clothes, plates, pots, pans, type writers, sleighs and skis there. I found a seed box made out of dark brown wood where I can put all my crafting material in that usually fly around on my desk, in my drawers and everywhere else. Then we went to Marken which is a little village on an island in the Ijsselmeer. Its just wonderful and very picturesque, I believe is the right word here. Little houses painted a rich dark green and white, huddeled together as if to keep warm in the icy wind. 

We called them ice mushrooms.

The ferry taking Moa away again. 

Back in Enschede we continued our tour to all the local Kringloopwinkel and got some very cute things. I also bought tons of presents for my family who miss all the advantages of me living there: the market, the plants and flowers, the cute shops, the cheese, the sirup waffles and the great licorice. 

Cute little drawer, still too big to fit into our car.

After some great days there, we went to Frankfurt to see my family for Easter. On Saturday we wanted to go to the fleamarket but after two hours walking along the Main not catching a glimpse of it anywhere we gave up. Turned out that the fleamarket does not take place during Easter weekend. On Sunday we were a little luck with the weater and went to play miniature golf! My brother-in-law got into a fierce competition only to find out in the end that my mum beat us both! 

After this, we went back home, hearts filled with old and new memories of friendly faces. <3