Our Alpine cabin

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All of a sudden, I feel strangely attracted to the so called Alpine theme. I ran across this old print in a thriftshop and it already sorta conquered a place next to my bedstand. Don’t it’s colours match perfectly with the Studio Ditte wallpaper? Also, I never feel comfortable with hanging pictures half across wallpaper, but I don’t find that a huge problem with this fellow. Overall, I think this one’s a keeper. :-)

Because I’m so happy with my Alpine themed print, my Love wondered if I already had thought of a name for the stag on the picture. I had to come up with something (quickly!) and so I gave the stag the most goofy name that popped up in my head that same moment: Bert. (If you say “Bert het Hert” in Dutch, it even sounds more silly. And don’t ask why Bert was the first name that came up…I already feel sorry for our future children ;-)). Being the couple that has the most fun about the most silly things, Bert has become a recurring character in our jokes now: “I think Bert will not be happy with this” and “Be quit, Bert is trying to get some sleep”. Aah, the silly joy a 1 € find can bring!

Obsessions and how they roll

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Yes, I am gonna annoy you with more reveries of my kokeshi obsession. This time I’m going right back to the beginning or the birth of my fixation for Japanese wooden dolls. Hoarding behaviour of this kind often gets triggered by something somewhere in the past. It’s a bit inception-like *): a tiny grain of seed is planted somewhere in the back of your head and once it has grown to a nice little tree you find yourself waking up in a home with, in my case, eight kokeshi dolls…and counting (‘cause, let’s be honest, if I can my hands on another nice item, I’ll definitely buy it). Let’s get back to that day in the year 2006, when I opened this magazine published by a Dutch painting company (Flexa Magazine, for the Dutchies among us).

There was this page with two abstract figurines on it that immediately caught my eye. The little seed was planted. I had to know what those figurines were and, more important, Where-To-Get-Them! Three years and a little tree in my head later (I’m getting all metaphorical), I bought my first two Japanse figurines in San Francisco. (I’m writing this like it’s some sort of heroic story about me becoming a billionair or something… I would have if kokeshi would be worth millions ;-))

So that’s the whole story, there’s nothing more to it. It’s not a very exciting (or long) one, but I just love to write about my little obsessions. As long as they’re harmless like this one, I’ll go ahead and cherish it.

My two sparkin’ new vintage additions to the little wooden doll flock:

*) Inception is one of the best movies I have, I dare to say, ever seen. It’s about planting information in the unconscious mind and that’s as far as I can explain what it’s about. But it’s so cool, you can really take my word for it! :-)

Gestures of love

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Two requests for wedding cake toppers this week. I love making them and I love how every bride (yes, it’s still mostly the bride that orders them! ;-)) has her own sweet or funny customization requests. There once was this bride that called her boyfriend “Bear” and she requested if I could make the groom a chubby little brown bear? Small gestures of love like this make me smile. (The cake topper worked out very well, by the way, and I actually fell in love with the groom’s little chubby alter ego, especially after the sweet words of his bride-to-be.)
All the ladies that crossed my path over the years are all so enthusiastic. Often I receive sweet messages afterwards with pictures of the cake topper on the actual wedding cake, which makes all the hard work even more rewarding.

Top: A purple theme for this couple.
Bottom: The first time I gave a bride bunny a birdcage veil and a little pinwheel in her bouquet. (Such an original idea!) The bride also sent me a picture of her boyfriend, to make his alter ego match. I hope she likes the result!

The Moving Cat picture

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Do you know those pictures of beautiful homes with a cat that’s moving through the picture (a bit like this one here)? Every cat owner knows that the one thing that is not feasable with cats is managing them. Those people know too that shooting a picture of a cat on the move at the right moment at the right place is sheer luck.

I tried to do it.

Molly was dozing a bit in our upstairs hallway and I sat on my knees on the other side, trying to make a picture. But as you know, where I am, Molly is, so by the time my knees hit the ground she was already next to me on the ground, meowing and purring (just doing her Molly thing).

I put her back on her place in the hallway, petting her, trying to get her to go to sleep again, just to make that one picture.
In the end I think it’s easier to stage a moonlanding than to try to stage a picture with Molly in it.

But finally, after a couple of staging-attempts, I was fast enough to run back to my camera and shoot this photo, just before Molly reached me.

Like I said, sheer luck!

New U.S. Polaroids

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 I took my Harry Potter Polaroid camera (common known as a Fujifilm Instax 210) with me during our trip through Utah, Nevada and Arizona last April. America is such a photogenic country and even more when you look to it through a Polaroid camera lense! I love the pictures I took so much, that the ones I took home seem now a bit too plain to me, actually.

So here we go, a whole new batch of snapshots (in no particular range)!

 A (very) old mobile home on Grand Canyon Camper Village. (The blob on the left is a big black dog on a very long leash.)
 A handpainted sign in Golden Gate park, our last day in San Francisco. It was a beautiful bright day, with perfect light to shoot Polaroids with (I learned that light is very, very important when it comes to taking pictures with a plain camera like this Polaroid).
Another sign warning for crossing Prairie Dogs in Bryce Canyon National Park. And yes, that’s snow on the sides of the road! The weather was bright but so cold (and I kept refusing to put on any other shoes than my flipflops (flipflops give me that extra holiday feeling), so you can imagine how cold my feet were that day :-)
It’s sometimes hard to be stubborn *LOL*

(I am changing the lay-out of my blog by the way, so please don’t pay too mutch attention to the fact that it looks a bit silly at the moment…working on it!)