a bit of green

As some of you might know, I recently moved to a new appartment. The old one was already furnished, so I was lacking several basic things such as a couch or a table for the living room.

A while back, I salvaged an old window from the garbage and I’ve been meaning to do something with it; so I decided to make a window table! My dad (maybe you remember his skills from the bike panniers) came over and we built the window table together. Here’s the whole process!

You might remember last’ years  Advent calendar I made for Alex; he liked it so much I thought I’d surprise him every year with one!

As you might remember from the previous post, an Advent calendar is a calendar that begins on 1st December and ends on Christmas; it consists of 24 little doors or boxes numbered from 1 to 24. Beginning on the first day of December, one door is opened each day, counting down the days remaining until Christmas Eve; behind each door is a treat, a piece of chocolate or a toy.

Many of you have asked for some kind of pattern for our roll up panniers. The time has come at last!
Here’s a teaser image; you can download a high resolution PDF here.

We’re writing you from Lausanne, in Switzerland, and with it being the fourth trip we’ve done together since bit of green was born, we thought we’d share the fun… and the things we’ve found on our way!  I love making lists of things I want to see or taste before an upcoming trip; it makes planning our day in a foreign country easier and I can surprise Alex with various comments (usually of architectural nature, like “This was built in 1863!” or foodie nature: “I read there’s an african restaurant down the road!”). He seems to like both.

So, we have some kind of guides for the cities we visited, and we thought we’d share it with you. There you go, find out the ten (+1) things we saw in Berlin!

What we loved most about Italy was the food. Coming home from our trip to Rome, being the foodies that we are, we stuffed our baggage with delicious stuff;  parmigiano-reggiano from Parma, salame from Milan, various sausages and a packet of herb mix called Diavola.

Having tasted several pizzas in Rome we wanted to make one ourselves for our friends using a relatively classic Italian recipe. Here we go then, for our Italian thin-crust pizza!

Colorful elephants! These will be made into earrings for a bazaar I’m taking part in with a very good friend of mine.
They are made out of cardboard; we drew the shapes in Autocad (ask me for the .dwg), then cut them at our university’s laser cutter. Afterwards, we hand painted them, let them dry and added a clear varnish coat. We’ll add silver earring hooks and beads later. They make wonderful earrings; they’re so cute and colorful!

According to Wikipedia, “Guerrilla gardening is gardening on another person’s land without permission”. The term was coined in 1973 by the Green Guerilla group that was active in the Bowery Houston area of New York. The act itself, however, dates back to at least 1649 when Gerrard Winstanley and his group of Protestant agrarian communists called “the Diggers” was active in Surrey, England. The land that is guerrilla gardened (or bewildered as Australian gardener Bob Crombie likes to call it) is usually abandoned or neglected by its legal owner and the guerrilla gardeners take it over (“squat”) to grow plants. This gesture may or may not have a political flavor to it. In our case it doesn’t, at least not consciously.

Some weeks ago, me and Alex travelled to Rome. We just wanted to leave it all behind for a while and travel together (the destination didn’t matter) and since we found amazingly cheap air tickets for Rome, that was it: alea jacta est!
The upcoming travel was an opportunity for me to freshen up my meager italian, so I took up some free italian lessons from Livemocha. Livemocha is an online learning community where users can learn a language and also review exercises of other users. That’s how I read a writing submission (in english!) of an Italian user, titled “Your last vacation”, where he described he visited an old city called Civita di Bagnoregio. He added, “If you ever go to Rome, take a day to visit Civita di Bagnoregio!”.

As you might remember from the previous Bike Makeover post, it’s been a while I’d been drooling over these magnificent roll up panniers by Brooks; I was so charmed I couldn’t find another bag suitable for my bike. Normal bicycle bags seemed just too plain now, and most of the panniers I found couldn’t roll up at all. I kept searching and all the bags I saw were too bulky, too boring or too expensive, so my bicycle kept going with no bags at all. I showed the roll up panniers (that are much to expensive for my wallet) to my dad, and he exclaimed: ‘Alright, we’ll make one!’

_{Walking on Roman velvet green.}