Picturesque Month ~ 03'14

Jeez, April is almost over and silly old me wants to review March still... well, here we go:

In the beginning of march we went to the Naturkundemuseum (Museum of Natural History) in Berlin.
~They have a bunch of huge dinosaur skeletons right in the front hall, which kindof make the rest of the museum a littler more boring.
~ Taxidermy - Nailed it!
~ Spooky scary collecection of preserved animals .

One of the bigger projects was our hallway coat and shoerack and I finally got to finish it on my days off work. I'll try to put the makings in a blogpost soonish.

Another big project was our livingroom shelves.
~ I found a really nice display cabinet at a thrift store and when my dad was in town we picked it up for only 25€
~ The very messy before picture. The shelves were thrifted and not very pretty.
~ The much nicer after picture, as I'm thinking. The white even makes the room a bit bigger.

Small craft projects:
~ an organizational box made of toilet paper rolls and a shoe box
~ making wooden brooches and magnets at the Dawanda Snuggery
~ preparing our wedding invitations

Concerts in March:
~ We Are Scientists @ Ramones Museum  ~ 3/5 bazooka points for nostalgic reasons
~ Broken Bells @ Huxley's Neue Welt ~ 5/5 bazooka points for awesomeness
~ Chvrches @ Culumbiahalle ~ 5/5 bazooka points for more awesomeness

Origami Wedding Flowers

We're in the middle of planning for our wedding end of June this year. A big part of our wedding decoration will of course be self made. I found these wonderful handmade wedding centerpieces on Pinterest and wanted to make something just like them for my centerpieces! Instead of paper sheets from normal books I will use old maps and sheet music for my handmade flowers.
Here's how they're made:

You start with 5 sheets of square paper, any size you want and fold them to a triangle.

Fold up one of the slimmer corners of the triangle to the wide corner on top.

Then fold up the other side exactly the same.

Then you press down on the fold on both sides, flattening them out so the fold on the corner touches the fold of the diamond shape you created a step ahead.

Like so!

Fold down the tips like shown above.

And fold the two outer shapes inside, so they're cut in half.

Bend the diamond shape so the two halfs you just folded meet in the middle side by side. Now you either connect them with a paper clip like I did or you glue them together.
Now you have one flower petal!

Create 4 more of these flower petals to make a full flower.

They're connected by the sides either with paper clips or more glue.
And there's your flower!

Of course the amounts of petals in a flower and the sizes can vary like in the picture above. Now imagine I only have to make 58 more of these... I will have some help of course by my beautiful bridesmaids. We'll have a craft party soon just for the making of more of these flowers. Can't wait to see how they look like done with sheet music.

This post will be part of Nina's Upcycling Tuesday,the Creadienstag and for the first time Monochrome's Du it Yourself.

Handpainted Tetris Shoes

Sometimes I have the Tetris theme stuck in my head, and not just when I'm organizing things. Tetris is probably the ultimate boredom game. I used to play it on my graphic calculator on my way to school when I was in high school, that's the only game I ever put on there, my class mates had all kinds of games installed, but I was just fine with the good old Tetris.
Tetris shapes are also a great design for shoes I thought and got to work with a pair of slip ons that I thrifted a while back.

At first I tried to bleach them to get a white canvas to paint on, but the paint proved to be more powerful than the bleach.

So I just painted them black, it's too bad you can see the "hashtags" through the black paint, but oh well. To know where and how to paint the different Tetris shapes I used a ruler to sketch some graph lines directly on the shoes. And then I painted:

I think they turned out mighty fine!

And if I get bored on the way to work my shoes remind me of the good old pastime Tetris.

This post will be part of Nina's Upcycling Tuesday and the Creadienstag. 

PS: Check out all these funky geeky crafts at the Nerd'n'Geek Linkparty <3

Picturesque Month ~ 02'14

Another month gone by this year, a particularly short one which flew by so quickly. Let's see what happened:

~ this moth has been filled with lots of healthy vegan & low carb foods, the best way to start the day is a nice warm matcha latte
~ vegan, glutenfree & sugarfree banana muffins and a smoothie for breakfast
~ Matcharinhas to prepare us for a friend's surprise birthday party

~ porridge & raspberries for breakfast
~ not very low carb, but still vegan & super yummy, leftover pizza from Sfizy Veg
~ I've already lost a few pounds with this "diet", mostly low carb for dinner and healthy carbs for breakfast and lunch

~ it's also been a crafty month, lot's of preparations for the wedding, Save the Date DIY coming soon
~ made this clock from masking tape and wrapping paper for my mom as a birthday present
~ turned this cool shirt from a size S to L, much more comfy this way

~ the future husband and I went to another Dawanda workshop, the first one this year
~ it was hosted by Lucy Knisley, an American comic book artist and she taught us how to draw a short comic strips
~ I drew a comic of a dream I had the night before: We're moving offices at work and I dreamt that I came back from vacation and all my colleagues moved offices, but they didn't save me a place so I had to sit in the hallway! What a nightmare.

~ speaking of work, I also went to a bunch of concerts this month, first off; Maximo Park
~ then I saw Arthur Beatrice, an upcoming new british band, they actually played the same night as Maximo Park, so I had to leave early to catch this show
~ and finally Thirty Seconds To Mars to top things off, I don't actually like the music that much, but the show was great!

~ good thing my dream didn't come true and I did get a place after the move. It's a pretty awesome place as well, right by the river Spree and with a breathtaking view of the Oberbaumbrücke conncting Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg.

That's it for last month, many great pics to come this year, looking forward to reviewing them all at the end of the year!

Size Wars - More Love for the Stormtrooper!

I got an awesome Star Wars tank top for cheaps a while back, but since it was way too small I've never really worn it and even though I'm losing a few pounds at the moment I'm sure I'll never be a petite/small size. So I grabbed another shirt that was a bit stained aleady and made a comfy shirt out of both of those.

I started out with these two shirts. The red one was from a flea market and got permanently stained by some squished cherries in summertime. The Star Wars Shirt is from a Sale at my company, we have a merchandising subsidiary and they do a huge sale every half a year or so and I got so much Star Wars and Batman stuff for so little money, it's insane. I really loved the print, so I had to get it even though the size is not even close to what I usually wear.

First I cut apart the main shirt. I used a tool to remove the thread between the fabric so I wouldn't lose much of the fabric and shape of the shirt.
Then I cut out two pieces of the same size from the red shirt to sew in between the cut out side of the main shirt.

I sewed it twice and sealed the excess with a decorative stitch from the outside to add an extra pop.

It's so much more comfy now and flowing instead of strangling. Also it's just an awesome shirt which got a little more special by adding the matching red fabric on the sides. An ideal way to fix up the shirt that got too small when you're not ready to let it go.

This post will be part of Nina's Upcycling Tuesday and the Creadienstag.

PS: Check out all these funky geeky crafts at the Nerd'n'Geek Linkparty <3