Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

No stitching in this blog, but all the more place for food and pics of Jelena :)

As usual, I was 'in charge' of dessert and cakes for christmas with the parents.

For dessert, I made a white chocolate-mousse and a dark mousse (a very light kind) and some fruit



I also made the traditional christmas cookies, this time with colored glacing (my first time, lol)


and the traditional cake (Kerststronk), this year with buttercreme and jam


aaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnd CUPCAKES! Had a lot of work on those, but I'm quite proud of the result










And then there were the christmas-presents. Jelena had a great time giving the gifts to everyone. She also wanted to help unwrapping everything. Her doll was a huge succes! She already knows how to feed her :)





(the plaster on my head, is where the stitches after my fall are hiding, tomorrow the threads will be removed).

Also, Chaotic Crafter is having a give-away for a 10.00 gift-certificate at 123.Stitch; enter here

SAL Snowglobes: 2/8

Snow-globes
I've just finished the second snowglobe, about a week late (ouch). It's another christmas-themed one, with a nice christmas tree. Unfortunately, the frogs really seem to love this SAL as well, as I've been visited many times on both globes.
On to number 3...!

(click to biggify)

T-shirt
I've taken the challenge to stitch on clothes, nothing complicated though, just a tiny Hello Kity on a easy t-shirt. I used the DMC soluble canvas for this. It melted away quite easily, and I'm rather happy with the result.



Baking
I found a new recepy that looked quite delicious, and since it was my father's birthday, it was a good occasion to try it out!


give-aways
Nancy at Victorian Motto Sampler Shoppe is having a hand-dyed floss New Years give-away. She's also having a Christmas give-away!! That's two chances. Go check it out!



Blogger
Thanks for the suggestions! I have closed the google-toolbar as suggested by Miek, we'll see soon if it has helped :)

Edit: still not able to post, which means I'll have to start it the old old slow slow slow desktop
Edit 2 to change time of publishing to current time.

Weather
This morning the streets were quite icy. My bike (the two-peddled kind) decided to flirt with the ice on the street while I was on my way to work, the result: a couple of stitches in my face. I've told my bike never to flirt again!

Snow-Globe 1/8

Blogger problems
Updates come slowly, for two reasons. Not enough time to stitch..., but also problems with posting on blogger. I can type up my whole post on the 'new' (secondhand) laptop perfecty, but the stupid thing refuses to publish. So I have to start up the old computer to publish a post, and that one goes as slowwwwwwwwwwwww as a snail! So that takes a lot of time, that really could be used for better purposes. I also have difficulty reading other peoples blogs, so that takes up a lot of my time as well :( (but it's worth looking at your work!)
Any one have an idea whath the problem could be??; The laptop has Vista and I work on Internet Explorer 9


Snowglobes
I joined a new Sal at the CSL-group and finished the first part. The SAL exists out of 8 snow-globes with a Christmas or winter-theme. The first one has a Santa inside.


Sinterklaas kapoentje
December 6th we celebrate Sinterklaas. For the adults that means chocolate, marsepein, nicnacs (little biscuits in the form of the alphabet), yummy! For the kids it means... toys! And even though Jelena is little, she got visited by Sinterklaas too :-)

First she put her shoe with a little something for the horse.


The next morning her shoe was filled with some nicnacs (she doesn't usually get anything like this) and something more healthy ;-)
And of course toys!



she was very happy with her little shop, her kitchen-stuff and building blocks!

Till next time!



comments are loved and appreciated

Lanarte Cultures: another update...

This time I got some more progress on Lanarte Cultures, I can finally get rid of one of the two (very big) pages of the pattern, yay!


what can you see on it this far:
- El Castillo in Chichén Itza: temple pyramid
- Sandstones
- Lama
- The statue of chichén Itza in Yacatan
- The 'drawings' on the top and bottom are Maya script; with the typical round forms
- a Mixtec cooking pot
- the agave: used for distillation of liquor
- A woman and flute player in colourful attire from Guatemala, a weaver from Hondura, a guitar player and woman with child dressed in poncho from Peru (still one to stitch!)
Unfortunately, now progress is once again nill, as I haven't stitched for a couple of days again :(


A couple of days ago, it was my birthday, Jelena drew me a drawing as a present:


comments are loved and appreciated

Lanarte Cultures: Inca and Maya Cultures - progress pic 4

Grab a Brownie and come along...







Lanarte Cultures

Not as much progress as I had hoped to show, but at least there is some.




Baking
I don't often find the time to do some baking, but I finally managed to get the brownies done, and made some more cupcakes as well. Obviously I'm not that good at 'drawing' witches hats, ghosts and pumpkins!


16 months!
It's only a couple of blog-posts ago, I mentioned Jelena being 15 months, and now she's already 16 months! And she's already choosing her gifts from Sinterklaas in the toy-shop catalogue!




Also, Meagan is having a blog-giveaway, go check it out.

comments are loved and appreciated

Lanarte Cultures: Inca and Maya Cultures - progress pic 3

I'm still very slowly progressing on my Lanarte-kit Maya and Inca Cultures, so I hoped you might enjoy a new pic of it.





Autumn has now really arrived with rain and wind, but the temps are still quite high. Christmas-decorations are already showing up in the shops - way too early for me! First sinterklaas will come, and then I''l think about Santa :)






comments are loved and appreciated

It was a

Hi all,

thought I disappeared of the face of the earth?; No, still here, but my laptop died on me! Now I'm figuring things out on my new (second-hand) laptop. A lot could be recovered from the old laptop, but still lost a lot of my links and patterns :(


It was a
itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini


finish!




RAK'ed
Lisa N. rak'ed me with a cute Eeyor-chart! Thank you Lisa!!


Autumn?

so we're autumn, but the last days were really summer-like, we had more sun and warmer weather then during summer! Enjoyed them while they lasted, and now we seem to be heading to real autumn weather.

15 months!
Time sure does go fast!



Coming next: update on Inca and Maya cultures


comments are loved and appreciated

Inca and Maya Cultures: progress Pic 2

Hi all,

I've made a little bit more progress on my current WIP, Inca and Maya Cultures by Lanarte.
Stitching keeps going slow, but well, at least there is some progress :)





Till next time



All comments are appreciated!

Some progress

I've made a bit of progress on my newest WIP. It's not exactly a small piece but not really BAP-size either, but it might still take me a while to finish this one; since I only get to stitch a couple of hours per week.




Every year, we have a sand-sculpture in Blankenberge, this year the theme was Disney.

more here

and for closure of this post ;-)

Pics, Pics and more Pics (part two)

Soooooooooooo, here is the stitchy part of the update!

Yes, the long awaited pic of the baby afghan is finally here. What fun I had pulling out all the threads (not!)

So here it finally is: Farm Animals Baby Afghan by Dimensions (designed by Barbara Mock)
29" x 45"/ 73 cm x 114 cm


A finish also means a new start! I had planned to start the Christmas-sock for Jelena put didn't have the kit with me on vacation. I did have another one with me, here is what I have so far:


I did already get the encouraging comment that I had done only a little bit on it, and that there is a lot of work left on it :( Yes, I know, my stitching does not go that fast anymore. My days are filled with walking little circles with my daughter :)


Give-aways:
Daffycat is hosting a give-away, go check it out!

Pics, Pics and more Pics (part1)

When in need of photo's my friend really comes to the rescue! Thank you very much for the pics of Jelena's birthday-party.
First a pic of the big cake I made for Jelena's birthday :)
It's made out of 3 biscuits on top of each other:
- regular biscuit with crème au beurre filling
- chocolate biscuit with strawberry-mousse filling
- regular biscuit with crème pattisière and kiwi.
I did make a change to the biscuit-recepy, but that's my secret ;-).
All decorated with rolfondant and marsepein. The decorations were 'glued' onto the biscuits by home-made edible 'glue' :-)

Next to this big one, there were also strawberry cakes, flan bresilienne and misérable, and Jelena had her own special cake with fruit and pudding.


After the cake it was time for presents!


Nancy, my apologies ;-) there's no pic with cake all over her face, but I hope this one (with spaghetti-sauce over her face) can make up for it :-)


I've been on vacation at our coast, here Jelena was taking a walk on the beach:


And when it was finally warm enough, she had to try out her new bathing-suit


Since she's now a big girl, I've been cooking some 'special' dishes
(the second one is courgette-gratin) It was very yummy!


here she had her first professional haircut


playing and sharing:




Hot-air Balloon
I gave a gift-certificate for a flight by hot-air balloon to the god-father of Jelena, here are some pics of his trip


And I hope this works:


MOV00895.MPG
(ps. she did not get hurt during the making of this video)


Stitching: to follow in part two (not tired of all my pics yet?)