Apart from the cooking

I bought my flickr pro account yesterday, right after I posted :-) Poppalina, thanks very much for the offer though!!

I've been uploading photo's like mad today.

I'm so behind on news, but I barely find time to write. And I always forget things. Like that I was accepted for Plush You last week! Which is really great news!!

Well, I should go to bed. I've been working quite a lot for university today. And need to start early again in the morning.

Before I go just one more thing: I'd love to introduce you to the hero who came to save me last Wednesday!

Sour cream

0.5 liter cream
1 big tablespoon of sour cream of the shops

Put these mixed together in a closed glass jar and leave for one to two days at room temparature. The substance should start to thicken after one day, if it's not thick enough, leave it for some more time. Check back regularly until the desired thickness is achieved.

Put in the fridge.





Yes, it's that easy.

Instead of the readymade sour cream you can also add butter milk to the cream, but this gives a slightly different taste, I don't really like personally.

Flickr pro

I almost reached my 200 photo limit on flickr.
I want a pro account. But it costs extra money.
It's not that much. But I haven't got much to spare either.

I'm totally indicisive.

Let's go to bed and sleep over it.
Maybe tomorrow will bring me a decision.

Who knows?
:-)

Goodnight!

The phonecall

Maybe, when I said I got a WEIRD phonecall Wednesday, I should have replaced 'weird' by 'scary', 'terrifying', or something like that.

I'm not sure wether you really want to know this, but here it goes...

Around 8pm the phone rang. A person asked for my mother (by her name). As my mother wasn't home I said to call again today. Upon that the person asked if I could say that again in french because his/her Dutch wasn't very good. After I explained it French the conversations took a strange turn. the person started rambling 'So who are you then, ah the daughter of (my mother's name), so you are home alone? aren't you afraid to sleep alone? shall i come over at your house to sleep with you? i'm a young guy of 28, i could come over to sleep with you and make love to you'.

Shocked.

That was what I was.

Imagine. First you think the person who is calling is a friend of your mother's (she has some contacts in France, so it wasn't weird that the person was French). You don't even think about asking the person's name, because he seems so familiar with your mother that he asks for her by using only her first name.

And then all of a sudden someone is proposing to have sex with you?!

So.

Now we have our own personal stalker.

Maybe he was just a bored, drunk, miserable man.

Maybe he's a psycho.

I wasn't at all pleased with my situation, as you can imagine. Lucky as I am, Bertus, my personal hero, came over from Holland to rescue me, and stay with me all night to protect me.

So. That was the phoncall.

Trash & Angels {available now}

My new collection, Trash & Angels is now available at http://www.hannahzakari.co.uk!
I'm so excited about it *makes a little dance of joy*. I made this ten piece collection specially for Hannah Zakari.

You can also view the collection on my website, together with what inspired me to make it.

Trains and tags

Yesterday...


I went to university, all for nothing (class was cancelled, and of course, I did not know that,...).

This is where I wait for the train to arrive (almost) every day...


And I made new jewellery tags.


And I got the weirdest phonecall ever.

Polymer clay

I've been thinking about polymer clay lately. I have worked with it when I was a kid. My sister and I used to make toy foods with it: small olives, mushrooms, chocolate bars, bacon, sausages, carrots, peas, cakes, ...
I've been thinking about using it in my jewellery designs. I'm not sure in what way though. But today I ran accross this post by Martha of Uniform Studio. What she is doing with something simple as polymer clay is just amazing!

Quick lunch

It's all about the food here on my blog these days, but time to eat is the only spare time I give myself, so eating is the only thing I am doing apart from writing papers!

Another idea for breakfast

Mango, straberry, honey, sour cream, roasted hazelnuts.

PS.: I'll post the recipe for the homemade fresh cheese on the blog soon!!

papers ... exams ...........

I finished the pottery paper last week, a couple of hours before the deadline.

I the mean time I already started working on the next paper.

Within two weeks my exams are starting.

So, no, no time to breathe!

That's why I think I won't be able to post here regularly. Knowing myself though, it might be possible I will post a lot, just becasue I need to do SOMETHING to take a break.

We'll see.

Food

Friday I was a little bit down, still tired from the hard work earlier last week. To cheer me up my boyfriend took me to IKEA, where I had lots of fun picking new pillow cases and sheets. I hadn't been in IKEA for a very long time.

We had dinner in the IKEA restaurant. That made us wonder if the IKEA-food is the same in all countries?

Here follows some of the food I prepared since sleeping on the new IKEA pillowcases and sheets:

Tomato stuffed with: tuna, boiled egg, onion, cocktail sauce and a bit of yoghurt.

Salad: lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, fresh chive and dressing (i made my dressing with mayonaise, a spoon of yoghurt and a spoon of honey-mustard.

Dessert: strawberries, honey and whipped cream.

Stawberries, dates, goat cheese wrapped in bacon with honey, lettuce and carrots. The goat cheese is simple fresh goat cheese, that you can buy in regular grocery shops, then wrap around a few slices of smoked bacon and sprinkle some dill on top ot it, fry in butter. serve hot and top with honey.

Mindt

On the homepage!!!! Yay!

They have a rotation system, but your items need to have a certain degree of popularity, before they can make it to the front page.

www.mintd.com

Early, and later this morning

Early this morning before I went to bed I made some changes to my website. With the previous design I felt there was still something lacking. I like it much better now already, though I am planning to make some changes in the structure as well, to make things easier to maintain.

And later this morning after I got up: BREAKFAST!

1. Homemade fresh cheese
2. Hazelnuts
3. Dried cranberries and cherries

Idea

I'm thinking about adding watermarks to my photo's of my products in the shops. I was trying to find a way to make them more recognizable as mine.

I've been suggested by a couple of flickr friends that maybe they should be a bit smaller...

What do you think?

Breakfast

1. Homemade sour cream (by my mom).
2. Kiwi's.
3. Roasted hazelnuts.

Portfolio

I'm making a portfolio with all my jewellery here:
http://paperflowergirl.designstolove.com

Me again

1. Still four pages to go until I have the ten I need for the pottery paper + still have to add photo's and photo captions, and also the bibliography.

2. Have been working a bit on publicity for my shop: have been more active than I usual am in the etsy forums and chat, and have been advertising on some other sites (including my myspace).

3. Moving in with the boyfriend will have to wait at least one more year, until I finished my BA in Archaeology here. Then Maybe I can take my Master in Amsterdam.

4. I have been looking around for some metalsmithing courses, and have found some I really like. I'll see if I can do one of them during the summer.

5. I really need to have that jeweller's saw I was talking about a couple of weeks ago.

6. I have another plan for after that: I want to learn how to etch. I've bought a little book about jewellery techniques and it's got a chapter on etching, now I totally want to try it.

7. I'll just go back to the pottery for now :-)

8. Have a great evening all!!

Eyes

Yeah, that is me staring at you. A little post, before I go to bed. I'm not shure what I'll write about, but I feel it is time to write. Sometimes when I take the time to sit down and post something here, I'll write something that has been in my head for days, something I'll just improvise at the moment.

Now I sit here, with a glass of water and a peeled mandarin next to my keyboard. It's 1 am. and I should be sleeping. but I'm not really thinking about sleep. I'm thinking about the paper on medieval pottery I need to finish this weekend. I still have to write seven pages. I'm thinking about moving out and going to live together with my boy.

I'm dreaming. About selling ten pieces of jewellery a day. And make a living of it.

I'm a bit worried about selling next to nothing lately.

Other then that, I'm fine. Really. A bit stressed out by loads of work still, but better than last week.

I think I shall go to bed now.

Nightnight!

SALE

Hi all,

I'm having a sale over at my etsy shop. I want to clean it out, so that only my jewellery items and associated artwork remain.

Everything else is going on sale and won't be relisted as the items expire!

Spirals

Something else I did during last week's absence. Within two weeks I hope to have finished more that can go to the shop.

I can't seem to manage to write anything really. My head is full with other stuff at the moment. I won't be able to post much untill next wednesday, and if I post it will probably only be shorts posts, since I have a really important deadline coming up concerning university.

I whish you all a great time, friends!

Flea market

Bertus took me to the flea market in Utrecht last weekend. It turned out it was only one stall. Probably because it the monday before it was the national feast day in the Netherlands, Koninginnedag (Queen's Day) and then there always is a huge flea market everywhere!

However, it had been a REALLY long time I had been thrifting, so it felt great. I even found some nice vintage necklaces to take apart and a vintage ashtray.

The sweetest smell

I made these at 8.30 pm today. The flowers were already starting to go to sleep. I love the colours and the freshness of our garden in the evenings at this time of year. And now is when the flowers with my favorite smell are blooming. I don't know how they are called in English, but the dutch name is 'seringen', they are the flowers on the left. Their smell is just heavenly. I dream of a perfume that has the exact same odour, but I never found a perfume like that.

A litte time after finishing my evening walk trough our garden, I realised that I don't need to make choices, that I can do (almost) everything I want, everything I love. I decided to see where my studies will take me, and that coming autumn I want to take some short jewellery courses. It will all clear itself out as time unravels.
I think I am afraid to not be determined about what I want. I discovered I'm determined about what I want all the time, but that in periods of stress my dreams get blurred by what I think 'the world' expects from me (I mean the people around me). Even though I am surrounded by loving people who only whish me to be happy and don't try to push me into anything, I still get that feeling sometimes, especially when I don't feel well.
I would love to study jewellery design, but I learned that there is nothing that will stop me to do that in my own personal way. I realised I don't need to follow an official study programme to learn the things I want, the way I want.

I am determined to do things in a way that they make me happy. I think - I'm sure - I should just try to stick to that as much as possible. I lost the bright, enthousiastic, wild and sometimes reckless Isis, that loved dancing and laughing. Sometimes she comes popping up again. Just for short moments.

(Look at me talking about myself in third person, haha!)

I hope you all can do the things you want to do in a way they make you happy...