On September 4th, Nils and I invited our friends and family to celebrate our winter marriage at a summer wedding party. It was a beautiful, humbling, joyful, relaxed and just really fun night. And I didn’t have a clue how to write about it. Read on …
I first came across this “community driven visual potluck” early 2008 and rediscovered it just a couple of weeks ago. I love browsing the site for inspiring food photos, yummy recipes and new-to-me food blogs at the end of my work day just before dinner time. Can anyone say hunger-driven?
Pinterest has already made the round through various blogs, and deservedly so: a nice, clean service to bookmark favorite images that are linked back to their source. I frantically (and successfully!) searched the web for a way to access this invitation-only community last summer, as I thought this could be the perfect way to collect ideas for our summer wedding party in one spot. It was indeed. I have yet to fully embrace the idea for other fields of life, but enjoy the sporadic emails notifying me someone liked or repinned one of the wedding ideas I found helpful last year. Tis the season, I guess! (Oh, and in case you want in on the fun, too - just leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite.)
My (or rather: Nils’) newest discovery of the lot, and one with a bigger purpose: Zootool is a service to collect (and track) bookmarks, images and other media snippets (developed in Germany - neat!). In some ways similar to Pinterest, I use it solely to save bookmarks and provide them with context (tags and notes). This could be yet another community to get lost in, but the really cool thing is that Nils is working on a way to automatically include saved links into my (and his) future blog stream. So the flow might look something like this: An article sparks my interest in Reeder (my RSS reader), one of the apps of Read it Later (my reading list for articles I want to, uh, read later) or Safari, I then click on the Zootool button (can you see the tiny Z in the upper right corner of my screenshots?) to save the link together with some tags and a short note and the whole thing is then posted to my blog to share it with you and save it for me. I can hardly wait.
A post on designsponge reminded me of being a knitter today. I started knitting in 2006 and have since spent many fall, winter and spring evenings as well as four months of train and bus commute during an internship in 2008 knitting away on scarves, hats, wristwarmers and even a pullover or two. But not this past winter. Or fall. Or spring, come to think of it.
The knitting bug left me late 2009 or early 2010, in the midst of finishing up a grey cardigan modeled after a knit by Brooklyn Tweed (one of the few men designing patterns for other men out there) for Nils. Around the time I was figuring out the right size for a bolero for my sister, and the urge and joy to knit slowly slipped through my fingers. Maybe it was diving into work life after university that left so little head space for other things. Or maybe I just needed a really long pause to rediscover this craft. During the last few weeks, I sewed in the missing cardigan zipper and have at least considered the next step to finish that bolero jacket, but have yet to actually pick up a knitting needle again. My local yarn store, Stil Blüte Handarbeit & Co.(I still really like that site we created, Nils!) is hosting a knitting party next Tuesday and I said I’d attend. Who knows? This might be just the right time to become a knitter again.
The cape pictured above is the knitted item I have by far worn the most. I didn’t expect it to be, but I wear it nearly every day working away in front of the screen. Photo taken early 2009.
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Ich bin Johanna.
I live in Braunschweig, a city in Northern Germany, together with my husband Nils and our baby son Max. These days, my life is made up of long nights, sweet smiles and running our design studio from home. As for this blog, it’s a mix of all of the above. This is my story.
