Touching clouds

Yes the hot air balloon did take me on a trip. Trip to the sunny, windy, rainy and absolutely beautiful (no matter what the weather) Albany. We saw all our sights in the rain, but I think it only made things more beautiful.

How can that sea be so amazingly blue and yet so stormy? And at times we were so up high that we were literally touching clouds.

Hope you all had a great weekend. Ours sure was!

From a cereal box to a mailing envelope // TUTORIAL

Yay, this tutorial has been long time coming. Just like all the parcels I've been meaning to send to my family and friends in Finland (they are coming, they really are).

All you people who send mail to your friends and buy those bigger and more firm envelopes from the post office, well this one's for you! It's pure recycling and you can decorate them how ever you want (I did mine with some stamps). And the best part: they are super easy and quick to make!

You can use whatever card board boxes you have, it doesn't have to be cereal boxes. They just make the biggest ones in size. I've used berry boxes and bisquit boxes too. One of them was even pleading to be recycled:

So are you sold yet? Let's start! I've written all of the information in the pictures, but I might just explain a bit in text too, if needed.

Here's what you need:

Stamp and ink are optional because you can just as well decorate them with other methods like drawing or painting. So all you really need is 3 things!! Choose as wide double sided sticky tape as you can. I ran out a while ago, so I just used a bit narrower for this one.

First thing is to cut your box into two pieces, the front and the back piece. Pretty simple, yeah?!

The small text in the previous image might be a bit hard to see, but it just says that you can trim the long sides of the box to make them a bit narrower. This depends on the size of your box. Usually I don't do this, but in this cereal box the sides were very wide, so I just cut a bit off.

I recommend to stamp at this point, because it's still a flat piece. Once you've put the envelope together, it can be a bit tricky, especially if you're using a bigger stamp. But again it's your call. You can decorate it once you've finished the whole thing. If you do decorate it now, you have to keep in mind that the short side's flap is the top of the envelope, the place where everything goes in.

Wow, it's finished! So simple, so easy, so quick. Feel free to ask if some step doesn't make sense. Now all you have to do is to remember to keep those boxes and make some more! And of course send some love to your friends. I bet they'll be super happy to get this parcel!

P.s. if you don't trust in your double sided sticky tape to hold, you can put clear sticky tape around the edges at the post office. It's good stuff!

It runs within us, craftiness I mean.

I am so inspired by the amount of handmade things people in Finland do. So much sewing, knitting, crochet. So much recycling and redoing. It was a big hit of reality brick for me when we moved here over a year ago. No-one was making anything, no handmade shops around. Now of course there are people here who do make things with their own little hands, but compared to Finland, it is very minimal.

So when I met with a group of Finns last May I realised that it runs within us. We are people who like to make things ourselves, need to make things ourselves. Oh so we organized a knitting group. Once a month. Chatting and knitting. Could there be anything better than that.

To prove a point I'll tell you a story. One of the girlswho came to the knitting club had bad memories of knitting and crochet from her school years. Yet after a while, he bought a crochet hook and some yarn. I gave her some what very minimal instructions and she was on fire.

She has since finished her first scarf and is now onto bigger adventures with her hook. How good does that scarf look!!! You can read her blog here. So you see, it is in our blood!

Stamping away

Carved myself a stamp, I did. Dreaming of going away somewhere. Maybe this weekend I will get on that hot air balloon and see where it takes me. Hopefully somewhere magical. And green. I don't even mind if it's raining.

Tried it on some material, but it didn't work. Maybe it's the rubber, maybe me.

So instead I decided to use it in something else. What's that, you say? Well another project that I will share very very soon.

Little things like stamps

Seeing so many summer pictures in the Finnish blogs that I read, has made me miss Finland so much. It is such a beautiful country! Another thing that I really miss is the every day things made a bit funky. That's how they do things there and I love it.

I found these two pictures on my computer, that I took before we moved. The post office was selling stamps that had pictures of different vegetables and then a massive amount of stickers with them. The idea was that you were able to decorate the vegetables the way you wanted. Now how cool is that!!

People in Finland, don't take things for granted. Love your country with all the quirks.

I will rise above it

I've been sick for nearly 3 weeks now and my energy is running very low. But since I don't feel ok, it's not the end. That gives me comfort. I shall conquer this, I shall.

So my making limits to that clock. We had the $2 clock from Ikea on our wall for over half a year, ugly thing. I took the only parts you need for a clock to work and tossed the rest to the bin. If I would have been more efficient, I would have spray painted the hands white. It had to be yellow to fit in with our same coloured kitchen bench.

So a plastic pizza tray, some fabric and hot glue gun later, we had ourselves a new clock on the wall. I'm more at peace now.

Silly things...

I love lists. So here's one:

Things I have done while I've been pregnant that don't really make any sense:

• Had a collar shirt wrong way around and wondered for an hour why it was so uncomfortable. Yeah took me an hour to figure that out. 

• Drank watercolour water, you know the one where you dip your brushes. Made so sure that my daughter wouldn't drink it that I ended up having it in my own mouth.

• Forgot my wallet behind the back door, outside and over night. Lucky no-one stole it. Found it the next morning when I went outside and opened the door.

• Remembered on Saturday that my daughter was suppose to have vaxinations the previous Tuesday. It then took me about two week to rebook her appointment as I kept forgetting again.

• Left a needle in a beanie that I took to the store to be sold, turned out I hadn't finished it yet.

• Cried when I took a pizza out of the oven, because it smelled so nice.

• Cried hopelessly when I saw a long lost friend standing in front of me. She on the other hand didn't have a clue who this crying and hugging woman was. It had been 10 years sinse we saw each other.

• Cried when I saw a tv add to remind us that we should wear seatbelts. I could make a whole list of things I've cried about.

• Was looking for a knife at a friends place, couldn't find it in the first drawer and as I opened the second one I had totally forgotten what I was looking for. So I just kept staring at the content of the second drawer until my friend came to help me.

 There's the ones I can remember, and I didn't even include all the meetings I have forgotten to go to or all the times I have cried for no good reason.

Isn't it amazingly weird how one tiny person growing inside of us can make our brains mash. Have you done something silly while you've been pregnant? I really hope I'm not the only one.