Me, myself and I

Some of my blogfriends asked me what I looked like as a kid. My father was a keen photographer and never went anywhere without his camera. And me and my sister were his favorite models! He developed his own photos in the bathroom and I can still remember the happiness I felt when I was allowed inside to help him. It was so fascinating to see the picture slowly appear on the photo paper. That’s when my own interest in photography was born I guess although I started taking my own pictures very much later…. Unfortunately a lot of my father’s photographs were destroyed when my parents summerhouse burnt down last year. Some however was saved …..

This is me deep in thoughts at the age of four I think.

This is me and my sister playing in the kitchen. As you can see I was very much in to
kettle-holders even then!

Being creative !

My mother didn’t know she was expecting twins until she arrived at the maternity ward and the mid wife said "that belly is so big it has to be two inside". - No way said my mother. And my father almost fainted. Mostly due to the fact that he had made a beautiful cradle with a handwoven basket made of willow ( my father is very creative too) and the cradle most certainly had room only for one. What was he to do? Luckily for him we were born to early and he had time to make a second basket while we were in hospital.

When we were born my mother had to fill out a form in hospital. Since we were born at the same time she forgot to tick the box that stated if I had any brothers and sisters. When I came home from hospital my mother was visited by a nurse from the child welfare centre. My sister was still in hospital. The nurse was very surprised when she found a cradle with two baskets and me lying in one of them and the other one filled with books so the cradle wouldn’t fall over. The look on her face! I wasn’t supposed to have any brothers or sisters. She thought my mum had gone completely nuts!

This is me on my mothers shoulder at the age of approximately 8-9 weeks. We were born 6 weeks too early and I left hospital at about the age of six weeks and my sister a few weeks later. Us being in the hospital was a trauma for my mother. We were in isolation and in an incubator and my mother weren’t allowed to hold us or even be near us. She just had to stand outside a glass window looking in. Thank god the care of premature babies are much better now!

Many of my friends say that my youngest daughter has a great resemblance to me. Here she is a day old resting on my shoulder. Maybe they are right.

What do you think?

I have been tagged

I have been tagged by Lili M. She wants to know 7 strange and unfamiliar things about me. Since I am not a very interesting person I will follow Lili`s example and show you some garden pics as well. I wouldn’t want you to be bored stiff….

1. I am a twin. My twin sister is one hour and a half older than me and boy did she rub that one in when we were kids. I weighed 500 gram more than her when we were born and she always accused me of kicking her out in order to have all the food to my self. We are not identical twins. She is thin, has brown hair and is easily tanned. I am blond, on the shubby side and go red in the sun. We are more alike now than as kids though. She is good at mathematics, science and anything logical and I am good at languages, social science and writing. We used to fight a lot! Thanks to my sister I got great grades in science when I finished school because we competed about absolutely everything including test results. I love my sister very much despite or maybe due to our differences!




2. I love to sing and have attended various choirs but am currently without one. I don’t play any instrument and I can’t read notes so I sing by ear. I am a contralto but on good days or in the shower I’m a mezzo soprano! I got thrown out of the local church choir in my teens when I was caught singing Janis Joplin’s Oh lord want you buy me a Mecedes Benz while my best friend was playing the church organ. I never sing before breakfast because my grandmother always said “sing in the morning and there will be tears before evening”. I whistle instead!

3. I have distant plans of writing a book. I have always wanted too but after taking a course in creative writing a few years back I felt totally defeated and depressed and decided that book writing was nothing for me. But now the old yearning has come to life again… But this time I haven’t got a novel in mind. I would much rather write a book about how to be creative! Or how to pursue your inner creativity. A sort of “how to” book with lots of photos and pep talk. Because as I often say in my blog is that it`s my firm belief is that everyone can be creative and that everyone has a talent. It`s just that for some this talent is hidden and yet to explore. And I so would like to help people explore it!

4. I used to work as a physical therapist but now I work with project leading, project development and community development mostly in the health care area. People who don’t know me usually think I am very organized, that I always have an answer and know what to do. But that’s just a front. My work room and office is always a mess and most of the time I just walk around thinking that “Shit! Soon people must discover what a great fraud I am”. But funnily enough I always seem to land on my feet and work things out. I like to work alone and I am not very good at delegating. But I always get my best ideas in discussion with others but then I like to get back to my office and work on it further on my own. What I like best about my job is that no day is ever the same and that I get to solve things not by seeing problems but solutions instead.

5. I hate reading manuals and I think that the saying read the fucking manual must have been written for me. I have difficulties seeing things three dimensional and therefore I can never build anything after a plan. And I can never put anything together from IKEA! My youngest daughter is phenomenal though and always helps me out. Because of that she learned how to handle a cordless drill driver at an early age!

6. I love making lists of what to do! And I often put in one or two items that I have already done just to have the satisfaction of ticking them off!

7. I have yet never spent a night alone in our country house. I have an overactive imagination and I always think that ax murderers and mad rapists are lurking in the garden. I’m OK in the city but as soon as I get down to the country house and it darkens I start looking over my shoulder. Of course it’s much more safe in the country house than in town but try telling that to my imagination….I still jump at every little noise! That I’m a crime novel freak might have something to do with it.

Well that is 7 strange and unfamiliar things about me. Now I get to tag someone else. So

Anna Stilla

Angela Louise

Betty Jo

Carolyn

feel free to tell us some strange and unfamiliar things about yourself!

Have a great week everyone!

Jeanette

Clematis

The good thing about having a gardening quarantine is that you get to spend time in your garden actually doing other things than weeding. For me that means wandering about with my camera, stop and smell the flowers and enjoying the moment. Today it was the spectacular colors of my Clematis that caught my attraction……

Don`t forget to stop now and then and smell the flowers!

Hope you all have a lovely day

Jeanette

My poor darling

The day before yesterday my youngest daughter fractured her arm for the third time in a row. Poor darling! She was in so much pain. And she wasn’t allowed to eat or drink because the doctors weren’t sure whether or not they had to operate. We spent eight hours in the emergency ward and wasn’t home until the middle of the night. Luckily my daughter is a very happy, patient and calm girl and it takes a lot to upset or bother her. So when she got the result from the x-ray she just sighed and said “this is the third summer with a cast. That’s a really lousy tradition Mum…. ” . Well, amen to that! Today she was feeling much better and went off to school again. Returning with the cast full of autographs….

Quarantine

My cottage garden is very old fashioned. The old lady that owned the house was very fond of her garden and had a lot of old plants. When she died the house stood empty for more than a year and the garden was unattended. The former owner lived there only for 8 months and wasn’t interested in gardening. He had enough work with trying to make the house livable. So much work I am sad to say that his marriage broke up and they had to sell it. We bought the house in the middle of last summer and didn’t have much time for the garden either carrying on where the last owner left off and trying hard not to let our marriage go the same way. So this spring the garden was all shambles and in great need of some tender love and care. I have been working hard with cutting down hedges of sleeping beauty proportions, digging up nettles and giving the weeds a hard time.

In the process I found rose bushes, peonies, monk’s hood, delphinium, foxglove, lupines, lilacs and an enormous amount of Lily of the valley. I have been working so hard in the garden that I got a sore hip tendon. I tried long and hard not to pay attention to it and by doing so pretending that the pain would just go away. But when I couldn’t walk properly any more due to the pain I had to stop pretending… So I put myself in quarantine. Gardening quarantine! Last weekend I didn’t even allow myself to visit the house because I new that being there I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from digging or mowing the lawn or planting flowers, or….It wasn’t easy I can tell you because now is the absolute most beautiful time of the year! My youngest daughter felt sorry for me and said we could spend some quality time together instead.

I am very proud over my two daughters. They are both talented girls and the eldest (16) is very much in to fashion, great at doing make up and has a lovely singing voice. She is a natural when it comes to horses and wants to study natural horsemanship for Monty Roberts in America. The youngest (13) is the creative one. She handles a sewing machine and a drilling machine with the same forte and wants to be an inventive genius when she grows up. She got her own sewing machine last Christmas and this Christmas her highest wish was a dress form. And she got one! Now when we had some time on our hands she wanted to sew a summer party dress. Said and done. We bought a beautiful fabric and a pattern that in fact was a ball dress with a long skirt but we decided we could always shorten it. I was a bit nervous because the pattern seemed rather difficult but we were determined to give it our best shot. I cut the fabric and my daughter did the sewing. Furter down you can see the result!

My poor garden.

So sadly neglected. Everything is buried in nettles and weeds.

After some TLC.
I still want it a bit rough and unattended looking but now the peonies, monk’s hood, foxglove, lupines, and Lily of the valley has a fair chance of growing and blossom.


My daughters dress.
Not bad for a 13 year old! The dress form was a great help!

And now my hip is so very much better and my walk only has a very small limp to it! I hope to be able to do some more gardening in a near future! Or at least be able to bend down and smell the flowers…..

Hope you all have a lovely week!

Jeanette

PS My dear blog friend Betty Jo has moved her blog. Please visit the new one and take a peak at an amazing verandah and a lavender colored house.

How about some recycling fun?

Ever since I bought the book on metal craft I have a new passion. Metal is such an exciting material and it doesn’t matter if it’s shiny and new or very old and worn you can still make so many fun things out of it. I have started to build up a collection of tins and cans and my work room is getting way to small. Wool, yarn, fabric, beads, pearls, paint, brushes, tins, cans and a whole lot of other stuff that can come in handy is stowed away on a very tiny area. I am in desperate need of a new work room or a total makeover of the old one. That will definitely have to be one of my summer projects…….among many others!

Today I needed someplace new to store my vintage lace so I decided to make one. Do you want to know how I did it? Welcome to tag along!

I chose a tin can from my "collection"

I like this can as it is but sausages doesn`t go to well with vintage lace so I decide to redo it! I wanted it to be a bit more shabby chick and princess like in style...

I made a paper template ....

.....then I traced the template on the can using a permanent marker.

I cut out the crown using heavy-duty tin snips and I used a metal file to remove the sharp edges....

.....then I painted it white and added a few rosebuds, an old photo and the text princess on tiny scraps of paper with decoupage finish. I use Royal Coat because it`s acid free and fast drying.

This is the finished result! Soon to be filled with vintage lace !

Alien nettles?

I wanted a small vegetable garden at the country house. Not much, just some rhubarb, salad, herbs, strawberries and one or two raspberry bushes. I had the perfect spot. The former owner had already planted rhubarb there so why not carry on where he had finished.


The place was absolutely covered in nettles but what the heck you just pull them up by the roots right? It took me 10 seconds to realize that pulling them up was out of the question. They had roots as big as my index finger and grew half way to China.


Armed with a spade I started digging. And digging and digging. Six hours later I had removed all the nettles from approximately 15 square meters and I was beyond tired. I had been going on autopilot the last hour or so and my husband had told me twice already to finish for the day. But if I stopped now all my hard work would be unnecessary because they would grow right back. So before I could call it a day I had to cover the ground with black garden matting in order to kill the survivors. And because it was a windy day I had to secure it with stones. A lot of stones! Thoughts of a long hot soak in the tub accompanied with a glass of wine or two were the only thing that kept me going!

Another hour and fifty stones later I was done! My entire body felt like I had been run over by a truck! I had muscles aching I didn’t even know existed. And I used to work as a physical therapist so I should know! But I was happy and very, very proud. My husband had already left for town and I just couldn’t wait to get into my car and drive home too for my long longed for hot bath! When I opened the trunk I found the five sacks of compost soil I had bought on the way down and forgotten to unload !!!! I wept. And as I dragged them out of the trunk one by one I could swear my foul language killed the nettles that were left…….

When I came back two days later I ran to look if my hard work had been in vain. Wow! It looked just perfect. No nettles! But wait a minute weren’t there nettles everywhere else instead? Oh yes! All my flowerbeds where full of the little bastards! So now I have a war going on in my garden. It’s between me and the nettles and right now it’s 5-0. To the nettles! When ever I turn my back on them they seem to grow up again. Poof and they’re back! Could they be aliens? Are they in fact planning on taking over not only my garden but my brain as well? I have been feeling rather odd a while now having a strange urge to just give up and let the nettles take over. Is that a first step towards being beamed up to the Mothership do you think?