MAKE YOUR OWN DECO BOOKS

In This pile of magazines are most of my favorite decoration mags. This is one of my passion to buy these type of magazines, reading them but I do something more with them and it's fun.

Few times a year I take all my magazines, go them through and take everything out that interest me... It can an atmosphere, scenery, colour, image of the room, accessories, paint effects or even articles about DIY, etc...Sometimes it takes half of the day to do all these but it can be fun on the rainy day...

So to make your deco books you need a pair of scissors, plenty glue and visual diary books, the big ones are better than the A4 size, you can have a really nice collage on your pages...

Buy several visual diaries and make you books by theme, I have made for example a book for any kind of paint effects and colours, rustic chic, country style, then you can just assemble on one or two pages different bath rooms, bed rooms, kitchens etc and add different pictures of accessories that goes with these pictures.

This is really fun, creative and it is also relaxing...Collect your own dream house or houses...

HOW A BICYCLE CAN CHANGE ONE PERSONS LIFE...

Today in Nairobi, the Tour d'Afrique gave away bicycles as donations, which is part of the cycle race that my husband is doing at the moment. Have a look on http://www.africanride.blogspot.com/

WALL DECORATION

This is in our lounge in Andorra, the high wall needed some decoration, so I made this big frame with Marimekko's fabric and the red accessories added some colour. The 3 african ornaments comes from South Africa but I think the origin of the must be Malawi, they were made with this really heavy dark wood, so to modernise them I painted them with a metallic pearl paint.

DECORATE WITH STICKERS

Here you can see how few stickers can change a wall. We have a stone wall behing the sink. The stickers are easy and cheap way to change quickly some wall or window surface. Stickers can be found in hardware stores, online shops, IKEA etc.

KITCHEN WALL

Some colour to our kitchen, I repainted the narrow wall, the previous paint was not good quality and I couldn't get the stains off.  The two berry photos give a nice colour to the black and white kitchen. On the stone walls I add some stickers. The huge box next to the wall is the gas heater system, not really the nicest place to have it, but it was there when we bought this house. It was white so I turned to black and I think, if I will find some blackboard paint I will turned to a kitchen blackboard...

MOOMIN MUGS

A nice morning starts with a mug of nice cappuccino and not in any kind of mug, the Moomin characters light up my mornings. The colourful mugs can be found in many Finnish families. I got my mugs as a Christmas presents from my children and some from friends. These mugs are "Made in Finland" and some models are quite rare and they are already collector items. The black and white mugs on the coffee machine is part of the new collection called "Seikkailu", meaning adventure. In that collection there are trays, mug, milk jug, cereal bowl. Actually the colourful collection also have matching cereal bowls.

H&M HOME

A week ago when I was in Stockholm I saw the first H&M Home shop that had opened in city centre of Stockholm. In the shop you have a display of most of their home products, bed linen, kitchen towels, bathroom textiles, cushions etc. you can purchase some items in the shop but all the items are in storage at the back of the shop. So to do your shopping you take a metal plate and you have a choice of small flat magnets with pictures of the items you can buy and then with this "shopping basket" you go to the cashier who will give you all the purchased product. Some product are only available on Internet... I wanted to make a photo of the shop but I was not allowed to do that...

All the photos are from the H&M HOME Spring 2010 catalog

SPRING FEELINGS

Yesterday I left Finland after 3 weeks of hard winter, -13 to -20 degrees Celsius during the three weeks. So much snow that I needed to climb up on our sauna roof to shovel the snow down, because by the weight of the snow can damage the roof. I left the snow to find plenty sunshine in Spain, the fields had turned green and some trees had flowers already... Arriving by bus from Barcelona airport to Andorra... In Andorra yesterday evening was still quite warm 10 degrees... At home we had little bit less degrees due to the altitude, it feels spring but they still say that it will snow here this coming week, but my mind is in spring maybe because we have not snow in the garden at the moment and I have bought some nice decoration items to work a bit in my house...Today we are finally getting the new entrance door, even this house is only less than 2 years old, the door that the builder put in was not the right type of door. It was an entrance door for flats that are suppose to be inside in the blog of flats. This door couldn't support the heat of the sun, the rain and the winter cold... The entrance door is really important, it is the "passport" to your home...