Cold snap

When I posted last week's 'weekly outfit', I fully expected the snow to be gone pretty quickly. That was why I took the effort to take the picture on my balcony. Usually, any snow we get here melts within two days. Little did I expect what happened next. On Saturday, the snow didn't melt and on Sunday, it was snowing again. We had snow all day on Sunday. It ended up being a layer of between 10 and 20 cm. In The Hague, the Netherlands! I haven't seen this much snow in my hometown for at least 5, but more likely 10 years. I know it's pretty pathetic compared to a lot of other places, but it's pretty impressive here. There were no trains on Sunday. A collegue of mine was stuck in another city and didn't get home until Monday afternoon.This is what it looked like from my kitchen window on Sunday morning (the layer of snow got thicker later on).

The snow is slowly starting to melt now, but might freeze up again tonight. Luckily, I can walk to work. Normally I ride my bicycle, but I'm not biking on slippery surfaces. Now, I walk through an eerily quiet city (the trams are still not back to their usual timetable). The pavements are covered in caked snow, the roads are muddy slush. You can't actually see where the one stops and the other starts, so I take big steps over the snow/slush mounts at the edges of the roads.

As M says, it has been great weather to stay indoors. Which is just what E and I did on Sunday. That gave me the time to do some sewing and look through my stash materials. I didn't really get to my fabrics because I spend a lot of time looking through this, and another (less picturesque) box like it.

My grandmother gave me her old boxes of buttons last year. There is no really fancy stuff in any of them, but I just love the stories these little collections tell. Similar buttons are oftern threaded on pieces of string, to keep them together. With the small ones, they often don't all match. It seems that some ladies in my family would cut the buttons of all worn-out, un-salvagable pieces of clothing and kept them in these boxes. As organized as possible. I used some of those not-quite-matching little mother-of-pearl button for my white shirt, and as always, told myself to come up with a design which would make use of some of the more eye-catching buttons. There are two other, very small boxes holding old cufflinks, plastic broches and a belt clip. I'll show you those later, hopefully when I use some of their contents.

I just love sewing supplies with a history. Do you have any of those stories as well?

Weekly outfit nr.12

A picture in a different setting this week.

So far, apart from a few days in early November, we hadn't had much in the name of cold weather here in Holland, this winter. Until this week that is. The first part of the week was cold and bright, with midday temperatures around freezing point. Then, yesterday, there was snow. Lots of it, in the northern provinces. Where I live in The Hague, in the southern half of the country and close to the sea (yes, it's a small country, but for things like snow, a few miles can make all the difference), it got to about 5cm. Which is a lot by the standard of recent years. We tend to get between two and four days of snow here. It's here now, but that's by no means a garantee for a white Christmas. In fact, just a single day of frost around the clock is enough the make skating enthousiasts dream of marathons on the canals.

For me, the weather offered the opportunity to show off the city I live in in unusual garb and to show you some of my warmer clothes. I made the coat in late winter, two years ago. So late in fact, that I could hardly wear it anymore that year. It's an A-line coat in thick black wool with broad leather edges. It closes with covered buttons. With it, I'm wearing my wide, belt pleated tweed trousers and a simple black shirt, both made about exactly a year ago.