Thursday, May 31, 2012

Photography and growing blisters

Not having been active with my camera for more than half a year, I notice that my photography skills have gotten rather rusty. I didn't have that much skill to begin with, only having started with exploring the effects of lighting, depth, composition and backgrounds, but still...

For me, photography is something I'm not looking forward to beforehand, but as soon as I start I really like the process. Fortunately, my boyfriend (and other friends as well) are quite into photographing, being kind enough to provide me with tips and feedback (and even a camera, thanks Love ;) ). When photographing for my previous blog, I have even made a couple of pictures that I am actually proud of! These can be viewed on my Flickr account. However, I really need to practise again, so I'm trying to photograph some random inanimate objects whenever I have the time. This week:

The beautiful roses my boyfriend gave me for my birthday:





...and a worn-down flower hawaii-necklace against our wall:



On another note, because there is going to be a performance with my Tuna music group (nothing to do with the fish, 'Tuna' comes from 'tunar', the Spanish word for roaming around, as Tuna groups stem from student troubadour groups in medieval Spain) and I tend to skip rehearsals whenever I'm busy or tired (which is often), I'm back to practising the songs at home. The texts (in Spanish, which I do not speak) have been forgotten to the point that I can only hope no one with a working knowledge of Spanish is listening when I sing (fortunately, my voice is very quiet, lol - still need to work on that). But most important, my bandurria (a sort of Spanish mandoline) play has gotten worse as well, and that can be heard by anyone, yikes!

So now I have about 12 songs (the ones that have a high chance to be chosen at the performance) to improve on within week. Bandurrias have double, metal, high pitched snares, so after playing for half an hour your fingers start to hurt (of course, the skin of my fingers has softened over time making it worse), and I really have to limit my playing time to prevent getting blisters on my finger tops... I just hope it'll work out!

Update: Ouch... two blistered fingertips already...

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Forward with the goat

Okay, let's kick off! (or even better, 'forward with the goat!' to translate one of the quirky Dutch sayings -literally)

Lately I'm busy with working on two designs for rings, to be 3D printed (it's like how you print on paper, but instead of one layer of ink, thousands of layers of for instance stainless steel or plastic are stacked); parttime work in the cooking supplies store; tying up loose ends on a small webdesign job that keeps dragging on a bit (come on people, move it! I really want to be done with it); nourishing my ongoing thoughts about my professional website-to-be and new business name (not completely decided on yet); baking cakes (it's birthday season for my boyfriend and me); cleaning and tidying up the house (again, birthday season) and, most important, eating lots of ice cream because it is really freaking hot at the moment and I still need to get used to it.

Because of the heat, I was craving for a healthy salad for lunch, and my chives plant had started to bloom, which negatively affects the taste. Fortunately, the flowers are edible (quite juicy actually), a perfect way to get rid of them! So I whipped up a little salad:



Cucumber-tomato salad with chive flowers and a yoghurt dressing (in Dutch: komkommer-tomaat met bieslookbloemen).

For one person I used:
- 1/3 cucumber, in small pieces
- 1 tomato (without the seeds, cuz it's so much more healthy that way), in small pieces
- a handful of chives and chive flowers
- a few basil leaves, chopped into small pieces
- some bacon, chopped
- half a handful of dry roasted pumpkin seeds

For the dressing, I mixed:
- a few tablespoons yoghurt
- one teaspoon honey
- paprika powder
- pepper

Mix the salad, mix the dressing and pour it over the salad: enjoy! I ate it with some baguette with homemade herb butter (unsalted butter, crushed garlic, chives, parsly, some thyme, salt and pepper, best made a day before use) and was quite satisfied with the taste. The pumpkin seads were just added because I need to remind myself to eat more of them (y'know, healthy and stuff), however I was pleasantly surprised with the earthy element it added to the salad.

Also, a little snapshot of our table (we use it for our personal projects):



Really really really fanatic followers of my previous blog might recognise the fabric from here, I bought it some time ago at a Quilter's shop. Before, I had absolutely no idea those even existed in the Netherlands, but turns out there is even one in my home town. As I felt that I needed something simple and stress-free to unwind in the evenings lately, I picked it up to make a small patchwork spread, to be used as a pillowcase or something. Naturally, I managed to mess up during the making of the templates (with only two to make, you'd think I'd manage at least that), only to find out the error when trying to connect the second row of pieces and seeing they were too small. Turns out I made the triangles half the size they were supposed to be...

Now I'll have to try and cut out double the amount of triangles while having very small scraps of fabric left, I hope it'll be enough!

Oh yeah, I came across this brilliant song that I just don't want to keep from you: enjoy!



P.S. Can't yet show any pictures of the rings I'm working on though, I definitely will when they are finished. I hope to be able to send them to the printer in two weeks, yay! Planning might be a bit optimistic, but it helps me speed things up a bit. Or helps me to start working on it althogether, whatever you want to call it.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Hello world!

Hello world!

My name is Marloes and this is my first blog post. Nah, kidding. Before, I've blogging under the pseudonym 'Kat', where I wrote my previous 202 blogposts, effectively making this blog post No. 203.

You can read my previous blogposts on:

http://katscrea.wordpress.com

However, these are written in Dutch and as I wanted to start writing in English (for the much-needed practise, I can feel it slipping away...), it seemed the right time for me to move to another blogspace as well. Blogger this time, as I really liked Wordpress, but not its limited options for changing the layout. I like to have a virtual playground so to speak.

My blog topics?

Well, bits and pieces of my daily life, the creative projects I'm working on, both the professional and spare-time ones, some recipes here and there and hopefully a few decent photographs now and then.

I'm aiming for a few-times-a-month/once-a-week frequency (more wouldn't be feasible timewise, less would probably make me forget I even had a blog to begin with), but we'll see how it goes along the way.

I wish you happy reading!

            ~Marloes