New room make-up

We have been changing a lot in Sofia’s room lately to make it more cosy and suitable for an almost 2-year-old girl.

The bay in the room has changed to a cosy place where she can sit and read or play. We have recently added some curtains to make it look nicer.
She has liked it the very moment she saw it and now loves to snuggle up in the cushions and ask us to read a book.
Some pom-pom in one corner help to bring some colour.
I have bought these at a lovely shop called PinkFisch. When I bought the pom-pom, I thought they were quite a lot and would fill the whole corner. I like the result but I would like to add some more of them.

We have also bought a second-hand romantic bed in case she should decide she wants to sleep in her own room. For now it is a place she likes to sit now and then to look at a book.

And there is one little open project. While visiting one of the many markets during our holidays in Provence, we found these:

I don’t know the name. They are used to do cross-stiching etc. but I once saw them as a decoration.
We found a lovely haberdashery shop in Avignon, full with wonderful fabrics, called Le Cartonnier de Marie, where we spent quite some time. I just looove these kind of shops, filled until the last corner and full of little surprises or things you don’t even know they existed.
The web site is a bit of a mess but if you like little shops with fabrics, buttons and such other things, it is worth a visit.

The last thing to do is to place the fabrics into the frames and to hang them up. I am not sure if I want to use some paint and stencils on the fabrics…
Will show you the result once it’s ready.

Letters

Letters are an always present topic in Alex’ and my life. Without even noticing, we have gathered a quite big amount of different letters: wooden letters, electric letters, lego letters, cardboard letters…

As Sofia keeps on growing, her reach is also wider and we needed to find a solution to our picture wall in the entrée as she started grabbing the pictures and throwing them around.

I think the idea came during our holidays in London this summer. Alex discovered a really nice shop called Glyphics Shop. He was so keen to see this shop that he even said he was going to divorce if we were not going!
It is a letter lovers paradise!
You can find letters from all over the world. Brian, the owner, can tell you a story to almost every single letter. He stores the letters in drawers and all over the place. And by the way: what an incredibly pleasant and enthusiastic man he is! If you are travelling to London, make sure you are visiting Brian.
An idea of what the shop looked like when we visited (as the decoration changes):

We decided that we needed to find a word or a phrase we wanted to create with the letters and then come back to find the suitable ones for us.

After some days we knew what we wanted and we spend 2 hours in the shop, on the floor, opening the drawers, taking out letters, combining, changing again until we finally had the chosen ones.

And this is the result in the shop:

And this is how it looks on the wall:

It means ‘welcome home’ in swiss german and is like a welcoming greeting when you enter the door.
We had a helping hand from my father, who painted the wall and put all the letters in place. Most of them are not really heavy, so a simple velcro was enough.
The E is from an old pub, it is a simple wooden letter painted in gold. I wanted to include this one as soon as I discovered it. It almost falls into pieces, but it has a story to tell.
The M was another story. It weights 3 kilos, so you want to make sure it does not come off the wall when going to the bathroom! It has some old nails on the back, so we have used a wire around them and then hung it up on two nails with L shape.

The space below the letters will be a magnetic chalkboard, but this will be done later on this year.

Fallen from the van

Apart from last Easter Holidays (where Alex stayed in bed all 4 days due to a flue), we last visited Paris in 2009.
We found a shop in Montmartre where they sell all kind of things from closing factories. From doll legs and heads to typing letters, you can find all sort of nonsense.

So we decided that we had to find this shop again because we had to complete our name letters.

Here are some pictures from this funny shop called “Tombées du camion” (fallen from the van):

The letters have found their home:

And if you are curious about the shop, here is their Facebook group:
See here.

The french touch in Berlin

There is much much more I could write about Berlin. It is truly a fantastic city and a place where I can imagine I could be staying for a longer period.

One of the most important topics when on holidays (besides of shopping and sightseeing) is food. And starting with breakfast, the first mornings in Berlin were quite boring breakfast-wise. After a bit of searching, we found a really lovely place in Friedrichshain, the area we were staying.
The really cute café is called Louise Chèrie and the owner is a really nice french lady.

They make typical french bakery (yummy croissants) and prepare fantastic breakfast menus.

The interior is fabulous, a mix of french touch and flea market trouvailles:

If you are staying in Friedrichshain or spending the day in this area, Louise Chèrie is the perfect place to have breakfast, brunch or just a café.
You can find all the information about opening hours and location here.

New kitchen

The only room in our apartment I did not really like until now was the kitchen. It was somehow functional, but not nice.
One of the walls is red, which looks quite good and cozy. But that was it.
A small freezer in the corner, a shelf and a cupboard which I had painted red long time ago and used to be my shoe storage in the time I was living in Madrid.
I wanted to get rid of the freezer and the shelf. And I wanted to buy a small table, as there is not much of a working place in the kitchen.

This is what the kitchen looked like until last week. We had already removed the freezer.

We found a suitable table on Ricardo (sort of Swiss ebay) and I candidly thought that it would take me one afternoon in the attic to bring the colour off the table. This is how the table looked like when we bought it.

I bought a chemical paint remover and the instructions said to put a second cover of the gluey substance 10 minutes after the first coat if the colour was resistant, then leave it for about 20 minutes. Afterwards it would be an easy task to peel the colour off with a scraper.
But oh! Under the first cover of paint there was a hard coat. I had no other option than to scratch it off with the scraper. Which took me about 3 hours!

And this was only the table leaf! The table-legs are not plain and I saw that it would take me quite some hours to be finished.

After I took off the hard coat, there was a greyish paint. I guess it was an extra coat to make the surface even.

So I had to use the chemical paint remover again. And this is what it looked like.

The legs were a pain. I had to use a tiny screwdriver to scratch off the paint bit by bit. At a certain point, Alex, Sofia and I were sitting in the attic, trying to finish everything on the weekend. And yes, Sofia was trying to help. She insisted. So I had to give her a tool so she could imitate what we were doing. Really cute.

We left the table in a sort of unfinished state as it reflects the passing of the years. A cute little table.

And this is how the kitchen looks like!

The bowl looks vintage but it is only about 10 years old. It’s from “La Cartuja de Sevilla” a brand I really like. I have the whole set which is huge. An incredible present from dear relatives.

We have added some paintings we already had (The Oibot and the first present from Sofia), and some really nice and old paintings by Noemi Chiappa Pistoja, Alex’ great-aunt. Again, something we had stored in the attic and long forgotten after we moved in.

I am really happy with the outcome! Do you like it?

Happy week to you all!

The Ugly Portrait Wall

Finally!
After looking for the matching frames, ordering the passepartouts and putting them together, we were able to pin the fabulous Ugly Portraits on the wall.

Our frame wall project is not finished yet as we ordered one passepartout with the wrong measures. So we had to order this one again and we are now waiting until it is finished.

Here is our Ugly Portrait wall. Including pictures of “the making”.

Street finding

I think I already mentioned that it is forbidden to leave furniture and other things on the street here in Switzerland. But I am very happy that some people ignore this.

Walking through the old part of Zurich I saw some little wooden boxes on the street, just in front of a cigar shop together with a note saying that they could be taken for free.
These boxes are useful in many ways: decoration, storing, handwork etc.

Some of them have wonderful latches and are nice just the way they are. I am not sure if I want to alter them.

That reminds me that we painted such boxes in kindergarten, and I stil got mine!
I know that I am repeating myself, but I am already looking forward to doing handwork with Sofia.

Frame wall project

The frame wall project has been on a standby-mode for quite some time now. We first had to search for the matching frames. Now we have a frame for each portrait, we found all of them in thrift shops.

One of them looked really really shabby, so I had to give it a make over. It was a greenish very cheap frame which did not at all fit with the rest of our findings. It looks quite nice on the picture but it is a really cheap one.

I painted it white first and then I gave it three covers of gold.

I still have to give it a last treatment with the sandpaper, but that will be when we have all the frames ready.

The frame is now really golden, without any white showing like in the pictures. This will come at the end when using the sandpaper.

The next step is to buy matching passepartouts as the frames and the portraits have all different sizes. I have found a really cool web page where you can order custom made passepartouts. The company is called passepartout werkstatt (passepartout factory). They ship their products everywhere. Quite good as there are tons of companies that do not ship to Switzerland.

And at the end the last and my favourite step: put them in an order and pin them to the wall. I am already browsing the internet to look for good ideas.

I am already looking forward to show you the outcome!

Glowing letters and Berlin

Do you know these illuminated letters? I really like them for decoration.

Some years ago I bought one as a Christmas present for Alex. It was an “E”. Yes, an “E”. There was no “A” for Alex, so I bought an “E”.

The first trip we made with Sofia was for a holiday/training studies. We went to Berlin by train. Oh, I am completely skipping topic, but when telling a story, you sometimes have to go back.
So, the first trip with Sofia went really well. 8 hours by train is quite a long ride. She was 5 months old back then and she was sooo relaxed. When she was tired, she slept, when she was hungry, she ate. And our biggest fear that she would not sleep well in another place, was baseless. We had a really great time in Berlin. 10 full days of descovering the city.
Alex had to attend the re:publica, a communication fair, for 3 days and I thought it could be difficult for me to spend 3 days alone with Sofia in a foreign city.

It is not quite easy to move with a buggy, specially in public transportation. But after some days I knew where the elevators for the underground were situated. And it was in Berlin where I really learned to change diapers in impossible places. That gave me a lot of confidence to really move around as I pleased wherever I wanted to go.
On top of being a fabulous city, I met really nice people everywhere I went. I got a lot of help to go in and out of places with the buggy.

Well, that was the preamble to tell you that we found a really nice flea market in Berlin. And it was there where we found letter nr 2, an “A”.

The two letters are now sitting in our bedroom. Who knows, maybe we will find another letter in London.

Press letters and some frames

Today I want to show you what we found on a trip to Paris.

Strolling around, we discovered a very interesting shop full of “trouvailles”. Although others would call it rubbish and nonsense. They use to buy leftovers from closing factories. Their offer include parts of dolls like legs, heads and arms, or plastic glasses and other fun things. I love these little shops! I could spend hours in them because they give me a lot of diy ideas.

Among other things, we found letters from an old printing press. And as you know, they are mirror-inverted. So we thought we could put them on the furniture in the entrée in front of the mirror. Looking at the mirror, you are then able to read them.

That makes me think that we absolutely have to spend some days in this wonderful city again. Hmmm, task for later: Look for train tickets!

The newest project on my mind is a frame wall with the ugly portraits I showed you before.

The idea is to find different frames and to do sort of a “wild composition”. It is in my head, so let’s see what the outcome is.
Alex has written down the measures we need and has already found 3 frames in a thrift shop.

I think we are going to look for the rest of the frames today and tomorrow. And I would like to find some little frames as well for small pieces.
Will show you the wall as soon as it is done!