Who wore it better?

After knitting a very long scarf that I didn't like very much, I finally completed a knitting project that I actually like. I found a pattern for this knit headband/neck warmer on Pinterest and thought it would be a nice way to learn new techniques, like increasing and decreasing stitches. It's not perfect, but it's been getting a lot of use, and I'm happy with the color.

Now, my question is: who wore it better? Me or Rogue?

P.S. I'm frowning because I attempted to take this in a narrow cobblestoned alley that suddenly turned into a wind tunnel. Narrow alleys here have a way of doing that in the winter.

MangoJuiced: Style steals from an Istanbul apartment

I stayed in this Istanbul apartment last October—and I loved it so much, I "stole" something to take home with me. Can you guess what it is?

Go style stealing with me in this week's post on MangoJuiced. And leave a comment to congratulate me on my newfound sewing skills. Consider that your hint!

MangoJuiced is a webzine for anything and everything that interests women—from fashion and family, to pop culture and beauty, to travel and lifestyle. Follow MangoJuiced on Twitter and Facebook... and don't forget to check back in for a new post from me every week!

Christmas chandelier

Remember the wineglass chandelier that we got in April?

It recently became the target of my Christmas decorating frenzy. I had something in mind, but before I could put my idea to work, all the wineglasses had to come off. Yes, all 36 of them. 

While the glasses received their first wash in months, I strung up a few new ornaments: a set of four very shiny silver ones from Ikea, as well as some fresh picks from De Bijenkorf. All of the ornaments I chose were either silver, gold, transparent or some kind of combination of the three. All the better to let through, or reflect, the light from the central bulb.



Marlon and I couldn't resist taking a few pictures while working. Shiny things are just too much fun to play with.

After throwing in a few of our pre-loved ornaments to fill in the gaps, and draping some faux greens over the top, our chandelier revamp was complete.

Watercolor Christmas cards

Success! I've mailed out my Christmas cards for the year. Yes, I'm one of those people that still sends out Christmas cards via snail mail. It's usually a struggle to get them out on time, but this year I managed my to do it!

I knew I wanted to make my own cards this year. And I knew I wanted to combine watercolors with hand lettering. So I set out my watercolors, tore out a few pages from my watercolor sketch pad, and played around with them one rainy afternoon. These were some of the cards I came up with. Apologies for the bad lighting, Amsterdam has been immersed in this weak gray gloom all week. 

Yes, the designs are pretty simple and it's a very small batch of cards (plus a couple that I didn't photograph). But each one is unique and is made with love and care. Which one do you like best?

Oh, and I also made the envelopes myself, as all the cards are odd sizes. I used this festive Japanese washi tape with polka dots (my current obsession) to seal the envelopes.

And now my cards are winging their way to Belgium, the UK and Singapore. Fly swift, my pretties, and spread the Christmas cheer!

Coriander & co.

Back in Singapore, our condo unit had a balcony with a tiny box filled with soil. "Look, sweetie! We can plant an herb garden!" I sighed with all the dewy-eyed rapturousness of a new wife. In the three years we lived in that condo, you think we ever got around to doing it? Hah.

It turns out all I needed to bring this long-slumbering herb garden fantasy to life was... spring. Just as a deadline spurs a procrastinator into action, the thought of "I can only grow things outside until September!" provided the impetus to finally start cracking my green thumb...

Which started out looking a lot like a black thumb. The first few pots of herbs I bought died a fiery death, sun-dried to a McCormicky crisp during the week that we were away in Portugal. Burned by that experience, I resolved to try a new, two-pronged approach with the replacements I bought. 

Part one consisted of repotting the herbs in bigger pots. Marlon's logic: bigger pots, more soil, longer to dry out. The afternoon before we left for Oslo, he biked to the nearest Blokker (a Dutch chain with very affordable basic household items) and came back with these stainless steel metal window boxes.

I did the replanting out on the balcony. It was nice to get my hands dirty, literally. I used to love watering the garden and digging up weeds when I was a kid. I haven't felt soil between my fingers in ages.

Part two of my survival strategy consisted of showing my herbs some love: by naming them and talking to them. (Alert, cuckoo gardening lola in the making!) I was toying between Fernando Cilantro and Alexander Coriander for the (duh) coriander, but ended up going with Alexander. (I think it was influenced by Patrick's wife giving birth that weekend in Athens and naming the baby Alexandros.)

Paisley Parsley was christened by Therese on Twitter, and appealed to my deep and abiding love for paisley. Marlon later countered that we could have gone with Bob Parsley instead and given Alexander a gay Rasta boyfriend. It's hard to admit I dropped the ball on this one.

I made up for it, though, by bringing Rosemary Gil into the world. A seriously Pinoy pop culture-deprived Marlon did not get the significance of this name. The real Rosemarie Gil won my eternal devotion as the haughty evil stepmother in the 80s campfest, Nympha, where Alma Moreno played... you guessed it, a nympho.

A peek at her IMDB profile reveals a slew of classics such as Bata Pa Si Sabel, Burlesk Queen, Bagets and Nardong Putik mingling with such dazzlingly campy titles as Bruka: Queen of Evil, Night of the Cobra Woman, and Fight Batman Fight! Plus, she played (ting alert!) Tingting Cojuangco in a TV miniseries. How could I not want my rosemary to take after this fabulous woman?

Beside the divine Miss Gil is the only plant that I have ever tried to grow from seed. A species that's... uh, abundant in Amsterdam, it has yet to be named but has already begun to sprout. My black thumb might just turn out to be green after all.

School days

I've been looking for art to hang alongside the two Indian miniature paintings that Marlon and I bought on our honeymoon in Rajasthan. We've already put up most of our art, and none of them seemed to go with those two paintings in particular, either in style or in theme. 

Then I realized I had just the thing to go with the Indian miniatures: a family album of old photographs of India from the 1950s and 1960s. I first discovered this album in my mom's drawer back in high school. It was packed with some things of my dad's, like old passports. I'm guessing either he owned it or my Dima, his mother, kept it for him as a chronicle of his school days.

A little bit about my dad: he was named Amitabha, but known to family and friends as Gandhi because he was born on the date of Gandhi's death. (Nicknames are a big thing in Bengali culture.) At the age of 5, he won a huge regional quiz contest where the prize was a coveted scholarship to a British-run boarding school in the Himalayas, where India's elite sent their children to study.

This was a major deal. It made him something of a golden boy among his clan, the best and brightest, the family's pride. This sort of hero status surrounded him his whole life and extended to my mom, sister and me. I really feel it whenever I go to Calcutta; as Gandhi's daughter, I get the star treatment. My dad's boarding school education led to a scholarship at AIM, and eventually to a career in trading, banking and finance in Hong Kong and Manila, then the financial capitals of Asia.

Not bad for a young boy from a simple family from Calcutta. Dima was always so proud of him. Here is Dima in her younger days. Something about this photo reminds me of my sister.

Out of all the photos in the album, it was the glimpses of my dad's boarding school life in 1950s India that really captivated me.

 I think my dad's the one on the top left, in the singlet and sailor hat.

 Second row, second from left. I've had that same expression in class pictures.

Swimming lesson.

 Military training. We had that too.

 School dance. Already happening in India in the 1950s, 

but forbidden in my high school in the 1990s. WTF.

 Sometime close to graduation, I'm guessing. My dad is seated, on the right.

There are also some beautiful vignettes of India. These pictures are so small and delicate—some are just half the size of my iPhone. This is one of the larger, sharper ones.

I've decided that my new project will be to hunt for vintage frames for my favorite photos from this album. It will be hard to choose just a few... I might end up filling an entire wall!

Deck the hall

... with Indian fabric, falalala lala lala!

Marlon has the habit of coming home and emptying his pockets of coins, keys and wadded-up receipts... and they end up everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Back in our Singapore condo, I'd come across coins in the bathroom, in the closet, on the kitchen counter, floor, nightstand, bookshelf, coffee tables, dining table, you name it. I went ballistic each time I found a coin. I tried putting a specially designated canister in different locations to catch them, observing where he was most likely to empty his pockets, asking him where it was most convenient for him, to no avail. 

And so I became determined to win the war against the coins and install a catch-all solution in our new home. It came in the form of a many-drawered vintage steel cabinet, from my vintage/industrial mecca Spoor 38. The cabinet had a lovely patina (a.k.a. rust), but when we moved it into the hallway it looked lost and bare. 

Then I remembered I bought some pretty paisley fabric during our honeymoon in Rajasthan. (In case you didn't know, I'm the biggest sucker for anything with a paisley print.) It had been sitting, unused, folded quietly in a box for the last three years, waiting for its moment.

When I told my mom about this, by the way, she cackled with a triumph that was at least 24 years in the making. "See? See? Now you understand!" she cried with glee. She used to shop for fabric all the time when I was a kid, and I hated it. With a passion. Even my biggest displays of brattiness and my constant whining accusations of "You don't even use them!" could never dissuade her from this habit. And I agreed that, yes, now I understood. (Don't you just get the feeling sometimes that we are all turning into our mothers?)

Anyway, with several pieces of wood molding from the hardware store, some gold paint, a few nails, generous amounts of wood putty, and my trusty staple gun, Marlon and I made a "framed wallpaper" backdrop for the steel cabinet in the hallway.

And like my dining chairs and their DIY cushions, the print picks up the little bits of rust and wear on the cabinet while complementing the metal in a way that I really like. 

Those pesky coins? They end up in the drawers now, so I guess we can consider this battle won. With style. And paisley. 

Chairs from here & there

The first time I saw mismatched dining chairs was when Italianni's opened in Greenbelt in 1996. Before that, all I had ever seen were meticulously coordinated formal dining sets. It rocked my world, and my 15 year-old self vowed to have mismatched dining chairs one day. 

Italianni's as a design influence sounds funny and a little bit horrific now that I think about it, but it's true. And it's also funny that I can now say a dream has come true, since we've amassed an eclectic little collection of dining chairs over the last month. 

The first two dining chairs we bought were a pair of vintage metal Tolix chairs from vintage/industrial warehouse Spoor 38. I had made up my mind to get vintage bistro chairs like these, but we could only afford the one pair, and they weren't in the best condition with large exposed screws and seat-less, thoroughly rusted bottoms. 

So last week's DIY project was new seats for the Tolix chairs. I traced the seat shapes onto some plywood and got Marlon to cut them out with a saw. Then I staple-gunned them with foam padding from Albert Cuypmarkt and floral-print upholstery fabric from Westermarkt. I was pretty happy with the results.

I like how the orange in the print picks up the little bits of rust and wear in each chair. 

Then last Friday, Marlon called me on his way home from work. "There are people throwing away chairs on the sidewalk... and some of them are kind of nice," he said. "Wanna come over and help me choose?" I was over there faster than you could say may pera sa basura!

My wonderful husband not only picked out a couple of nice chairs in decent condition, but he actually sat on them to prevent other sidewalk vultures from getting them. Plus, he dug up a plastic bag with five rolls of unused Laura Ashley lining papers and wallpapers. He knows me, this man!

One of the people rummaging through the chairs with us remarked, "If our mothers could only see us now!" I think my mother wouldn't mind. I hope. 

One of our finds was this wood and steel chair. It's surprisingly comfortable. 

It was probably some kind of old-school office chair. I'm thinking of painting the metal white...

... to go with this cafe chair. I used to see these in very old kopitiams in Singapore. 

Well, it's not a dining chair, but I just had to have it! This cute little wooden chair will soon be reborn in  a fresh new color, maybe a bright purple or sunny yellow. 

The two "found" chairs are by no means permanent, and will likely get rotated to other parts of the house in the future. But for now, they allow us to finally put the dining room to use and take our time to find and save up for better chairs. And they've helped me fulfill my Italianni's dream! Tee hee!

Do it yourself

Today's post is brought to you by the letters D-I-Y!

It's no accident that the word tipidity contains those letters, lol. Marlon and I were forewarned by Europe-based friends that we would have to get very handy around the house very fast if we wanted to save money, and it's true. Nothing makes you realize how spoiled we Asians are like furnishing a European house on a, well, Asian budget. 

There was no way we were carting these Ikea Pax closet elements home with us on the train (taxi? what taxi? We're in Europe, remember?), so we splurged on delivery for less than €50. But when we were told that hiring someone to assemble them would cost at least €250, Marlon decided to take things into his own hands... literally.

He bought his first power drill and spent the better part of a Sunday assembling our closets. We had door-less closets for about a week and a half, because attaching the doors would require the three closets to be screwed together into one large unit. And that would make it hard for us to move the closet around when we painted the bedroom.

Assembling the closets brought out Marlon's inner handyman. He would do simple things before like change bulbs and hang frames, but often left anything more complicated to hired help—which is no longer an option here. He's gotten a lot more confident using power tools and gets really enthusiastic about my ideas for DIY projects.

What a revelation this whole process has been. Suddenly it's like all of life's questions can be resolved with a power drill. Now we can look at a piece of furniture or fixture that we like and go, "Madali lang yan! Kailangan lang natin mag-drill." Which is how two ladders and a few wooden planks almost became a bookshelf... almost. But that's another story.

One of his mini-projects was installing a bar with S-hooks (again, thank you Ikea) for our kitchen utensils, right beside the stove. I love this because it frees up so much drawer space and makes everything easy to grab. 

Our biggest DIY project to date has been the repainting of the bedroom. Both of us had decided early on that we were done with living in white boxes, a fate that most renters are doomed to endure. Luckily, our landlord agreed to let us paint the walls, provided that we return them to white if he should so decide at the end of our lease.

At €45 per hour for a professional painter, for a job that would take at least eight hours, it was easy for Marlon and I to decide to go DIY. He did some research on painting equipment and techniques online, then bought everything we needed at Gamma, Holland's version of Home Depot.

Having saved on labor, we then decided we could splurge on paint. Well, I decided. My obsessive online research had led me to Farrow & Ball paints, and somewhere between their poetic product names and and rich hues, I fell in love. I've always, always wanted an intense color on my bedroom walls, so I was immediately drawn to Drawing Room Blue. Marlon was totally on board with it; I think he was just glad I didn't want anything too girly.

At €119 per 5L can (one would cover our 30 sqm walls), plus another €109 for the recommended primer and undercoat, we could definitely have gotten something a lot cheaper, but you can't fight love.

The actual painting took up an entire weekend, starting with an hour on Thursday evening to move out all the furniture and mask the ceiling, floor and windows with tape. Friday night was spent slathering on the primer, which took about three hours.

Teka, puro si Marlon pala ang nasa pictures. Baka isipin ninyo na sitting pretty lang ako. Ako kasi ang taga-document at tagaluto. Pero nagtatrabaho ako, promise.

Using the rollers was super fun and made our job easier than expected. We got shaggy lambswool rollers for €2 each; if not for the Interwebz, we probably would have gotten cheapo foam rollers na parang pangkulot, lol.

We left the primer to dry all of Saturday and returned to do the first and second coats of paint on Sunday morning. Halfway through the first coat, Marlon and I found ourselves thoroughly pleased with our choice of paint. The best thing about Farrow & Ball paints are that they are water-based. No thinner, no awful fumes, and so easy to clean up paint splatters! Just a damp rag and a little elbow grease, perfect for DIY newbies like us.

And the color... the color!!! Deeply pigmented, with a soft sheen... *colorgasm* I suggested diluting the second coat slightly, which made it even faster to paint on. The second coat totally smoothed out the slight imperfections and uneven-ness of our first coat. 

By the time we were done on Sunday night, Marlon and I were grinning like idiots. We had spent a total of 12 hours, shelled out €263 (for the primer, paint and delivery), and saved €540 on labor for a paint job that was on track to make our bedroom look and feel like a million bucks. And we had just gotten our first taste of the DIY euphoria that money just can't buy.

Next up: the new and improved bedroom... revealed!

Lamp lust

My latest all-consuming obsession is fixing up the new house. Marlon and I spend hours talking about it. Our creative taps have been turned, and now we are gushing ideas, plans and budgets. The sheer number of options available in this incredible art- and design-mad city simply feeds the obsession.

What really helped me get started is the Dutch shelter magazine VTWonen. I'd heard of it even before I moved here, from Europe-based design blogs like Emma's, Design Shimmer and Vosges Paris. When I was in the hospital and bored out of my mind, I hobbled to the hospital bookshop and got a copy. Even if it was entirely in Dutch, I was enchanted. Everything was beautifully styled and photographed, and it was really easy to match the prices and shops to the photos. 

One of the resources was a canvas printing service which also does lamps. Perfect for our living room! Pictureprint's nifty site lets you try photos out on a sample lamp, an activity which is as addictive as virtual makeovers (remember those?). After a sleepless night, I came up with a few lead options, but still can't decide. 

Now picture dove-gray walls, light wood furniture, huge windows and and let me know which is your fave!

1) A painting from Fernando Zobel from the Ateneo Art Gallery. This holds sentimental significance, as I have fond memories of my Philo 101 teacher introducing us to these paintings. Zobel has an entire series where he used syringes to apply paint.

2) A painting by Jose Joya, also from the Ateneo Art Gallery. The entire collection traveled to Singapore last year, which is where I took these photos.

3) One of my recent favorite photos of Amsterdam, sun flares somewhere in the Old Centre.

4) An odd choice that works surprisingly well: closeup of the penny tiles in the hot tub on top of Marina Bay Sands. I love the colors but not sure how I feel about polka dots.

5) The classic Boracay sunset. This was taken during our third anniversary getaway.

6) A sunset that actually works ten times better, but it's from Pulau Tioman in Malaysia. I would have preferred to have a Philippine sunset.

7) Detail shot of amethysts from the Hall of Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

8) My favorite painting from the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco: Strut by Marilyn Minter, a huge enamel-on-metal still life of diamond-studded, lilac Dior stilettos. I'm wild about this, but it was immediately and vehemently vetoed by Marlon: "Marry a girl kung gusto mo talaga."

Decisions, decisions! Which would you pick?