TWO TIMES L.O.V.E.

My big sis and I when we were about five and three. Buddies for life!

photography: Caroline Coehorst / styling: Anne-Marie Rem

ECHT WAAR BAZAAR

This afternoon we went to Utrecht. The dark and rainy weather contrasted with the piled up warm colored leaves on the age-old pedestrians along the canals. We went to check out Echt Waar Bazaar, a creative market which is held every first weekend of the month at the beautifully located In De Ruimte. The bazar features a mix of design,craft, recycling, vintage, food, fairtrade, sustainability and more.I'm looking forward to participating next month!

GIVE AWAY STONES

This afternoon I finally started my small project 'Give Away Stones'. I came up with this idea last Summer when we were in France, spending hot days at the riverside. I saw these hundreds and thousands of stones and I was sure the river wouldn't mind if I took a few to share with others.

I'm decorating the stones with kind words and poetry lines. These are stones to secretly slip into somebody's coat pocket for him or her to find when you're not around. Little messages to express love and friendship.

They will not be for sale cause you know, they're Give Away Stones..!
More about this project later..

BUILDING BRIDGES

Crowd-funding has become popular over the last years. Lots of cultural, artistic and design initiatives have already been made possible thanks to this kind of funding. And it even works for urbanism! An example is the 'I make Rotterdam' project, an initiative of the IABR in collaboration with the architectural bureau ZUS. It's a crowd-funded project to build a 350m public pedestrian bridge called 'Luchtsingel' to make the district around Rotterdam central station more attractive. Every individual has the possibility to buy a piece of the bridge, a wooden shelf which gets imprinted with the name of the person or organisation. Some people use the shelf in a creative way for example to express their love for someone or to share a quote or spiritual message. When you are in Rotterdam and you're interested in crowd-funding, it's nice to go and have a look. It's a pity that the shelves are not high quality but it still is a nice project which enhances some kind of togetherness. And maybe you'll spot my name somewhere..

r'dam street art by dante horoiwa

AUTUMN, THE YEAR'S LAST LOVELIEST SMILE

(William Cullen Bryant)

More pots and plates with birds and leaves in the shop!

CIRCLES IN THE SAND

I’m not someone who can go to the beach and lay in the sun all day doing nothing, returning home tanned like a pancake, with no sand in bikini, hair or between my toes. When I’m at the beach I feel I have some work to do! I can’t leave the sand untouched. I have to dig, build, create.

We found beautiful circles in the sand, made by someone the day before. They looked like the circles Aboriginals use on their paintings to express their Dreamtime stories. We used these to to kick off our irrigation system. We started digging trenches and building dikes. First we had just a tickle of water moving through but after a while the brook became a swirling river which ate away the banks.

About 10 metres away from us there was a big hairy man with survival hat in beige digging the sand with his grandson. Soon we were a team, digging our way toward each other. Some other people participated. It really felt we were doing something important! The rest of the people on the beach seemed to feel it too cause everybody politely tipped toed between our dikes and rivers. We were caught up in our world, going with the flow. We were woken up in the middle of our dream when we, after digging at least 30 square metres of irrigation system, found out that hundreds of people with big tattoos invaded our beach.

We dived into the sea and escaped.

HERE COMES THE SUN

Last Sunday's Swan Market XXL edition, an inspirational market offering a range of homemade goodies, vintage, bio-food, design and lifestyle products, took place at Museumpark near the Kunsthal Rotterdam. It started with unimaginable rain but after a while the sun came out and changed the multi-colored pavement into a beautiful mirror. The explosion of talent and creativity of local and emerging artisans boosted my mood and multi-colored my heart.

MY ATELIER

Ever since I was small I enjoyed having a place to withdraw from the busy world outside. A place where I could be on my own every now and then, day dreaming, finding peace of mind through sketching, painting and creating. My parents created a great room for me. They covered the walls with cork so I could pin my sketches and posters on them. My dad made me a giant wooden desk so I could be creative without worrying about making a mess. I'm very thankful for what they did for me and I'm trying to give the same to my son. I encourage him to be expressive, use big paper instead of small and tell him not to draw inside but outside the lines of the colouring pictures at school, even though the teacher tells him not to :).

Nowadays my hide away is my atelier in the attic. This is where the magic happens:

FALLEN

There I was, 8.48am, laying on the pavement.

At 8.47 I was on my way to the office while giving myself a mental boost by thinking that, although I felt really terrible cause of a bad cold, at least I looked great in my new red trousers matching my red boots. Seconds after: BAM! Flat on the face.

For a moment I was just laying there, astonished at what happened. I wished the wind would lift me up like a leaf, high into the sky, blowing me to my home, through my bedroom window, onto my soft green pillow. But there was no wind and I wasn't a leaf. I felt like a brick, heavy and clumsy. I had no other choice than to stand up and move, quickly wiping the sand off my red trousers. Move like nothing had happened, like I didn't have sore hands and a throbbing head. Just move on and keep my head up.

.

NORTH SEA

The weekend was very relaxing.
We went to the North Sea to meet up with our friends who rented a beachfront cottage.
We enjoyed the cool waves' breeze washing over us.
Sea salt filled our lungs and refreshed our brains.
The sun burned our pale noses red.

PIECES - PART II

I wasn't the only one who broke something yesterday! In response to yesterday's post, my friend C. took her broken pieces out of the bin and sent me this great, almost similar, picture.

There's no such thing as a coincidence!

PIECES

I broke something today 

and I realized I should break something once a week 

to remind me how fragile life is.

__Andy Warhol

MEET ME IN THE MIRROR

Being inspired by Iris, a blogger who loves photography, graphic design and life's little inspirations, I post a picture of my reflection, just like she did.

Nice to meet you in the mirror Iris! 

Check out her inspirational blog here.

OF WOMEN AND HORSES

Years ago I lived near an antique shop. I passed this shop countless times but never paid any attention to it cause it looked dark and kind of creepy inside. One day though, it was different. While passing the shop-window a large framed antique photograph of a woman caught my eye. Her long hair flowed in loose waves around her face and down her shoulders. She elegantly posed with a coal black horse. It was such a mysterious photo. Since then, whenever I passed the shop, I just had to stop and look. Was this woman flirting with me?

After a few months I decided to go and buy the portrait. Instead of the photograph there was a big 'For Rent' sign in the shop-window. I couldn't believe it, I was too late! The woman and the horse were gone without a trace.

The photo looked more or less like this old French postcard from around 1900. 

But..life reveals great coincidences at times.

Shara Worden, alias My Brightest Diamond, is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist I adore. I wanted to blog about her great music, style and creativity and stumbled  upon pictures of her posing with a horse! She used this old style photography concept and her elegant classical looks to create amazing contemporary images. As you can see, even though a century has passed, the concept still is interesting and powerful.

Here's one of my favorite songs of My Brightest Diamond:
'I Have Never Loved Someone'.

LIFE'S CHALLENGES

And I'll just say it's been a hell of a week. It was like spinning through the air like acrobats, with major fear of going splat.

Thank God we landed on our feet.

LOOK AND FIND

Yesterday was a day full of unexpected finds.

Found the perfect dress in a vintage clothing store in Rotterdam. A gold-rimmed black dress, very cheap but chic at the same time. The most important reason I bought this dress is that it shows it's 'handmade with passion'. I usually don't like it when clothes are too obviously home made. But this time it was different cause I just could feel this woman went the extra mile to make it look perfect on her. How could I not buy this dress?! I imagined that long ago this woman designed the dress herself to impress some nice man. She sketched it over and over again on squared paper to finally come op with the perfect design. She spent hours behind her old sewing machine to make it flatter her womanly curves. Although the fabric is not high quality, she just didn't have much money, she made it look as chic as possible. I really hope she impressed the lad! But I'm sure it looked great on her. And I surely will wear it with pride.

It's a pity she didn't sew her phone number on some little tag in the back of the garnment. Wish I could call her to let her know this dress is enjoying a second life on a woman with the exact same curves!

Found a beautiful poem line on my way back from the city centre spray-painted on the pavement.

It says:

'Ik leg je in mijn oog en zie door jou de wereld'

'Laid you in my eye and I see the world'

I love to be surprised by poetry in unexpected places.

Found a package with sweet gifts from my sis on my doormat when I came home..

Thankful!

MARY & ME

One and a half week ago I attended a soap stone carving workshop together with my mum. I like a challenge so I took the biggest stone I could find, grabbed a hand saw, some fancy rasps and files and got started. I wanted to create a Virgin Mary at all costs, but my piece of stone was formless and somehow I wasn't inspired. I took the stone in my hands and rubbed it, trying to feel the 'magic' between us, but I just didn't! 

Luckily, after a few frustrating hours, I was off, rasping, forming, carving like crazy. While the others were working really precisely, with clean desks and mouth covers, I was a butcher. From top to toe I was covered with dust, forgetting about everything and everyone around me. I felt relieved and it felt great to be in my own creative world again, creating something out of nothing. 


The result:

Just like I have a thing for beards, I have a thing for the Virgin Mary. My love for her started when I inherited my grandmother's embroidered image of Mary with child. It's really special to me cause above all it's symbolic for the person my grandmother was: kind-hearted, motherly and warm. Although she had a lot of hardship in her life, she never lost her pride or let her heart turn to stone. She never judged anyone and has been a mother and grandmother to many different people. Her favorite saying was: 'when you give, you'll receive'. And that's what I believe too.

In my house you find many different Mary's and Mary inspired images. 
Like these on a moodboard in my atelier.. 

..or this one in the lavatory..

..or these in the living room

On the picture there is me and my sister Mary (Marielle) when we were small