Thursday, October 25, 2018

Ode to the North Sea! Is the Silence of a Cistercians abbey something for you? Feeling yourself safe as a member of a big family.

Last week I told you about the upcoming w.e. at the North Sea and West-Vleteren. The Lebbe-family gathering on Saturday started at 11 am and we wanted to be on time and without stress so we decided to take the whole weekend. My grand children had a week off so we could start our w.e. on Friday morning. We were at destination at 2 pm, put on our bathing suits and left immediately for the sea.

The North Sea!

I love the North Sea! I love it's beaches with the tides and I love the sand dunes with their peculiar vegetation, the bumps and the pits that protects you from the fierce winds.

I love taking a walk on the beach when the wind is blowing full speed and the sand is giving your face an acupuncture treatment and your underwear is full of sand!

I love the myriad of seashells that the tides leave on the beach and the crushing and crashing sound they make when walking overthem, with each beach its own type of shells.

I love the  small pools of water that are left when the sea is withdrawing where I learned to float.


View of the sea at Oostduinkerke, Belgium
View of the sea at Oostduinkerke, Belgium


I love the never ending always rolling waves, an irresistible invitation to get in, play and have fun.

I love the view from a distance: the grey sea, the blue sky and the yellow golden sand!

I love the peculiar light that is hanging above the beach and sea, nowhere else can you have this light.



View of the sea at Oostduinkerke, Belgium
My daughter and grand children at
 Oostduinkerke, Belgium.



I love the endlessness of the view: look as far as your eyes permit, nothing obstructing your view.

And I did have my swim! despite the blowing wind and the coldness of the water. IF YOU WANT SOMETHING BAD ENOUGH, YOU CAN CONQUER THE OBSTACLES! NOTHING CAN HOLD YOU! My legs were red red red when coming out of the sea. I was with my daughter, she also had a swim and Filou, the dog was keeping watch over our belongings. That was so cute; he kept running small distances in every direction and always coming back to our pile of belongings.


West-Vleteren, a place to get to know yourself. 


On Saturday we left the sea behind and headed southeast for West-Vleteren, a small village near the French border. (You can read all about this Cistercians abbey in this previous post. and have a look at images here.)  We were a 20 minutes early for the service and the monastery chapel already was almost full so we had a seat in the front row.



St.Sixtus' chapel at West-Vletren, Belgium
The chapel of the St. Sixtus abbey behind the building.

The service finished we followed the others to the hall where the reception took place. There was beer and cheese, 2 eminently abbey products. At least a 100 persons were present with lots of young people and small children, the family is still growing. Belonging to a big, loving family gives you strength, makes you feel safe, gives you a sense and place of belonging.


Garden of St. Sixtus, West-Vleteren Belgium
People spilling out into the garden of
 St. Sixtus, West-Vleteren, Belgium

This little guy also feels safe on my brothers knees with my oldest brother, his grandpa next to him.


2 brothers with a small baby
My eldest brother (r) with his grandson on
my except for 1 youngest brother (l) knees.

I had the intention to connect to members of the other family branch and one of my cousins who is into family trees introduced me to a couple of persons. One woman's mother was a cousin of my grand mother and it was funny to hear the stories she had heard from her mother about my grandmother; I got to know a to me unknown side of my grandma.

If you want to know who YOU are, if you want to touch your idea about yourself to reality, go to a place by yourself and stay for a couple of days. The Trappists cultivate stillness and ask the same of their visitors. The abbey has a guesthouse, open to men and women. Even a so closed community as Trappist monks is evolving and changing.

Nothing is more confronting than silence and being alone, just you and yourself! And if you give yourself a reading restriction, you'll learn still more. To be accurate, all sorts of stashed away feelings assault you, your ego gets a huge crush but you get a glimpse of what is underneath. And this gets you on a path to finding yourself again.



This posts is all about my feelings that have been stirred up this last weekend. I hope you can distill  something out of this that works for you. I hope YOU belong to a family where you can be you and feel safe to be you.

See you next week!







Thursday, October 18, 2018

You don't have a garden but like to grow veggies? Read this!. On a long ride, how to entertain your (grand) children. Cute Halloween leather jewelry.

For everyone a mini garden!


I thank my mini garden to Tiffany from "Don't waste the crumbs".  I red her post about regrowing food in water last year and tried it out for fun and it did work! In another post I don't recall, I learned how to plant them. This is still better than growing in water. Now I  have my own mini garden and for free (you would anyhow have bought the veggies you are starting with); thank you Tiffany for sharing!! If you want one too, just follow the steps below; it won't take much time or effort.

Preparing your garden


Everyone can have a mini garden! The only thing you need is a container and some soil (this could be the hardest part). Your container can be anything that is waterproof; this could be a plastic container as well as an empty can. I have used a metal empty 5 liter olive oil can in the past. This summer I  had a container with a hydrangea that was more dead then alive; I took the hydrangea out and planted it in the garden and used the container for my mini garden.

Choose something that you have laying around in your kitchen or buy a fancy container, put some pebbles, stones, beer bottle caps, or the like at the bottom so the roots aren't permanently wet, fill up with soil (most soils have already a fertilizer incorporated) and your garden is ready! Best place to grow your mini garden is outside in your garden or on the balcony but a window sill with some sun will do too.



Lovelea's mini garden
My mini garden!


Choosing your (organic) veggies.


When your garden is ready, go out to an organic store or market you trust and buy organic vegetables you like such as carrots (best is if they have some green on top), fresh onions, lettuce, spinach. If you start with organic veggies, you can grow your own organic food. When washing your veggies, don't throw away the water, because it has become fertilized: poor it over your babies.


Preparing your veggies.


Let's say you'll having a lettuce salad for lunch. And you'll add some scallions to spice up everything. You have chosen onions with long and healthy roots.  When paring 1 or 2 scallions, leave at least 5 mm of stem when cutting the roots, they feed on the 5 mm stem you left above the roots  Let the roots soak in water, on the window sill (I cut a small plastic bottle in half and used the bottom to soak my onions) till they spruce a bit; you'll see a small bump on the surface you have cut. This takes 3 or 4 days. Leave them a couple of days longer, take them out of the water and then transplant them into your container.


LoveLea's fresh onions 3 weeks after planting
My onions 3 weeks after planting
and several cuttings later.



Do the same for carrots; you don't have to spruce them in water, you can plant them directly into the soil;  good carrots that don't have some green left, will spruce but with more difficulties



LoveLea's spruced carrots
My spruced carrots


Lettuce is fun and easy: cut off the stem of your lettuce and plant it directly in the soil; in a couple of days you should have 1 small tiny leave. If you buy fresh spinach with roots, choose the nicest ones, leave about 1 à 1,5 cm of stem and plant them directly into the soil. I throw banana peels into the container as fertilizer; still better would be to cut the peel  in small pieces and bury them about 1 cm under the soil; but I am always in a hurry and just leave them on top of the soil.



How do you actually use/eat your veggies


You use the green leaves of your onions in your salad; I planted 4 onions and every couple of days I have enough green to add to a salad. Just cut off the amount you need; not from 1 onion but from different plants; this way you don't wear out 1 plant and the onions can reproduce the leave  more easily.

LoveLea's growing organic scallions.
My organic scallions.

The scallions in the picture above were a meager 5 mm at the start; look what they have become in a couple of weeks!

I had quite some carrot leaves. I checked the internet to have some ideas on how to use them. Some articles suggested soup but I didn't have enough for a soup; others said to use it in a salad. At the end I followed my instinct: I boiled some potatoes, put some olive oil in my salad bowl, cut the boiled potatoes while still hot, tossed them in my bowl and swirled them around in the oil. This way they absorb the oil nicely and are very tasty. To top off the salad, I cut up the carrots leaves and mixed them with the potatoes. But I must confess: the leaves didn't add any extra taste to my salad. Maybe when cooked in a soup they might add some taste, but that I have to found out still.



LoveLea's spruced lettuce, radish top, leeks
My leeks, radish top and sprucing lettuce.


My lettuce is sprouting well, but not the leeks. I have another confession to make: I forgot to soak them in water and planted them immediately in the soil. Apparently that doesn't work for leeks; I could get them out of the soil, soak them a couple days and then replant them.

I planted the upper part of radishes (the pink color underneath the leek) with some stems and the cutting is producing new leaves are growing. I doubt if I'll get radishes but the leaves are very tasty stewed with or without onion in olive oil.

To round up:


If you have limited space and have only room for a small container (even a tuna can could become your container),  grow preferably scallions, then lettuce leaves and/or spinach leaves. You can try out carrot leafs and decided about the taste yourself, after all tastes differ. They sprout very easy. And try out for yourself and experiment, it's fun and gives a lot of pleasure.

Wow, this has become a lot longer then I intended.


How to entertain your grand children.


Next weekend is the annual Lebbe- gathering in West- Vleteren, Belgium the very same gathering I couldn't attend last year. But this year I am attending. My daughter and family and dog are attending too and we'll make a weekend out of it. They're picking me up on Friday and ride straight ahead to the coast. It is about a 2.5 hrs drive which is long for children. But when Grandma is in the car, time passes quickly and in no time we are at destination.

Children are happy when they get exclusive attention: when you are with your grand children lent them both your ears, not one ear directed to what the adults are saying and the other to the children! That won't do: give them all of your attention.

The easiest thing to do, when they are small (till 8) is to let them choose a color and count all the cars they see in their color, very exciting! or they can choose a type of car, truck, whatever.

You can tell stories: they love real stories about your youth, anecdotes about their mother or father, they love to be scared so tell them something scary but observe them closely to know how far you can go. The classic fairy tales like Snow White , Cinderella are still liked.

You can learn them funny songs; children like to laugh with silly things are sing the old songs they know. It's o.k. to sing them when no friends are  around. This brings us to older children

It takes some sophistication to get the attention of older children. Best thing to do is to talk about and ask questions about their interests. My grandson is 12 and he gets very passionate when talking about his games. He talks and goes on and I listen, asking him questions about the things I don't get or know nothing about till his sister of 9 interrupts him saying: you have talked enough, my turn.

Cute Halloween leather earrings and bracelets.


Last week I said that I wouldn't show any pictures of my leather Halloween creations because they are in consignment at a shop in my home town. But the earrings are so cute that I have to show them to you.


Lovelea's skull earrings
LoveLea's cute
leather skull earrings.
LoveLea's cute bone earrings
LoveLea's cute leather 
bone earrings














Aren't they adorable: and the skulls and the bones!

Here are 2 very simple leather  bracelets with a sliding knot, perfect for people with metal allergy.


LoveLea's 2 skull sliding knot bracelet
LoveLea's unisex 2 skull
bracelet  with sliding knot
LoveLea's skull bracelets with sliding knot
LoveLea's unisex skull
 bracelets with sliding knot

















Glad I showed you my latest Halloween creations.

Tomorrow, Friday I am off to the the North See! I haven't seen the see in months and the North See in 2 years. I would love to have a swim in the North See but with the tides, I don't know if my swim will fit in, And to West-Vleteren. I'll tell you all about it.

That's it for this week. See you next week.

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Bobbin lace and leather! Poor over coffee memories. Superb sunrise to start my day!

The secret of bobbin lace!


At this moment I am reading the incredible useful e-books of Erin from Made Urban. She has simple but very  genius ideas like bringing together products with the same color to create unity (in a craft display). I created some series like my pool wear collection and more here!, but lots of my products are kind of disparate.

To apply this principle I had a look at all my products and found out that I have a lot of red/burgundy bracelets and a lot of them are embellished with lace.  And while stuffing my new closet (hey, I haven't shown it to you), I discovered my box filled with real lace. I say real lace because I am Belgian from the Flemish region and we are very proud of our world known bobbin lace.


LoveLea's red leather & lace bracelet collection
LoveLea's red leather & lace bracelet collection



How I am so sure it is bobbin lace?


Because the town where I was raised, small as it is, has a tradition of bobbin lace. When I was in the fifth grade of elementary school, we had a choice between the regular needle work lessons  or going to the bobbin lace class. I choose the latter and with a couple of other girls we crossed the whole school to the kindergarten section where the class of Soeur Marie des Anges was situated! Yes, I went to an all girl, catholic school, directed by nuns!

Anyway, the class was fun, more relaxed, at the most 5 girls and at the end of the school day. We learned the basics as where to put your pins, read and comprehend the pattern charts because each stitch has its symbol. I I remember the linen stitch and the embellishments as the spider, picots and the fan. We made only  long strips of lace. Albeit they couldn't be that long because I still have a little booklet with samples of what we learned and made. I never made it to lace in a circle on a round cushion because the next year I went to a boarding school.


LoveLea's bobbin lace sample booklet
A page of my bobbin lace sample booklet with spider motifs.


Above is an mage of a page of the sample booklet we got at the end of the school year. It shows varieties of the "spider" motif.


My collection of red+lace bracelets contains a large cuff embellished with a crocheted doily motif; (I have a plain one for myself and the cuff is heavenly and pleasantly warm in winter.) The white  motif ads freshness to the dark winter days.


LoveLea's red leather cuff with white vintage motif
LoveLea's red leather cuff with white vintage motif



For the second narrow bracelet I used a piece of bicoloured crocheted lace made out of a very fine thread; my mother in law gave it to me, it is what is left from a headscarf. It is a very simple but very beautifull example of crocheted lace.


Lovelea's red leather bracelet with vintage crocheted lace
Lovelea's red leather bracelet with
vintage crocheted lace



Here comes the bracelet adorned with real bobbin lace. The name of the motif is "little spider". Bobbin lace can be faked fairly good! but I'll tell you a little SECRET: if you can see the little, tiny holes where the pins used to sit, then you have real bobbin lace. Because this lace has been washed several times, only the holes in the spiders are still visible in the image below right.



LoveLea's red leather bracelet with vintage bobbin lace
Red leather bracelet
with vintage bobbin lace
Bobbin lace detail
Bobbin lace detail showing
 the pin holes 














And for the fourth bracelet I used a sturdy mechanically produced lace. To compensate this fact, I used a vintage glass evil eye bead as button.


LoveLea's red leather bracelet with lace and evil eye bead.
LoveLea's red leather bracelet with
 lace and vintage evil eye bead.

Poor over coffee

When reading Emily Smith's post  (she is Editor of The Best of This Life) about poor over coffee, I was pleasantly surprised that a whole post was dedicated to poor over coffee. I haven't known any other way of making coffee in my whole life. I think I was in my twenties when I had an Italian expresso for the first time and a Turkish coffee.

I have memories of my father making coffee with the Melitta filter in our own big coffee pot. In the morning when descending the staircase to have breakfast, the smell of fresh coffee awaited us. While the right amount of water was put to boiling, my father, who made coffee every morning for the whole family, measured out the number of table spoons of coffee and a little tiny bit of chicory root into the coffee filter. The chicory is some habit, left over from the war when they substituted coffee by chicory or roasted  acorns. When the water boiled, he poured only a small amount of water so the coffee had time to swell and after this first time he just filled the filter with water covering the filter with a lid, so everything could stay warm.


But before we used the paper filter, we used a cotton bag that was sewn to a metal ring that fitted in the coffee pot. Farmers and poor people used the same method but they didn't use a ready made bag, they sew a nylon SOCK into the holder. The cotton bag made tastier coffee than the paper filter but I bet you can imagine the horror of emptying this bag full of coffee grounds every day and washing the thing every day! The paper filter was very convenient but we lost some of the taste.

Sunrise


Today I got up early to finish this post and I have been rewarded with a superb sunrise: the sky was on fire. Things like this make me feel good and energizes me the whole day.


Sunrise, Tienen Belgium
Sunrise Thursday morning.


About my Halloween jewelry, 

I took what I had made: 2 chokers, 2 bracelets and 2 pair of earrings to the local gift shop and they are doing great. This is why I don't show pictures of this creations.


I hope you liked my bracelets (available @ my FB page, LoveLea.) and my childhood memories.

 See you next week.




Thursday, October 4, 2018

Caught up in the Halloween frenzy, Men's jewelry time, Internet cause of divorce, a quote

Halloween is coming!


I remember when a child, I must have been 5 or 6, one day in winter my mother got all excited and made us put on our coat after dark! Very unusual! My sister and I were given a cute colored lantern at the end of a stick in our hands with the instructions to keep it straight otherwise the paper would fire. My elder brother was also given a stick in his hand but at the end of his stick was a hollowed out sugar beat with a candle burning inside.When the train passed our front door, we were pushed out the door to go along with the other children. 

This was my first experience with Halloween. It was the way things were done when we were little: we had no idea what we were doing, why we were doing this, the reason for this celebration, no explanation, no communication, and mind you: my parents were cultured people. We did participate a couple more times and that was it. 

This year when seeing pumpkins, long pointed witch hats, spider webs in the window displays, I got caught in the mood and made a Halloween choker: 


By next week, I should have made more chokers and bracelets.

Men's jewelry time


Halloween preparations means fall has come. I haven't made any men's jewelry in a long time. The change of the season allows different kind of jewelry. Summer is more associated with light, airy jewels and summer is definitely over now. Fall brings in the need for heavier, more solid things and that's exactly what men's jewels is about.

I made 3 bracelets, to be more specific: 3 variations on leather & vintage beads. I found some sturdy leather and thought about a means to adorn it with the vintage evil eye beads without using any glue or cement.

Lovelea's bicolored leather men bracelet with vintage beads.
Lovelea's bicolored leather
men bracelet with 3
vintage beads.
Lovelea's leather men bracelet with vintage beads.
Lovelea's  leather
 men bracelet
with 3 vintage beads.



Lovelea's bicolored leather men bracelet with vintage evil eye bead..
Lovelea's bicolored leather
 men bracelet with evil eye vintage bead.

The leather I used is very nice and sturdy. wear it with jeans, cargo pants, even with a suit!


Internet cause of divorce


2 Days ago, my husband was looking at a newspaper article that said: "Internet can be a cause of divorce" or something like that, I don't remember the exact wording. I can agree on this but not on the image they used: A WOMAN with her laptop!!!!! I was about to explode!!! The writer behind this article must be a man. Are only woman hooked on Internet? Men are not guilty of spending too much time on the net? Women have been care takers for ages and this is changing now. Of course men are not happy with that, they loose all their privileges, only women can gain from this situation.

But what I really want to point out is that women take care of others but not of themselves: I hear it from women entrepreneurs, I see it on Pinterest and I observe it with my self: we don't care enough for ourselves. Why has this to be so difficult? Is it a christian upbringing that teaches that the other comes first? Do we learn it from our mothers? I love it when the air hostess tells us that in an emergency situation, mothers should put on their mask first. This makes sense: if you are feeling well, you can take care of others, not as a duty but as a feeling!

Mothers of little girls, teach them to take care of themselves, put themselves in the first place without being egocentric  and maybe more important, teach your little boys to do themselves what they can DO themselves: don't tie their shoelaces, learn them how to do it! Don't get them a glass of water, tell them to get it themselves if they are thirsty.

During an experiment, not that long ago, in a nursery of a Scandinavian country the children were filmed at breakfast time and the childcare takers saw with their own eyes that the little girls "served" the little boys. If a boy wanted more cereal or milk, he prattled something to the girl next to him and the girl got up and got it for him. Upon watching the video, from then on girls and boys had their breakfast separated. Then the care takers observed that the boys didn't even know the words necessary to ask for their needs! Nothing has changed in fact.

My quote

Last week, something went wrong and I couldn't download my quote. In the mean time I straightened things out and I have a quote for you and me. The second quote I mentioned isn't ready yet, that's for the near future.

When something unpleasant, bad, disagreeable happens, we tend to blame the happening on others and poor we are victims. This is the most easy behavior but not the best one. It gets you no where! So, when something unpleasant happens again, study the case and find out what your part is in the event. It is time to drop your victim role and take your life in both hands. Be responsible for your own life! It is more scary at first, but ultimate you'll have a happier and more fulfilling life.





Do you have any Halloween childhood memories? Let us know, write them in the comments!

I hope you enjoyed reading my post. If you liked the images, when hovering over them, you can share them on Pinterest.

See you next week!


The event of the year (in my town), Pro's of having a dog, How I excorcise inspiration; My revamped quote!

The event of the year Last Friday it was my daughter's birthday and it was the first day of Suikerrock, a 3 day rock festival in our...

The event of the year (in my town), Pro's of having a dog, How I excorcise inspiration; My revamped