Independence day

Yesterday on the 6th of December was the Finland's 94th Independence day. A and I went to visit a friend of ours and spent the evening there watching the Presidential Independence day reception where our President shakes hands with 2000 guests and the TV-viewers admire or criticise the outfits of the guests. That's how it goes every year.

The whole day is very military oriented. On the day the movie Unknown Soldier comes from television. There are no fireworks and no joyous parades. The closest to anything fun is the University students parade where they just walk, hold candles and sing the national anthem. I've once participated in it and I'm afraid it was a bit boring. Then on the evening everyone lights Independence candle or candles.

Don't get me wrong, Indepence is GREAT, which is why I think the day could actually be celebrated. I bet everyone else than Finnish people think we are in mourning. I'm happy that our friends have come up with a tradition of getting together and watching the Independence day reception together. Friends make the day much more fun.

Winter wreath

Saturday was a really nice day here and we went to the sea shore to have a walk and admire the shimmering sea. While we walked I found a big branch that had fallen off from a pine tree and I took it in purpose of making a wreath. Free material is the best material. At home I also took a branch from a thuja tree we have between us and the neighbour's yard to have some variation in material in the wreath.

I disassembled the fall wreath I had made to be able to reuse the wreath base. I made the wreath base long long time ago, it's just few twigs rolled to a wreath form and it's not even perfectly round but it works fine.

I cut the pine and thuja braches into shorter pieces.

Then I take a small bundle of branches and form them to a fan of sort before I place them on the wreath base.

I roll wire on top to hold the braches, the wire needs to be pulled tight, but usually one round is enough. Then repeat again and again until the wreath is done. For more detailed instructions check for example this site.

So once I was done I hung the winter wreath to it's usual place next to the front door. I like wreaths without much decorations, but you could add pine or fir cones or berries or what ever comes to mind.

Switching lights on and off by a remote

I love decorational lights and lights sprinkled around the room that give a cozy feeling to the room, but I never use them. I never switch them on. I just switch on the ceiling lights because it's easy, but it's not cozy, at all. Despite the love for decorational lights I don't fancy walking around the room switching them on or worse yet pluging them on, so I never have them on. I complained about this to a colleague of mine and she suggested that I'd get swithes that work by remote control. So I bought a new gadget from my favourite store, or actually four new gadgets: remote controlled switches.

How you use those is that you plug the remote control switch on the socket and then activate the correct channel from the remote control by pressing the channel button. The switch says 'click, click' and then it's ready for use and you can plug in the light or devise or whatever. Super easy.

In this remote control I have the option of putting the lights on one by one and putting them off one by one. I can also switch them all off simultaniously, but since this was a cheap set, I cannot put them on simultaniously, but that's fine.

The remote control must ofcourse be kept in a place where A and I can find it easily. And since the ceilign light swithes are on the wall close to the entrance to the room I figured the remote control could be kept there too. I added a piece of sticker velcro on the wall and on the remote control and attacthed it on the wall next to the regular switch. Now the lights can be swithed on or off from there or if wanted the remote can be moved.

So to demonstrate. Pressing the first light on

First light is on

First and second light are on

First, second and third light are on

All lights are off

And I have not moved one inch, Yay!

A week in the New York City

Hello and greetings from New York! A and I were there last week celebrating Thanksgiving and touring around the city. We had the best time and I loved beeing in New York again.

We arrived on saturday the 19th, on the first night we just had a little something to eat and then went to bed early beeing tired from the flight and jetlag. On sunday we hit the Harlem and went to a Babtist church to listen some gospel.

It was the most amazing church event I've ever been to and that type of music cannot ever be heard in Finland. I was so amazed how captivated everyone was and I had so much fun. It was like beeing in a consert, the choir was absolutely fantastic.

On the next few days we visited the Top of the Rock, the Museum of Natural History, the Intrepid - an aircraft carrier that also has a Concorde and lots of other aircrafts.

We also visited the Staten Island with the orange Staten Island ferry and took a lot of bad pictures about the Statue of liberty. On the way back the sun had set and we were able to see a very nice night view of the Manhattan.

Then Thanksgiving came and we woke up way too late to get any good viewing spots for the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. But we saw the balloons! Those were huge and what we could hear the marching bands were amazing.

The parade was very long and we did not feel like standing and looking at the parade for the whole time so at one point we returned to the hotel where we saw rest of the parage from the telly. On the evening we had booked a table from a restaurant in Soho to have a Thanksgiving dinner. We had the traditional turkey and filling and sweet potato mash and as a desert we had pumpkin pie and everything was very good. I especially liked the sweet potato mash, it reminded me of the potato and rutabaga casserols we eat here in Finland over the holidays.

On the friday we wanted to experience the black friday in a big way and so we headed to the Macy's. And the people were definately crazy to go there to shop, just look:

They are nuts, or then all of them were tourists checking out the crazyness.

Here is a one final photo of the subway. We had a seven day ticket to the subway and boy did we use it. The subway and the easiness of moving around is clearly one of the best things there are in New York.

I could definately visit New York again and again, it can never bore me.

And on the trip A and I also had a dinner with two new blogging friends from the Blogging Your Way e-course. Thank you Nina from no. 40 and Santa from Homestilo for meeting up, I had a very nice time with you!

Packing for a vacation

I like to travel light. But I don't travel with only my passport and I do have some clothes with me but not much. I mainly like to travel light because I'm not a very strong person, I just don't have the strenght to lift up a heavy bag, or to carry one up stairs or pulling one behind me on a road. So it's a whole lot easier to travel light. Also I must admit that being small myself and that I usually wear quite fitted clother makes it much easier to travel light. A pair of my trousers takes up about third of the space A's trousers do.

Typically I would take a small bag with wheels. But to the States where we were leaving I had planned some shopping so I took  bigger bag to have extra room for the souvenir.

I have a notebook where I've written a general list of things I need to pack with me. I have there a separate list for summer trip, fall/spring trip and winter trip. Also I have a separate list for a cabin trip. I've had these same lists for years. The lists are not very detailed. For example the list just says I need to pack shirts, it does not say how many shirts and what type. Since I have this permanent list on a notebook I don't strike over the things I've allready put in the luggage, I can remember what I've allready packed and what I have not packed.

I try to make sure I have done some laundry before the trip so I can choose what ever I want, also I try to make sure all the clothes I choose go well with each other, so I don't end up in a situation on the trip where I have only one shirt and one trousers left and they don't go well together.

For a weeks trip I take one pair of trousers in the luggage. Then I take maybe two to three undershirts or t-shirts. I don't change my shirt everyday even at home. I also take one or two long sleeved shirts, one lighter one and one warmer one. I take underpants ones per day of travel including the day of return. If the trip is longer than a week I only take about weeks worth of underpants and then I assume I can wash them in between somewhere. Socks I also take one pair per travel day. Then I do take one extra pair of shoes, incase it rains one day and shoes get wet. I hate wet shoes. What else... For this trip I did not take a towel, since we are staying in a hotel. Well I do take soap and shampoo and lotion with me. I have these in travel size containers and store them in a ziplock bag for situations when I've taken only hand luggage with me. Also I sometimes take flip flops with me even to city vacations, since the hotel showers can be quite gross sometimes. Now we had booked a room from a fancier hotel, so I left those home.

My packing style is to first fold and then roll all the clothes. I think in that way they don't wrinkle that much and are easy to retrieve from the bag. In the picture you don't see my underwear.

Since I now took a bigger bag with me and the stuff I put in there did not really fill the bag up I was left with some empty space. The bag does not have many compartments and the clothes would just flow around in the bag and get all wrinkly. At least by the time the throwers are moving the bag to the cargo the insides are going to get all mixed up and I don't want that.

I think I was quite a genius when I came up with an idea of using luggage strap to hold the clothes in place. There is a hard sheet on the bottom of the bag and I pushed the strap from underneath the sheet and over the clothes to make a nice bundle.

Perfect!

Oh and by the way later I added a small umbrella and cell phone charger and camera charger in to the bag and some pain killers.

At the roof tile factory

When I started my teahouse building I did not have any specific plan on how I'm going to make it and I certainly had not made any plans on paper or calculated how much materials I would need. I just went to the crafting store and bought some amount of wood and some other materials. I thought I wouldn't need much materials at all and the whole teahouse could be built in less than 40 euro. Well I was dumb as a boot.

I had allready visited to the crafting store twice after the initial shopping trip to stock up on the wood and on superglue. The third trip I took there was to get more modeling clay for making roof tiles. Here are the tools I used for making the roof tiles. Knife for cutting, ruler for measuring obviously, jar as a rolling pin and glass sheet as a workbase.

Originally I had bought two packages of FIMO modeling clay, I was certain that would be way enought, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Then I made the mistake of mixing two colours, black and brown, I wanted dark brown roof tiles.

While I was mixing the first batch I noticed the mixing was lot of work. It was lot more burdensome than I had thought. The colour was fine though at that point, but when the roof tiles hardened in the oven they turned allmost black. I had been to so much trouble and then the end result was almost black anyway. Now I had done the first batch and did not want to start over so I needed to make the following batches equal. Also I noticed that from two packages of modeling clay I was able to make one fourth of the roof. Only one fourth!

Well I had started making the tiles like that and I was not going to back out now. So mixed up the next three batches of the clay, cut the straight tiles and hardened them in the oven. This took several evenings. Then I made arched tiles to go in between the straight tiles, I used my roof tile cutter with great success.

I draw a form for the arched tile on paper and formed the tiles on top of it, so I could get the tiles somewhat uniform.

Then I baked the arched tiles too. And here is how my roof tile factory worked like for many many days and I don't think the plastic smell is ever going to leave from the oven. Stay tuned for the tiling of the roof maybe next week.

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This post belongs to the series of posts for the I'm a Giant challenge by Emily Henderson. All my posts about the challenge can be found behing this link.

Winter decoration with string of lights

I showed you allready the glowing orbs, which were created with string of lights. Here is another string of lights idea.

Well the lights are from a store but what covers the light bulbs are "snowballs" I made last winter. I'm afraid I have no making-of pictures but I'll try to explain how I made them.

What you need is

• waterballoons or regular balloons blown very small
• yarn
• wallpaper paste or glue watered down
• somewhere where to hang the balloons to dry

What I did was to blow the balloons and then I rolled a good amount of white crocheting yarn on the balloon. I dipped the balloon to a cup of wallpaper paste and then took it out and wiped the excess paste off. You could also take a long piece of yarn and dip it into the paste and then roll it on the balloon like is done in this gorgeous blog post. I just did not want to guess how much yarn I would need for one balloon.

I tied a piece of yarn to the knot on the balloon and hang the balloons to dry. Next day they were perfectly dry and I poked the balloon with a needle and removed the scraps of the balloon by one of the holes there is left between the yarn.