Some photography: Scandinavia

Lately I’ve been getting back into what once was my one and only passion; photography.

Photography and me, we’re a strange pair. It’s somewhat of a love-hate relationship we have. There are times when I want to crash my computer screen, because my film did not turn out the way I thought it would at all. And there are times when I feel adventurous and courageous enough to pick up the heavy thing, get back in the saddle and try to aim a bit closer to what I want the result to look like. A bit closer than last time.

As I said, lately I’m in one of my ‘up’phases , thanks to the newly found inspiration induced by Kandice Breinholt. Kandice is an amazing wedding photographer who lives in Utah, in the US. The path of my eyes and her photographs first crossed during one of my hour long ‘obsessively-scouring-the-web’ sessions, in search for a photographer for our wedding. I was instantly blown away by the tender and unapologetically raw quality of her images. Kandice photographs couples in an intimate setting, preferably outdoors in forests or mountainous habitats. She uses a lot of toned down whites in her images, which give her photos a triste, melancholic quality. This in combination with mother nature’s textures, leaf filtered sunlight and a stunning couple impeccably dressed for the most important day of their lives equals…. pure bliss!

As a tribute to Kandice I decided to scrape the courage from the soles of an old pair of shoes I hadn’t worn in a while and opened a photo folder on my computer. I finally got to have a proper look at the images I took during our 2015 trip to Scandinavia. On Instagram I discovered a few clues as to the type of presets Kandice might use to get that beautifully sombre colour palette. Inspired by Kandice’s style, here are the images I feel comfortable enough to share on my little corner of the internet.

 

Sweden

Sweden

sweden 2

Sweden 2

Sweden 3

Sweden 3

Smogge

Smogge

Brunne

Brunne

Denmark

Denmark

Sweden 4

Sweden 4

Smogge 2

Smogge 2

Bedroom final result

The other day, I realised I hadn’t yet shared the final result of what our tiny bedroom looks like now. It’s been such a hectic time with the CELTA course, studying, keeping up with things, STILL diy-ing in the house and obviously the whole wedding planning shenanigans.

 

So here we go, a visual impression of our bedroom. Keywords: white, grey, scandi, airy, light, geometrical shapes and of course lots of handmade wooden accessories!

 

dark wood bed

this is what the bed originally looked like. Dark wood wasn’t an option for this tiny room. I primed it, painted it off white and I used wall paper on the headboard.

bedroom before

bedroom make over before. A lohot of wall filling and sanding was required.

bedroom wall during

Bedroom wall colour testing. Eventually we went for a very light, matte, powdery grey.

wall paper horrendous

This wall was a complete pain in the ass. I kept filling, sanding, plastering, again and again. In the end I chose to wallpaper the wall and it was the best decision I made for this room by far. Honestly, the wall was still crumbling down as I was smothering it with glue, but you can’t even tell now.

 









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Photo booth for wedding / party/ event

I recently did a photo shoot for a photo booth company (I know, that sounds weird, right!?)

These two guys in my city run an awesome photo booth company for parties and weddings. For any of you not familiar with the concept, photo booths have become quite the rage in Europe over the last 5 years. They’re a machines / set-ups or even just columns you can hire to entertain your party guests with a selfie experience taken to the max. Some photo booth suppliers provide a proper old fashioned 90’s style photo booth including an awkwardly crowded space behind a closed curtain and polaroid style slowly developing photostrips popping out the side of the machine. Other companies just rent out a camera and a backdrop and present your party snaps in an online album.

 

This company of the two guys I mentioned earlier provides their customers with the best of both worlds; enough space to pose and goof because there’s no enclosed space but with real (and unlimited!!!) photo strips. A pretty cool concept I think. I wouldn’t want to spend money to hire a photo booth and not have something tangible to offer to my guests.

 

What does this machine look like you ask? Well, the reason I ended up photographing its the answer to just that question. Their current loyal, yet somewhat unfortunate looking photo machine was in desperate need of a sibling with better looks. James was commissioned to produce this photo booth 2.0. It had to pretty much have similar measurements as the old model, as inside the machine there was all sorts of electrical equipment. The style and execution however was in desperate need of scandi infusion, a serious dose of manly plywood and some state of the art laserburn technology.

I took these photos for James’ portfolio and I thought it’d be cool to share the result with you guys. Here are the photos, enjoy!photo booth wedding

heavy photo booth wedding studio

pretty heavy to manoeuvre in our tiny make shift studio!

logo cnc laser photo booth wedding

logo made by laser cnc

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detail laser cnc photo booth wedding

Such amazing details; a combination of the wood, the colour of the burn and the graphics.

ffbserie3 ffb3 ffb6 ffb10 And here are some shots set in the amazing former Honig factory outdoor space. SUCH a cool space for photoshoots, the light is different every time which makes it annoying but keeps it interesting.ffb15 ffb17
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DIY Bloomingville wall feature replica

Both my partner and me are both fans of ‘the imperfect’; we like reclaimed wood, scuffed edges, furniture pieces with a bit a history and character. The strange thing about doing up a wonky, dirty house I guess is the fact that once you finally get to the stage where everything is clean, straight and white, you want to KEEP it clean, straight and white! It’s safe to say this whole process has really influenced our interior design preferences.

Therefore, with the amazing geo patterned Eyffinger wall paper we chose for the bedroom (the grey version) an angular, calculated trend in the room was set.

geo wallpaper

copyright karwei.nl / eijffinger wallpaper

About a year ago we made a road trip to Scandinavia and, not that I wasn’t aware of it before, but I REALLY REALLY like Scandinavian design. One brand I have liked for a while now is Bloomingville. Their products have mid range prices, making them only affordable (to me at least) when they’re on sale. I have been drooling over their wall features for a while now, they have several geometrically shaped wooden displays in their collection.

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-11-06-43 screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-11-18-52screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-11-19-05I wasn’t willing to pay the asking price for them though and decided to try and make one myself. A little bit cheeky, I decided to order a Bloomingville hexagonal shelf from an online shop with a generous return period intending to have a better look upclose before returning it. Copy cat? Ehm, let’s call it ‘making a replica’.

When the shelf arrived, it complimented the wallpaper very nicely, as I expected. But I was surprised by the quality of the wood. It weighed nearly nothing and it was very soft, making it very prone to any kind of damage. It was so not worth the asking price of 150 Euro!

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What I also didn’t like was the extra bit of wood that you had to use to attach it to the wall. Such a shame to mess up the simplicity of the honeycomb shape like that. I was sure I could do it better!

The process really was dead simple.

  • I measured the Bloomingville shelf, as I liked its size, and cut six pieces of 18mm plywood to the same length. Bear in mind, these days, lots of DIY shops offer (often free) woodcutting service. So if you’re not too tool-savvy yourself, try and go to your local DIY shop to ask for help.
  • I cut the pieces off at a 30 degree angle (180 divided by 6, because 6 shelves, is 30)
  • I used PVA glue to glue the pieces together. This PVA had a drying time of about 20 minutes, which gave me plenty of time to check that the diagonals of the hexagon all measured the same length, because that’s the way to check if a hexagon is even. Clamping a hexagon is nearly impossible, so I used masking tape to tightly bond the edges together, like this:
    img_8244 I then gave it some extra pull by taping it all the way across, which, to be honest, was probably completely useless.img_8241

After the project was dry, I started fiddling around with the metal hanging slots I had lying around, I usually use them for the wooden lights I sell on Etsy. There are two different types of hanging slots. Obviously it’s nice to attach a keyhole plate completely flush or countersunk into the wood, but I always find it a lot of hassle to drill or router into the wood. PLUS… the plywood is too thin to drill a hole the size of a screw-head into, it would probably tear the wood. So I chose to use the lazy keyhole slot plate (see image below) and the fact that there’s about a millimetre of space between the wall and the shelf is hardly noticeable.keyhole-slots

Obviously because of the shape of the wall shelf, placing the slots vertically isn’t an option. I therefore chose to attach them on opposite sides of the hexagon and attaching them making a clockwise rotary movement. Make sure to use the proper drill bits in the wall, good wall plugs and check that the heads of your screws are compatible with the keyhole slots.

 

I was indecisive about how and what height I wanted to add shelves, so I added the slot plates and took a break to admire the shelfless version…
a very minimal hexagonal shelf

The last step of the process: adding a shelf/ shelves. I decided to go for one shelf which I placed at around two thirds of the height. I didn’t do any accurate measuring, I guessed the length, cut off another bit of plywood and cut the ends at a 30 degree angle again.

And here’s the result…

img_8322 img_8314hexagon-finished

 

I’m very happy about the result! It’s a nice little feature on our bedroom wall; not too invasive, stylish, scandi-style and customisable. Just how I like it.

Total cost of project: 8 Euro

bloomingville-replica-tribute

My dream: doing an old house up. And then blogging about it.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where something you’ve always dreamed of is finally happening and the reality is NOTHING like you thought it would be?

That’s what’s happened to me in the last three months, hence the fact I was somewhat MIA from my blog.

We have a new house! (yay!) And it’s a very old house (more yay!) It’s one of those houses that needed so much work done to it it could have been an inexhaustible source of stories for my blog. I could have written endlessly about moodboards, shared before and afters, asked you guys help with choices that needed to be made, diy tutorials and so on and so on. Has it always been my dream to do a cute little house up, document the process meticulously as I went and create something inspiring to share with others? Yes, it has.

So three months ago, when I first walked into that 1911 built dark and abandoned terrace house which we were going to turn into our new splendid house, taking photos and write about everything little action we took surely was the first thing I did, right?

Wrong.

We had 24 hours to make the decision whether or not to accept the offer of this place (has something to do with a complicated Dutch system). And since we were moving from a ridiculously 190 m2 big flat to this in comparison slightly minute one bedroom terrace, moving our stuff over would not be the only thing that needed doing. And did I mention the new house was disgustingly neglected? We had a period of 4 weeks to renovate the new (but very old!!)  house, to buy / source / build and make new furniture since everything in the old house was too large. One of my friends who came to house/rabbit sit in our old flat once lovingly refers to our old sofa as ‘that couch on steroids’. So I had to sell almost everything I owned, which wasn’t easy by the way, since I hand made most of my furnishings and each single item has some sort of emotional meaning to me. I also didn’t want to make the time sensitive situation reduce any potential profit and so I hustled, negotiated and online listed my ass off.  Four weeks to plough through my three year’s worth of ‘I-have-a-massive-flat-anyway-so-why-not-collect-this-clutter’. Four weeks to rip out floorboards, lay all the flooring, do the painting, the plastering. Four weeks to build, clean, sand, fill and paint every inch of that old and dark house. Four weeks to arrange finances, process address changes, to look for bargains and find ways of sourcing new furniture that would actually fit our new life style.

I was completely overwhelmed by everything involved in the process. And the fact almost anything in the house that could break, leak or crumble actually broke, leaked and crumbled didn’t help either.

 

first photo old house

This is the very first photo of the house, I took it with my iphone on the day we had the viewing. As you can see, it was a shit hole.

To make a long story short: I didn’t blog AT ALL.

 

So the coming months I will dedicate my blog posts to our new/old little do up house in a ‘in hindsight kind of way’. My stories will mostly be throwbacks to the pain splats, the struggles we faced, the problems and challenges we encountered and the little triumphs.

Even though most of the big and structural work is done,  there are still quite some things in the house that need doing. And since my cortisol levels have returned to normal, I might even find the time to sit down and share some projects with you as they are happening. Who knows.