My weekend was mostly filled with this:

battling a cold (I think I won – feeling much better today), good tea. lots of knitting

Also there was some of this:

(don’t worry, I am focussing on the good stuff here): more dark wood paneling gone, a view of beautiful old stones (original wall of our 1910-ish house) for now, a clean white wall once we finish this part of our big living room renovation project

And I paused to enjoy a bit of this:

It was a good weekend.
Hope you had a great weekend too and wishing you all a wonderful start of your week.

:: the gorgeous misty sunrise I witnessed this morning

:: looking back at a full but fun weekend

:: seeing the pile of bags I sewed this weekend (more on that later)

:: the bittersweet anticipation of our youngest girl moving out soon

:: family visits

:: thinking up a meal to cook for todays family visit, without having to drive to the supermarket.

:: remembering I planted four leeks in the garden. I think I’ll go and see if I can add those to my planned stir fry.

:: my oldest daughter being my hairdresser. I’ve never been disappointed after a dye or a cut since she took over.

:: autumn flowers

:: knitting (of course 😉  )

Wishing you all a wonderful start of your week!

Well, so much for picking up blogging again.
I do want to write real blogposts, but it seems I’m just too tired to find words (in a good way, we’ve been doing a lot of work around the house lately). So here’s just a few pictures I took in September. We’ll see how next month goes…

make puzzle, read, knit, repeat

a little roadtrip, diner with T, a short look at the sea, a visit to my parents

A little confession and a note to myself: I was so busy taking pictures that I kind of forgot to just be there and breathe for a while. That’s silly and I promise (to myself) I won’t let that happen again. I am savoring the short moment I did look at the sea without the camera though…

Well, it has been quite a while again, hasn’t it? What can I say… I actually have been really busy. I don’t know what I was thinking, I really like my summers to be quite lazy, but it happened.

It started with that last post about photography. I was hatching some plans to do more with it (yes I know, I said I wouldn’t, but it seems inevitable to go there everytime I really try to reconnect with my camera), so I set up a blog just for photography, explored how to sell prints, did a lot of shooting and editing. And then… well, I got overwhelmed (and disappointed in my abilities, but that’s another story).

I came to a place were I realized that maybe I should choose between writing and photography, because both take a lot of time and I also have my family, my house, my garden and my bookkeeping to take care of. But I couldn’t choose. While I love photography, writing is also very important to me. And that set me off on a whole lot of ideas to do more than just write a book and then wait for my publisher to send me a (tiny) cheque.

To grow my public I decided I needed to connect with readers, build a “tribe”, give something back. I wrote a story that will be published in short episodes, I designed and wrote a newsletter that will have extras for my subscribers and I wrote a list of ideas to revive my Dutch blog, focussing on writing, not my personal life.
And of course I thought it would be fun to start all that on September 1st. You know, since I like a good deadline.

Anyway, my summer was busy. So maybe it was a good thing that we hardly had a real summer until now. We’ve had an amazing amount of cold, wet days. There were also good days, but always just one or two, before it started raining again..
Right now I am (almost) done preparing for those September ideas (all in Dutch, sorry – I am contemplating translating some of my short stories, but that will take time). And somehow nature decided to give us a bit of summer after all. Forecasts are actually good for the next two weeks.

So… here’s to the rest of summer. And to taking pictures that won’t sell, but that will remind me of the good times.

Oh wait, that’s what I actually set out to put into words (I got sidetracked obviously). While I was working on my Dutch blog, I was also thinking about this one, it’s very few readers and what to do with it. And I realized (again) I really want to continue it to be what it always has been. some knitting, some sewing, some gardening, some family fun, some rambling about being too busy and about me trying to savor summer…

Well, so now I wrote all these words and I guess all I really want to say is: here are some garden pictures 😉