The little things

Enjoy the little things in life...
...for one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things!

I love that saying. ♥
I think there is a lot of truth in it. I love the little things. Little things make me happy. :) A plant growing a new flower, a message from a friend, chocolate in the right moment, a cup of tea in the evening, the first snow, when the sun bursts out of a gray cloud ceiling.... I don't need my boyfriend to make a big gesture to show me he cares about me. The little things, not planned or prepared, are those, which really make me feel loved.

Like this cute plant, growing and sitting on the windowsill, looking at the world. Isn't it cute? :) :) I took the photo while I was visiting a good friend in Strasbourg. :)

There is always beauty around you, you just have to start looking. :) Every time I discover something I think is beautiful and might be invisible to other eyes, I'll show it to you. :)
Have you also discovered little beautiful spots all around the world that make you smile when you look at them? I would love to hear about it!

Mailbox surprises

On Monday we arrived home from our amazing trip to Sicily! :) :) We had such a great time! But being back home is always a wonderful feeling too.
And this time two surprises waited in the mailbox for me! :D

One order I made a couple of weeks ago in this cute shop via DaWanda. The shop owner was on vacation, which is why she sent me my order last week. I totally forgot about the order and was happy to receive this wonderfully wrapped little package! :)

I mostly bought items which were on sale and loved everything! :)

The second package was a big surprise!! A dear friend of mine, who works in Kenya, sent it to us, filled with wonderful little gifts and a letter!!! :D

I love that she uses leftover food cartons for the packaging, it's so creative! Once she sent me something inside a juice box! :D :D Thanks for this wonderful surprise! We loved it!

Last journey preparations

Last preparations for our journey are going on...:)

For collecting every ticket, map, post card, snippet of magazine, etc., I made little pockets for every day. Normally I just collect everything in one big envelope. But back home, it's quite exhausting to arrange everything. So this time I'll use separate pockets. :) I added some extra paper, just in case I'm suddenly in the mood of writing something down for our travel journal...you never know. :)

I've never felt so prepared for a journey like this time. :)
Wish you a great and wonderful time, while I'm gone! See you in 10 days! :)

Status of our travel journals

As I've already told you, I've never finished a travel journal before. But to be honest...I've also started just one travel journal. ;)

These are some piles (unfortunately there is much more ;)) of our collected travel materials, at least organized:

For some of our travels I made some simple travel journals with very little text, so at least I have a rough order of what we did:

In a separate post I will show you our travel journal of our easter trip to Reutte (Austria) in detail, which I already showed you on one picture in the last post.

So this is the status of our travel journals. I would love to see yours. :)

How I organize our travels

I have given this a lot of thought! And it took me quite long to find a good solution for us. This is how I ended up doing our travel journals, but I'm still not sure if this is the ultimate solution. But it works. At least till now. :)
If you have a good way of documenting your travels please let me know! :)

I love the idea of "project life"! I love the layout and the easy way of "scrapbooking". But I think for a travel journal the size of the albums are too big and they're also not that cheap.
So what I did is to use the idea of a given layout for designing our travel journals. But instead of using those cool photo pocket pages, I just use a predefined layout and glue the pictures, tickets and snippets at predefined places.

This is a page of my idea book with all the possible layouts and a sample page of one travel journal I started but didn't finish yet!:

So I basically do this:

During the journey
1. Document every single day (preferrably on a laptop)
2. Collect every ticket, map etc. for every day

Back at home
1. Write full texts based on the documentations
2. Decide how to layout the page by considering the written texts, the collected travel material and the taken pictures
3. Print pictures
4. Put everything together

The final really lovely thing we do since our last vacation is to write one postcard to ourselves. Both of us write down a little text on the same postcard and we are not allowed to read each other's text. From our vacation spot we send this postcard and it is so exciting when the postcard arrives back home. Reading the written texts together is so fun and quite often you read about things you totally forgot. :D

How do you organize your travel memories? Do you make travel journals or do you collect all the pictures in an album?

Swap - From Germany to Singapore

I already showed you the swap package I got from my swap partner Refine. Today I would like to share with you what I made for her.

The theme was handmade stationery! :) As I decided to mainly go with stamps, I started to carve like a maniac for a couple of days. You should've seen our living-room I misused for my studio! Unfortunatelly Luckily no one made an evidence photo of my mess! ;)

After carving a lot of stamps (I'm going to show them in detail in a separate post) I started stamping: sheets of writing paper, envelopes, p.s. cards, little tags and stickers (I LOVE stickers! :D).

Then I made some origami heart post cards (with a little origami crane stamp on the back).

I added a little origami mini book (love this pattern!), a crane for luck, a little note to my swap partner and some of my favourite tea. :)

Everything wrapped up and sent to Singapore! :) Fortunatelly it arrived safely. :)

Lovely Refine posted about the swap too on her blog, in case you're interested. :)

September project: Travel Journals

I actually wanted September to be a knitting month. After a long knitting pause, my fingers are itching (do you say this or is it just a German expression?!).

BUT we recently booked a second vacation in the middle of September. A vacation hopefully full of good weather, lovely water, snorkling, hiking, taking fotos, relaxing, a lot of quality time and yummy food. Our destination: Sicily! :) :)

So I decided to work on our travel journals in September.

Ahhhh, travel journals! I love and hate them at the same time!
I love the idea of them and I stockpile every little snippet of our vacations, but I've NEVER finished a travel journal yet! It's shocking and kind of depressing...

The list of "real" vacations together are by luck not that long....YET! But I'm getting nervous...and kind of worried. That somehow the list is going to be so long that there is no way making all the travel journals in a lifetime...
(And I'm only talking about the travels we made together and totally ignoring the vacations I made without him...)

So this is my plan for this month:

Is this doable? I hope so! I don't wanna fail at the first project I blog about. :)
What about you? Do you have any project plans for September?

Monthly project plans

To integrate more creativity into my everyday life I like to do monthly project plans! Yes, I know, this sounds kind of scary and pressurizing....but for me it works! :)

I tend to do "wrong" plans a lot in the past. Too many resolutions and to-dos often resulted in feeling overwhelmed and nothing achieving at all! 

So instead of making a long list of different things I want to do in the upcoming month, I choose one topic. Just one topic I would like to focus on in this month.
This can be very manifold...and also quite monotonous - if I'm in a knitting phase, so what? I'll just have five knitting-months in a row.
You get the idea? :)

This was my project plan for August:

And I did it! I started blogging (not in August...but still, I think it counts)! :D
What about you? How do you integrate creativity into your daily routine?

Swap - From Singapore to Germany

I LOVE the idea of swap packages! Whoever invented the idea of swapping deserves a giant bowl of ice-cream (or whatever sweet (s)he likes)! ;D

I recently participated in one Ishtar called out about two month ago (if you don't know her blog, you have to check it out! It's one of my favourites! :)).

I received my swap package from lovely Refine from Singapore a couple of days ago. It took quite long for its journey, but it arrived safely! :)
This is the cute package, she made for me:

I love the little notes she wrote on the back of some of her pictures. But my favourite is the self-drawn card! It's so beautiful! :)

In the next days I'm going to show you what I made for her. :)

Do you like swaps? I would love to hear about yours! :)

So I jumped

After a lot of wondering, musing and doubting I decided to jump! :) Jump into the wide, exciting and kind of frightening world of blogging! And I'm very happy about it. :D

The reason for that?
* Integrating more creativity into my daily life and hoping blogging would help to do so.
* Sharing my thoughts and hopefully giving back the inspiration I get from so many other wonderful blogs!

So this is me: 28 years old, living in Karlsruhe, working as a research scientist at the University, a very passionate all-round crafter and most of the day cheerful person.

Nice to meet you. :)