Picturesque Month ~ 06'16

~California Pops before going to see 5 Seconds of Summer. Teenage me would have been really into those cuties! 3/5 Bazooka Points for feeling old having to wear earplugs because of screaming girls.
~Summer at Tegeler See. Hung out on my brother's boat a couple of times. Sadly I lost my sunglasses going Stand up Paddling there...
~ Astrid S played a special showcase in our entrance hall at work. 4/5 Bazooka Points for a wonderful acoustic experience.

~ Whenever I take my bike to work I go past this building that looks like its flipping me off. And I always have to think about Rob from my favorite Youtube channel Threadbanger.
~I have gathered a bunch of fabrics over the time and it's always diffcult to choose a favorite for a new project!
~ Finally had my bat and cupcake tattoo revived with some new ink. One of my best lady friends Sonja got me these tattoos 7 years ago in her living room. Now she's got her own tattoo place and a lot more experience and I'm thrilled about my colourful back decoration. When's the next appointment?

~ Beautiful view out of my office window - double rainbow <3
~ I was once again invited to a blogger event at the Dawanda Snuggery. It was summer themed and they had the most beautiful decoration set up by dear Lu and her colleagues. The food was amazing as usual and we made cute felt and faux leather brooches.

~ We have these awesome swings in our entrance hall, so when I get a visit at work we can swing together!
~ Finally got my What we do in the Shadows kickstarter reward <3
~ I got a bunch of rhubarb from our local foodsharing station, so I decided to make a pie and I turned the leftovers into syrup. So delicious!

~ Love for the birthday girl!
~ I took my birthday week off to enjoy some quality time at home, just for getting shit done mostly.
~ The husband made me my very own wand for my birthday! I love it! So pretty.

~ The husband loves vietnamese food so much, he wants to make sweet sweet love to it!
~ I got mail! Kawaii japanese candy mail! Loved the matcha Kit Kat!
~ Ramen!

~ Fun happy beach times!

~ Dramatic wall art.
~ Pretty wall art.
~ Pretty birthday card!

~ For my birthday we went on a boat trip through the Spreewald. It was so pretty!
~ Such an idyllic scene!
~ It's official. I'm too dumb to walk down the stairs. Sprained my ankle on our 2nd wedding anniversary... good thing it wasn't anything more serious, but still...

DIY Felix Felicis Necklaces ~ Harry Potter inspired Baby Gift

     

It's been a while since my last Harry Potter inspired crafts (Cauldron &Pumpkins & Potions Medicine Cabinet), so when one of my colleagues had a baby earlier this year and named him Felix I knew I had to make her something Felix Felicis inspired, because she's also a huge Harry Potter fan.
So I looked online and found a bunch of tutorials on how to make Felix Felicis potion necklaces (for example in this Youtube video). I was originally thinking of just making one big potion vial, like Harry had in the movie and putting this in a wooden box I had lying around, but I only found these tiny teardrop vials online, so I decided to make two necklaces for the parents to wear.

So I started out with a wooden box (a colleague gave this to me a while back, because she knew I would find a way to upcycle it, it had pralines in it originally), a silver and a golden necklace set and the teardrop glass vials with a tiny cork.

This is what the necklaces looked like put together, but without the potion inside the vials.

I mixed the potion fluid with some gold paint and water and carefully inserted it into the vial with a thin paint brush. I still got it all over the sides...

I made 4 vials in total, just in case I screwed up one and I also wanted one for myself. I left them to dry for a couple of days to make sure the paint dried completely.

Now to the tricky part: The wooden box. I really enjoyed my last wood burning project (Weasley Family Clock), so I definitely wanted to decorate the box with a wood burner. Finding the right design was the tricky part. At first I thought of writing something like "All the luck in the World" of "Good luck" on the front, but I thought that was too cheesy. So I came up with the crest symbol and writing the baby's initials in the Harry Potter font.


From the first draft to the first burning. The lines were all super uneven from pushing the burner not enough or too much. Each wood is different! If you want to try this yourself make sure you try out the burner in a place that can't be seen to test how long and hard you have to burn into it.

To make the box look more used and vintage I thinned out some wood stain to darken the wood. I tested the stain on the bottom first to make sure it's not too dark. Make sure you are quickly covering the whole surface, because it is absorbed very fast. Otherwise it looks like a bad paintjob.
Once I tested it on the back I covered the whole box inside and out with the stain.

After the first coat was set and dry I went over everything outside the crest again to make it even darker. The burned crest looks so much better now with the fat lines instead of the two thin ones. This wasn't really the right wood for intricate designs. So I'm really glad I didn't go with the writing!

And here's the finished box:



I covered it with a coat of clear laquer to make sure the stain wasn't rubbing off on anything.

The husband had to interrupt his gameplay to let me back in from the balcony, because the spraypaint was pretty stinky ;)

I sewed up a small pillow with two button tucks to set the necklaces on.

Now all that was left was to glue the Felix Felicis label to the vial. I printed out the label in the right size for the vial and carefully cut it out. Then I used normal craft glue that dries see-through to attach it to the vials and let it dry overnight.

And then I was done!



I got to give my colleague this gift a couple of weeks ago and she loved it! I'm really happy with the way it turned out and hope that they will get to cherish this gift forever <3

Oh, by the way. I shared this with my fellow crafters in the Facebook group Try it, don't buy it! and one of my favorite Youtube crafters Annika Victoria commented on it saying that it's amazing and that she wants to be my friend so she can get awesome gifts like this as well :D Haha, definitely an ego booster!

Picturesque Month ~ 05'16

~ Made it on the Dawanda Lovemag mailing list. Thanks to my dear Lu <3
~Thrifty fun on May the 4th.
~ New books! One for me and one for the husband ;) Alright, his was for work.. Mr Ayoade is soooo weird! I love it.

We had a long weekend in May and one of my best friends and I decided to go on a three day bike trip including a day trip to Moryn in Poland. I tried out my new bike seat and had no issues at all! after 225km in three days the only thing that hurt were my legs and my arms. I couldn't really move my right hand from gearshifting so much as we had a bunch of steep roads to climb and go down. But it was really worth it and so cheap since we stayed in Brandenburg at my parents house and at her's the second night.

~We stopped at the polish market right behind the border to take a lunch break. They have so much weird shit there!
~ Homemade ice cream! Trying to get off the sugar and still have my icy treats, so I get frozen fruits at the store, blend them up with a bit of juice and stick 'em in the freezer. It gets super hard, but this way I don't eat too much ;)
~ We still have a bunch of Star Wars Posters lying around at work. Anyone interested?

~ Saw GOOSE live at Privatclub again after ages. I probably saw them about 5-7 times before and they rocked the club as usual. 4/5 Bazooka Points for me getting old and having to wear ear plugs..
~ Just wow! I get to manage the Jazz sales for a bit now and our biggest release this year was Gregory Porter's new album. I got to see him at the Berlin philharmonics and it was awesome! 5/5 Bazooka Points for oh so much soul.
~ The Strumbellas belong on a much bigger stage than the former Magnet Club one's (now Musik & Frieden), not only because they almost didn't fit on the stage with their seven band members, but also because of their awesome sound. 5/5 Bazooka Points for reviving The Decemberists feels.

~ Had to get out my full pastell goth gear for this year's Eurovision and our contestant Jamie-Lee.
~ She did a really goo job performing and did not deserve the 0 points... and you're telling me the Eurovision is not political...
~Summery view from Universal's new terrace where we enjoy a coffee break every afternoon.

~Guess what? I'm part of the Hauptstadt-Mädchen (metropolis girls) now. It's a Berlin blogger community and I can't wait to their events and learning more about blogging <3
~ A blast from the past: My american sister's uncle found pictures from 11 years ago when we visited him in San Fransico during my foreign exchange student year in America. So much fun! I really want to go back there someday.
~ Of course I had to go on a search for the building from the intro scene from Interview with the Vampire. We found a similar looking building and took a bunch of pictures in front of it only to find out  while watching the movie that it wasn't that one at all :P But we still had fun pretending to be vampires.