Hi and hello!

Hi, Y'all!

When I take Heinrich on his first walk of the day nowadays, it's getting a little bit lighter every day - isn't that gorgeous? After weeks and weeks of rain that is a hint of spring which I highly appreciate. 

And regarding morning routines: I just wanted to drop that I reached half-time of my 60-day habit changing challenge! My results so far: 7 times per week pure water instead of syrup, 6 times per week Yoga directly after getting up and 5 times per week I practiced French. If you consider that you stick to new year's resolutions for 21 days in average, I'm on a good way on my day 31 now. Let's see where that leads me...

Besides, I can show you two little things I created in my sewing room: Our neighbors suffer from infiltration! And I don't mean politically :-) Although their apartment door was already repaired, they still have air coming through underneath the door. But I don't want them to freeze so I took a pair of jeans, chopped one leg off and created such a stopper thingy: 

Slightly embellished with some trimming and a leather patch and accompanied by another jeans leg, this time in black. I filled the whole thing with fabric scraps I couldn't use otherwise. Therefore, it is washable and pretty heavy - exactly what you want in a draft preventer.

For breakfast we usually have cereals and a smoothie. Often I drink it later and therefore take it with me into my office. But the water condensation always causes these annoying stains on my desk, thus I had to sew a coaster or mug rug. Took some softshell fabric I used for my rain jacket and used the grey fleece as outside and the black water repellent as inside. Looks pretty nice and matches my office color scheme. Maybe I'll sew some more; a monstera leaf for instance may look very nice, too.  

And as we are talking about nice and pretty: Before Christmas I ordered some black metal rings to adorn them with salt dough houses and to put them in my windows. Unfortunately, I didn't like the finished product at all! Therefore I stashed them in my ufo box. But then my sister told me they're going to move, and I thought this is the perfect opportunity to make them a door wreath. Please adore the prototype currently hanging on our door:  

As my sister gave me her stitching ring she used for her first attempt in cross stitching decades ago, it deemed appropriate to use such a device for her wreath. Plus, I could pinch some vegan leather in between the two wooden frames. That didn't work for my metal ring, obviously. My sister's wreath is slightly smaller than mine, but equally pretty: 

I try to organize our menu by season. Therefore, we have lots of squash and cabbage right now. But always the same old same old gets boring quickly, and so I tried two new recipes for Savoy cabbage. First a strudel with puff pastry, savoy cabbage and minced beef which we completed with some bechamel and white wine:

And then we had pasta with cabbage and walnuts - completely different: Cook pasta and cabbage and then mix some of the cooking liquid with walnuts and parmesan cheese in a blender to get a creamy sauce. Fold in the cabbage and pour it over the pasta. Top it off with some chopped walnuts and some grated parmesan and you're done. Very yummy!

And last but not least a pro-tip for bottles: If you use such devices as SodaStream, you will probably know my battle with keeping the bottles clean. Even when you use a bottle brush it might get difficult. Usually I take some rice to clean my water bottles: uncooked rice, water and a few drops of laundry detergent into my bottle and shake it, baby, shake it! Perfect result, but the rice is doomed afterwards. But my favourite drugstore recently added stainless steel cleaning pearls. Same principle as the rice, but no waste. You can use them for thermos jugs or vases, too - I like very much!  

Stay squeaky clean, safe and sane :-)))