Hopfaldera

It's green!

Here's (drum roll...) our new couch.

The picture shows the one in the kitchen. Can you imagine, a couch in your kitchen?! When we got a new kitchen, last November, it turned out we had space left for a relaxed seating area right next to the oven! Baking is great entertainment.
This is a two-seater. In the living room (living area of the same room really) we have a new three-seater. Also green... fresh and lovely!
For the kitchen couch I made new pillows from Japanese fabric with a Swedish kitchen theme (to go with that IKEA kitchen of course). I ordered the fabric from the US (from Superbuzzy), so international!
The crocheted throw is from a thrift store. Somebody ran out of thread or got frustrated, because it isn't quite finished, but you can't tell when it is folded up like this and it's just big enough to be a nice cover. It doesn't need to be that warm; you're right next to the oven after all!

Songs we enjoy

Here are two songs we have enjoyed the last couple of weeks. This means they have been played over and over (and over and over) again.
We love YouTube. You can usually find the song you want to hear pretty quickly. Long ago are the days you had to keep the radio on all day, hoping to hear your favorite song.

Enjoy our favorites, Mika and Leaf:

Sweet potatoes

Last week I made Roasted sweet potatoes! (I tried out two different spellings (patatoes, patatos) before I got it right; oh well...)
Here is my exclusive recipe:

Start with some sweet potatoes and a peeler.

Start heating up the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
Now, peel the potatoes. Look, what a lovely color!

Cut the potatoes in cubes. Put them in an oven dish.
Sprinkle the following ingredients over them:
Olive oil
Freshly ground pepper
Sea salt
Herbes Provençales
Some peeled and cut up (not finely) garlic cloves
You can also add a sliced onion but I didn't this time

Mix all of it together in the oven dish and spread the potato cubes out, so they all have their own little surface to roast on.

Put the dish in the oven. It should take about half an hour to roast the potatoes. Stir them after half the roasting time.
Prepare the rest of your dinner in the meantime. I added hamburgers, broccoli and some regular fried potatoes. Damaris and Emil like those better.
When all the other food is almost done, check if your sweet potatoes are soft and have brown edges. If not (and if you want to eat your potatoes with your meal, and not afterwards) increase the heat of the oven to 225 degrees for about 5 minutes (be careful you don't burn all of it!!!).

They should come out like below.
By the way, this is a single portion (Frederik was having a business dinner in Brussels round the corner of the Beenhouwersstraat, poor thing...). No need to feel bad if you finish everything by yourself: low in carbs and olive oil is healthy, right?!
If you double the portions, you should also double the size of your oven dish, so you have more roasting surface. If the potato cubes don't touch the bottom of the dish, they steam and won't be half as good!

Life on the farm

In the Netherlands the television show Boer zoekt Vrouw (Farmer want a Wife) is extremely popular. Last Sunday more people watched that show than there were football viewers. Some suggest, it is because people are longing for a simple life on the farm. One commenter on tv described it like this: "In the show they sit at breakfast with a packet of margarine on the table; hardly anybody lives like that anymore".
Well, most people I know live like that, but never mind...

I like the life portrayed in the video below. Without the hardship please.

Our own Emil doesn't get in this much trouble, I assure you. He was just named after this boy.

Music to knit to

Knitting is a nice thing to do. But it can feel very outdated and a bit too homey as well. I like to feel hip and cool, also while I'm knitting. The Stitch 'n Bitch movement has done a lot in making knitting hip and the internet is making crafting very modern again. I think that's great and I'm totally going with that, but sometimes you need a little more. At those times I play these songs by Franz Ferdinand (links to YouTube below; copy/paste the http-address if the link doesn't work). Some people might think it is just a lot of noise, but to me it is the perfect antidote to the stay-at-home-mom blues you get when you are really a 'struggling' webshop-owning Artist (met een grote K/with a large A).
Enjoy the noise:

Dark of the matinee  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_uhyeVrkig&feature=related

The Fallen  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPycggBuXA&feature=related

This next one is the first song I heard from Franz Ferdinand. The video is very 'arty'.
Take me out  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM4dxI0mO1k

Oh so arty too:
Do you want to  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Qvu5OUYoQ&feature=related

'Some people' might understand my music choice a bit better now.
Playing air-guitar and hitting some bucket-drums with toddlers, pre-schoolers, first-graders and pre-teens goes very well to these songs too.
Franz Ferdinand will save us!

What we're up to

In the past couple of days our living room has started to look different.
First one couch moved from it's place inside (which it had for almost 8 years) to a temporary spot outside.

Then a truckload of big packages came.

We are doing construction now. The promise is this. But not in white...

From diertje to ceramic animal sculpture

diertje, originally uploaded by doucepoints.

I made the little animal in this picture in April last year. This is it still wet and gray.

Today I put the sculpture up for sale in my Etsy shop. Between April 2007 and now this animal went through several stages:

Already fired once and covered in oxides (iron and cobalt) and a little glaze, waiting to go into the kiln again.

After the second firing still in the classroom at K&O, where I go on Fridays to 'do' ceramics.

And now, in the shop. Waiting, wagging it's little rabbit's tail (or is it a dog?), ears neatly combed back, for a new owner to come along.

Epiphany

Yesterday, when my kids were a little bored I asked them: ‘It’s the 6^th of January, right?’. ‘Yeah’, they said. ‘Then it is Driekoningen (Epiphany or Three Kings’ Day) today’, I told them.

This inspired a lot of activity: Damaris made a cake by crushing Lange Vinger cookies, mixing the crumbs with melted butter and shaping a cake out of the mixture on a gold paper plate. Before we ate the cake (I only did some digging to be honest), she put on whipped cream. Before thinking up the recipe for this desert Damaris said she wanted to make something that grown-ups would think was ridiculous but that children would love. I think she succeeded very well and the effect was great!

Of course she hid some beans for us to find in the cake to determine who would be the Kings, except we didn’t have any beans. Emil came up with the solution: 3 Lego blocks in the same colors as the paper crowns he was making for the lucky Kings. I made a drawing of the three kings in the traditional colors as well. At school Damaris and Emil learned that the first king (Melchior) is red, the second one (Balthazar) is blue and the last one (Caspar) is green (and also black). When they see the three kings portrayed somewhere with different colors, they say it is completely wrong and crazy. They are funny that way!

O yeah, who got the beans? Frederik found the red one, Emil blue, and Damaris got the green Lego block. I got a yellow king that Emil made to comfort the one person that wouldn’t find anything. And I didn’t have to finish my plate said Damaris. They are sweet that way too!