And then there were small left overs of plain white drawing paper. And a need for some new bookmarks to take to school. No more needed to be said. Here you go.

We opened up Photoshop and created black frames, bookmark size, in which we typed 'Shhtt, be quiet. X (name of child) is reading a book.' We left enough room to make a drawing and printed that out on the left over paper.

Then it was time to get the favorite book out. One about a clever dog and his illiterate nephew the wolf. 

We searched for our favorite illustrations and set to draw them ourselves on the empty space on the bookmark. Some aquarel, for mum, and some felt tip coloring pencils, for the girl, later we decided to back them with a lovely patterned paper before finally laminating them. Personalized bookmarks really are the best!

How cool are these? Marije Tolman did the original illustrations and these are our personal interpretations. They look really similar I think!

And does anybody else agree with me that these drawings made by my 6 year old are really fab? Cause I think so. But then according to me I have the best kids in the world. Apparently that's being bias. Pfff...

This past Easter holiday the weather has been stormy as my daughters put it. The weatherman prefers boisterous, it being spring and all. Anyhow, pouring showers, hail, thunder, blustering wind and cold temperatures kept us mainly indoors. And there I began the great task of sorting through my stuff and chucking lots of it out. You can't be too careful in trying not to fall into the pitfalls of hoarding.

So when my eye spotted a big pile of crafty magazines, beautiful magazines but all read and just sitting there, I called upon my girls and we tore the lot to pieces. Fun pages and pictures were put in a box for future projects, the remains went to the recycling bins. 

And this is what one can do with pretty pages.....

The start of a collection of wonderful handmade envelopes! 

And all those cardboard monochrome pages that were scattered throughout the magazines? They became ,with the help of a  punch and a blistered and battered thumb, little jars filled with paper confetti...

So not only did I get rid of this big pile of untouched magazines, I also gained, neatly in a box and some jars, ready to use stationary and craft supplies. How often does that happen?

We're not big on Halloween over here. However, as we are enjoying a school break and time is upon us for a change, I did take a knife and did some carving. Mind you, no pumpkins.... but stamps.

An eraser, a knife, a fun drawing and a little later you have these guys:

The cool hedgehog with his iPod was made on the request of my music loving youngest... I just love that hedgehog... such a cool dude! The oldest went for a mouse. I went for all the other bits and bobs.

It's so quick and so much fun. I'm thinking I might do a complete forest scene... with some extra musical notes, a little balloon, perhaps some trees and then who knows... maybe I'll stamp them on some fabric and use that as part of a patchwork placemat? I'll see where inspiration takes me on this... and time. Let's not forget time....

Do you wanna be my friend?

I can offer you some cake...

Or a friendship bracelet...

This summer I've made us girls here a friendship bracelet. Because according to the little girls we are all friends and people should know this. They really know how to make a mum's heart melt...

So when I came across this tutorial I set up a sweatshop and started knotting embroidery floss for hours and hours until I started wondering if it wasn't a better idea to keep our friendship a secret to all. Fortunately for my little friends I was close to the finish line at this point in time and I managed to pull out three bracelets in a bid to keep the friendship alive.

For my bracelet, I went for 8 different colors in the pink and gray scheme which resulted in a broad chevron pattern.

For the smaller ones I used the same pattern but only used 4 different colors. One is all shades of pink, the other more of a soft rainbow palette.

But alas, submerged in so much friendship my wobbly mind forgot to take a picture of the other two bracelets. We'll mend that situation in the near futur.

Or at least that's the plan.

Stamps are in. I can't remember ever having such a choice of stamps when I was young.

And what's more, making your own stamps is in. So are the tutorials on 'how-to'.

Well, there isn't much 'how-to' to it, it's all about supplies really. And once I figured out which supplies to get, I had a go myself.

The aim was to make a stamp for two kindergarten teachers that would actually resemble them.

Mission accomplished!

Out of a thin layer of some kind of soft rubber - the craft store made a solemn pledge that this beats lino any day and that it works easily.... and oh my, they lived up to their promise- I carved a simple image of their face. Just to be on the safe side I added their name...

Then I stamped the image on a nice piece of vintage wood (left overs from old staircase spindles that we used when we did up the house and that the husband cut to size... cheers, husband!) and glued the rubber stamp on the other side.

I stamped the image once more on a simple linen drawstring bag that I made to measure et voilà....

A cute little bag with a cute little stamp.

And I only cut into my finger once! A very superficial cut it was too.

So now I'm thinking a set of stamps based on their favorite picture books for upcoming birthdays... Speaking of raising the bar just a tad...I'd better go and practice my drawing skills a bit more though.

A couple of weeks ago when the little people were enjoying a spring holiday and the weather was mildly warm, we ventured outside with a bunch of felting wool and some bowls of soapy water.

The aim was to make some felt beads in order to make a chain.

After about 2 minutes rolling a shapeless fluff of wet wool in my hands I thought to myself "I'd be surprised if the ladies will even make it to the end of their first bead. And I won't blame them cause it is a rather monotonous job..."

But I clearly underestimated their determination.

An entire chain of felt beads has now been added to their collection of dress up gear.

It is that time of year again. Secret Santa time! 

And this year I'm in with the initiative that Tess took. Oh yes. 

However this initiative is very local and many of my readers are excluded from it on geological grounds. And that doesn't sit well with me and my " t'is the season for giving" spirit.

So, the following magical idea came to mind. I'll do a second Secret Santa of my own. Besides from participating in the local Secret Santa, I'll send one special Christmas gift to one special reader of this blog. And I don't even want anything in return!

If you would like that special reader to be you, leave a comment below this post before the 31st of this month (that is October... making sure.... I keep forgetting dates these days). On November 1st an innocent hand will pick a lucky reader and I'll make sure to get in touch with him/her for some further contact details.

Please remember, whether you live local or international, whether you already participate in secret santas or not, anyone can participate here. And if you feel the "t'is the season for giving" spirit too, why not give someone else a chance to participate here by blogging about it over at your place!

And so the waiting game begins.... not to mention the guessing game..... until Christmas. What will I send , to who will I send it and when will it arrive? 

Well, that's for me to know and for you to find out. So come on and play along! I'm looking forward to crafting something for you....

And for those who are wondering, these lovely Christmas sculptures in Playmais are the result of a successful artistic collaboration between the oldest daughter and the husband of this household. 

Isn't it a bit early to talk Christmassy talk?

Well, yes perhaps. But I'm sure that crafters all around the globe are busy assembling their to-do lists in order to create some crafted goodness that will eventually find their way under the Christmas tree.

Being a sucker for organization and lists I'm no exception. And behold, I've even started and finished the first things on that list. I made these...

Two of the loveliest birds sitting on teeny tiny nests waiting to adorn the Christmas tree. These beauties were a craft kit created by Jennifer Murphy from And other silly things. The kits arrived last week and so on a sunny afternoon I set to work. A little over an hour later, two birdies were tsjilping away on my desk.

The birds will become part of our Christmas tradition. In our household each child has a special 'Christmas tree decorations' box. And every year I add one special ornament to each box. I'll do this until they eventually -not too soon though, really not too soon- leave home. By then, they'll have a box filled with beautiful vintage or vintage like decorations overflowing with memories... enough to decorate their first tree of their own with.

And then it'll look something like this...

Or of girls and mice to be more precise.

Meet "Piep" the tiny mouse owned by my 5-year old. No need for worries, Piep is a mouse of the stuffed toy kind.

Piep is also a mouse of the "I have a great setup going here" kind.... courtesy of her owner. And this is how that came about.

Last week I was gently informed that with autumn setting in Piep was getting a bit chilly at night. Could I possibly master knitting him a blanket. How difficult is that for a mouse of a mere 5 cm tall? So I met this request with a "yes, go ahead and pick out some yarn". Now my girl has a keen eye for quality because she came back with some leftover Soyeuse, a yarn that combines merino wool and silk. Just for kicks I made a small crocheted flower to brighten up the blanket. Really, if a tiny blanket is all it takes, might as well then be a cool blanket I figured.

The following day however I was gently informed that although the blanket was great, Piep really needed a bed to go with it. The suggestion of making one out of a cardboard box was greeted with "no no, a real bed from real wood". Granddad helped out and we had a small bed -5 by 13 cm-. I was asked to paint it and put some decorations on. Lucky as I was, my efforts were approved off by both the girl and her mouse.

But still all wasn't quite exactly right.... because "mum, you really do need a mattress and a pillow in a bed, right?". "Uhm, I'm afraid so. Okay, you go and pick out some fabric".

So there you have it. One tiny mouse with a great setup. Apparently Piep loves it all so much that he now never leaves his bed. Wherever the girl goes, an entire bed with a mouse in it follows.

One happy girl, one sleepy mouse.

Sssssshhhhhhhhhhtttttttt, I think we'd better leave him to sleep some more....

If only you could take a look into the hardware of my computer, you would instantly know that I am keen on our family camera. I'm not the type however to walk around with the camera all day long -perhaps I would if it wasn't so big and heavy and rather impractical swaying from your neck... who can tell- but nonetheless I own many pictures. Most of them feature my children. And to be honest it wasn't until they were born and we got a Canon Digital Rebel that we started to accumulate all those pictures.

It's all just so easy. You can take hundreds of pictures, throw out those that are no good, perform magic by means of Photoshop or leave them as they are. You can just store them on your PC as a sort of backup memory or you can print them in hundreds of ways to make them a tangible part of your life.

Personally I keep loads of them just on my PC.

Then every year I create a couple of albums with a selection of our most treasured shots. I use Blurb for that. "Why?" you ask? Well, first of all they are the only company that will print more than 120 pages in a book. And yes, I surpass that amount of pages without effort. Secondly, they are professionals with high quality products and not unimportant, they actually ship orders destined for the EU from within the EU so there are no import taxes to be paid. 

I also make a number of scrapbook layouts -digital, hybrid and traditional- throughout the year depending on my desire to do computery stuff.

And lastly I use some of them to scatter around the house in the shape of homely decor.

This is a good example:

It's on old type case -after all I am the daughter of an antiques dealer - that has been filled with a vast amount of pictures and some embellishments from my scrapbook stash. Getting the type case to look like this was quite time consuming. First it needed to be cleaned. The old type case came with some seriously old dust. Then I varnished it to give it back it's sheen and to prevent it from becoming too dusty again. At that point in time I measured out the dimensions of the squares and resized and cropped the dozens of pictures that would be going in it. Once they returned from the printers I cut them all out and did some tweaking to the dimensions with an exacto knife. Old type cases, as all things old, have the tendency to be a bit uneven and crooked in most places. Once the pictures did fit, I glued them in place and brought some variation to the overall case by using small embellishments in a number of squares.

The result is a cheerful and random glance into our daily life of 2008. 

It was hanging on the hallway wall ever since. But last week we redecorated that wall and put up some magnificent wallpaper on the wall in question. And whilst the wall looks brilliant now, the type case needs to move as the two don't match. For now it's patiently awaiting some repairs -mostly new glue on the pictures- on the floor of my workspace. 

The discussion on where to put it is still very much alive and although we are open minded there's one constraint. It needs to be in a place where the children can see it. They like nothing better than to sit back and reminisce in front of it. 

Where would you put it? Any suggestions perhaps?