Christmas Preparations

Oh, what a lovely day! I woke up early because I wanted to hit the shops before everyone else would. Just when it started to look a bit crowded, I was ready to go home, and ready for lunch. For lunch I had delicious spring rolls, and of course some chocolate. After lunch it was time to do some Christmas present wrapping, and for that I needed to find suitable materials. I used wallpaper, a brown paper bag, jute string, old book pages, and anything that looked good. I think I made very nice recycled packages!

I also decorated the Christmas tree while listening to Christmas music. This year I didn't buy any new decorations, I'm very proud of myself! We have a small fake tree and the old decorations were just perfect for it, I don't actually even need more.

In the evening it was time for sauna, red wine and some more present wrapping. I could wrap only two presents with the brown paper bag so I had to wait until Mats came home and brought some brown packing paper. Viiru wanted to be close to me and was sitting on the chair behind me while I made beautiful presents.

A New Life

I've found a lof of ugly items in flea markets and transformed them into somethin new. I like to think that I'm giving them a new life so that also other people can see the beauty in them. Many items have an interesting shape and for example with some black paint it's easy to transform an old-fashioned item to look very modern. In this post I'm showing you how the items looked before and how they look now. Enjoy!

Christmas Shop Käpy is Open!

Finally the Christmas shop Käpy is open! In Käpy you can find perfect and unique presents for Christmas. The Käpylä area is also worth visiting, the wooden houses covered with snow look so beautiful. The building where Käpy is located is also very cute with its big windows. Now it's the time to do some shopping in Käpy!

Pop-up store Käpy

My friend is opening a Christmas pop-up shop Käpy on Monday 17th of December in Käpylä, Helsinki. I'm also making some products for the shop. I have found all the objects in flea markets, and most of them are made of wood. I look for wooden pieces because wood is a perfect surface for the decoupage teqhnique. Here are a few examples.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...

This week I've been home almost the whole week. I've had a flue and I've been very tired. Today the pictures will tell you what's been happening lately. Have a nice weekend!

December

It's December already! The days go by so so fast. It's been snowing awfully lot during the past days. The atmosphere outside is magical, there's snow everywhere and it's so quiet. The snow mutes the sounds effectively. In the morning the sidewalks were covered with snow and there were only narrow paths going through the white city.

In the summer I didn't feel like we would need curtains, but now that it's cold outside and there are no more green leaves, I started thinking about having curtains. Yesterday I started with my curtain project and managed to sew one curtain for the living room and hang it up. My initial thought was to have curtains made from recycled fabrics but I got tired of waiting to find the perfect fabric so I just bought this fabric from the shop.

Whenever I can't use recycled materials, I avoid buying synthetic materials and go for natural ones. I bought beige linen fabric for the living room and light grey linen fabric for the bedroom. I wanted to emphasize on the height of the room and made the curtains reach all the way from the ceiling to the floor. That's why I couldn't buy any ready-made curtains because the room height in our flat is 270cm and all the shops sell 250 high ready-made curtains. It's amazing how our living room looks totally different by just adding one curtain!

DIY Toilet Sign

I've been such a lazy blogger lately! Recently I've been exercising a lot and even though it gives me more energy, I haven't had time for blogging. I'm glad that I've found the joy in exercising but from now on I also want to have time for blogging. In the coming days I'm planning to show you more photos of our home. My posts have been a lot about small details but I promise I will show you more overall pictures. I don't want to take pictures when our home's a mess, and it's a mess almost all the time. Yesterday I vacuumed and today when I got home from work, our living room rug looked like no one had ever vacuumed it. Our one-year-old dog Viiru loves destroying her toys and that's why our floors and rugs almost never look tidy.

Here's a small thing I made today. I actually started with this toilet sign yesterday and today I managed to finish it. We used to have a romantic style sign on the toilet door but it really wasn't our style. I still have a few old boards from last summer and I got an idea to make a toilet sign from one of the boards. I used steel wire for the letters and there it was, a very unique sign combining old wood and steel wire. What a perfect combination!

Flower Pots

This weekend I've had a flower pot project. I've done many other things also but somehow these flower pots took me three days to get done. I wanted to have vintage style pots for the coming Christmas. Now I just need flowers!

I had old terracotta pots I thought were beautiful outside but they didn't go with the things inside. They needed a good wash and a little bit of newspaper and old lace. I attached the newspaper pieces with wallpaper paste and lacquered the surface with clear furniture lacquer. When the lacquer was still wet I added some old lace and added more lacquer onto the lace. Then I just needed to wait for them to dry.

I took the pots out on the balcony to dry because the left-over furniture laqcuer I had has quite a bad smell. I'm sure it's not healthy to inhale such substances either. When I'll get rid of all my left over paints ald lacquers I don't think I will buy these toxins anymore. I still haven't had time to find out about ecological and healthy paints so if you have any tips, please leave a comment!

No Adverts!

Twice a week advertisements are delivered to our home. We have not asked for them as we do not read them. That's why I decided to make a sign saying that we don't want them. In Finland it's quite common that people have a sign on their door saying "No adverts!"

You can actually get ready made stickers that you can put on your door or mail box. I just think they're quite ugly so I decided to make my own design. First I wrote the text on an old piece of paper and put it in black frames. After that, I decided I didn't want to make holes in the beautiful wooden door, and decided to make individual sticker letters instead.

And this is how it's done! I chose a nice font and printed the text. I already had black adhesive paper on a roll, which was perfect for this project. After printing the text I placed the text paper on top of the adhesive paper, added some masking tape in the corners to make the two papers stay put and began cutting. I used very small scissors for the job. It was actually pretty therapeutic to concentrate on cutting such small forms. I like the result very much! Now we won't get unnecessary adverts and we have a unique text on our front door!