Flying away with the family

Hi Everyone, thank you so much for following my blog and reading my silly words. At the moment i think i won't be able to write very reguarly until the move behind us. We are moving from one apartement to another (a slightly bigger one :))))) this month and next. I hope my internet provider connects me very quickly when we get to the other house. For now i still have a connection, but you never know when they gonna cut you off with these kind of companies.

If you see only silence...............at my end, it might be because an over-active employee cut my internet connection off early, or because i have no energie left to reach out to all of you kind people because of packing and organizing it all. But so you all know i will miss communicating, reading your comments and visiting your blogs.

Meanwhile I have a table at Poppytalk handmade, I hope you can pay me a visit there :))

See you all soon!!!

Time to prioritize.....

As I am packing all our stuff box by box, I keep finding triggers for new projects. Little pieces of fabric, buttons, pieces of lace, doilies, cute colorfull pieces of paper etc… I hadn’t seen for a while and see trough different eyes now I have to pack them in a box and close the lit. I must really be careful not to slow things down by acting on my impulses making new pillows, paintings, sketches etc….
EEEEEEEEh how difficult the thought is not being able to make anything new until we will be settled in our new home. I have other priorities now, or at least I should have:)) The time frame I see now for not being able to sew or create in any other form is that until the end of November, and maybe not even until mid December. So for now there will be no playing around with fabric or any other materials. OOOOh, This is going to be sooooooo hard on me...

Coney Island girls MIA & MARIA

Hi everyone, I am happy to present my next two editions to my Coney Island pillow series. Here are the girls MIA & MARIA! I am planning to update my shop with all eight of them at the pase of a snail in the next week or two. I have all of the eight pillows which are part of this Coney Island series ready to go. I made them a month ago or so. I can't list all of them yet in my shop because i still need to make photographs. Today I took photo's of these two girls during my kids nappie time. I hope I have the same luck to do the others as well in their nappie times of the next days. I hope I can list them all before the real 'moving rush' hits at our home. For this series of pillows I felt inspired by the early stories and pictures of Coney Island. As a matter of fact I have always felt an attraction to the Coney Island stories and images, from an early age on. The reason why I feel this way is I think the combination of a certain rawness, bohemian, Arti and sexy atmosphere. Well it might sound a bit strange to put it like this, but it's what i get out of the Coney Island 'world' anyway. Any other theme with these qualities is always a source of inspiration to me as well. Like the Life of Roma gypsies in Europe, especially their music, oooh those sad sounding violins give me such goosebumps! And then the Russian fairy tales with their incredible imaginary richness. What has also been always fantasticly inspiring to me are the Czech and Slowak fantasy fairytale movies from the 70ties and 80ties (and 90ties).

I had the luck to get to know them at an early age because my parents are from that region. So my child fantasies were very deeply influenced by the fairy tales and movies with the Eastern European sense of flair and imaginary dept. Please do not mistake what I am saying here, I do NOT try to give the impression to have the same abilities, I just have a huge attraction to this kind of art.

For my Coney Island pillows I used some nice materials like sequins and linen. For the back I used fabrics like sturdy canvas Burlap.

By the machine embroidred drawings I tried to give the girls a lighthearted ink or charcoal feeling.

Woonbeurs Amsterdam 2009 /Fair about home interiors

A few weeks ago I attended the annual Woonbeurs Amsterdam . It was great, I had my whole family with me. To translate the word Woonbeurs, I would say it means something like "(Huge) interior living fair ' where designers and businesses are showing the last trends in home decoration. This year's edition had an interesting experience for me. It was interesting because I looked at everything through a totally different set of eyes this time. I had been there many times before, but it's like this time I was a different person. Now I looked at all the businesses who presented their fabulous or not so fabulous:)) furniture and home wear as an equal. I mean I did not feel like I was the customer I had been all the other times, I was now a fellow business owner in home decor:)) And that felt great! It's all I wanted to be for all those years. So as such I looked for the businesses that would inspire me. I found not so much of those, most businesses seemded boring, gray and offered more or less all the same things. But I was happy to find a few great designers.
One of those designers I really like are two very friendly young women whom I had the pleasure to finally meet in person. It's the creative duo Jantien Baas and Hester Worst of Tas-Ka. I had been wanting to meet them for a long time because I admire their work a lot, like their beautiful pillows and fabric designs.My personal favorite items in their collection are their large huge software houses. They are made with their own gorgeous fabric designs, Really soft in a fresh way, just beautiful! And what a lot I like about them is the diversity of what they offer. Among their collection is stationary, fabric design, various pillows, Bread boards, wrapping paper, bags and much more ... and what is really nice is that they mix all that with some cute vintage items they thrifted themselves. I had the pleasure of having a really nice talk with them. Thanks for that girls!

I also with some other great designers about whom I will do my next post ... I think. So keep tuned in :))))

A humble shout out for a small shop re-opening

Hi everyone! I decided one week shop break was enough for me:))


Today I have put my LeiLilaLoo shop Back online again .... I just felt a constant ich in my fingers and i could not hold it any more. So I AM BACK! But I did decided to slim down the shop a little for now. By featuring less products i mean. And for now i will not make any costum orders for my handprinted ribbon for example.

This month will be a crazy month at our house because we are going to move house at the end of this month ... So as much as it frustrates me there will be little to no time at all to update the shop with all the new goodies I have already made, just not yet photographed . I will do all the new listings as soon as moving house is behind us and when we feel a little settled into our new home. But nevertheless I just could not keep the shop closed a minute longer, I just love doing it too much. It felt like I was holding back myself to much, and that made me feel too tensed in the past week.

A bit dumb i was:)))

Grungy photo-shoot (self portrait)

Earlier, before I wrote the last post, i changed some settings of my blog, i changed the comments to not appear right away, but post them after they had been viewed by me first. I did that because last week all of a sudden I had gotten really irritating 5 spam comments on several posts here on my blog or some Japanese porn blog. Well then i totally forgot about it when i wrote my last post. And i was wondering how is it possible no body visits me anymore (now pls imagine me thinking all this Teary-eyed). Then a week or so later I discovered I had gotten plenty of comments, I just had not given my okay to be published yet.

Ooooh, how dumb i was! I am thinking no one cared so sorry, sorry sorry sorry!
And thank you, thank you, thank you, for all of your kindness !!!!!

TODAY'S 'NAPPY TIME' FINDS THAT BLEW ME AWAY!.

Time well spend during nappy time i'd say. I found out about this fabulous Japanese brand mina perhonen over at design is mine.

Taking a small(?) break from my shop

Yesterday when I came home from a session with my therapist I decided it was time to take small break from my daily routine at my etsy shop. It is getting a bit too much lately for me to handle. And what is most important is that the most precious role I have in my life is being a mother to my two sweet children. And lately this role is becoming too much a role in between all the stuff that needs to be done for the shop. I was letting myself get all crazy with getting the shop ready for Christmas. I was sewing like a mad woman, and all i had planned was leaving no time to be a good mother anymore. A good mother in my eyes would be a mother who is spiritually as well as phisically present, someone who is emotionally availble for the people who need her. And I feel like right now, the way things are going, I am not really present in my childrens lives anymore. Most of the time when I am with them I am still stuck in my head, making to do lists for my shop. So that's why I am taking a small (ore bigger?) break from my shop. As a way to reset my relationship with the shop. When I come back I want to take it all more relaxed, I would like to achieve that the whole shop thing doesn’t rule me in the way it does now.

I also would like the time to work on a new less commercial project I wanted to do for a long time now. About this a will not tell to much at this point. Maybe a little sneak peek here on the blog a later on in the process. Oh, and my other Etsy shop, the one with only paintings and drawings will remain open during this break. Because it's a less demanding job to keep up, since it is not that frequenlty visited by people yet. I just recently opened it.

As far as blogging goes in this time of Etsy sabatical, I still plan one blogging once or twice a week. I like to blog, I like to tell you guys what’s on my mind and what inspires me. So if you all would keep on visiting me I’d like that very much.

One of the next day’s I’ll be blogging about the big Homewear fair I attended in my city of Amsterdam last Sunday. There I had some really nice chats with people who have their own brands and who create some awesome home accessories. Pictures will be included, so bye bye for now and stay tuned.