Beautiful. Wild. Calming. Ann Marie (from the gorgeous blog age old tree)’s  recent photos have once again captured my imagination and whisked me away to a far off land. Click here to see her video of wedding rock, in california. And I love that her last beach wander was with this lovely one.

One fine afternoon, a few months back now, french boy was cleaning the outside of the boat while I was cozily tucked up inside, working away on my book. Unbeknown to me, he had seen two stray swan feathers floating nearby in the canal and, knowing how much I love feathers and how I love to watch the swans when they come by, he grabbed our broom and spent a good while trying to lure the feathers in closer to the edge of the boat. When he finally got hold of them he came inside, and with each feather in the palm of each hand he walked up to me and pronounced, “these are for you”.

…given to me by hilde tempelman from atelier tempel here in amsterdam, on the day of my booksigning back in June. It says ‘congratulations’ in Dutch, isn’t it super? I adore Hilde’s work. Click here to see some pics of Hilde’s studio which we visited during the Amsterdam: Made by Hand wander.

I hope you are still enjoying this sweet treasure series because I have a few more for you next week. Also Marjorie has posted her second recipe from her autumn menu in the (blog)house kitchen! Check it out right here.  Have a lovely weekend mes amis!

xx

PS oh and I nearly forgot, today is our 3 year anniversary of living in Amsterdam! That means it’s been 3 years since we first moved into our little boat – I can barely believe how time has flown.

movie still from les choristes…

These past couple of months I’ve been in retreat again, while working toward another deadline for the production of the book – this basically means no weekends or nights out but lots of wonderful “nights in”.  So, it’s now become part of the routine that every few days or so french boy finds us a french movie to watch at home.  Since I know lots of you like the same things as me, I thought you’d appreciate knowing my 3 favourites from the collection thus far. They really are ‘sweet treasures’, in every way.  And I won’t tell you what they are about because I didn’t know until I watched them  – instead, just an image from each film. That, plus while writing this post I asked french boy to email me the french names of the movies, and with that he included his very brief description of each in English to jog my memory – they made me laugh, so I’ve included them here for you too. Enjoy…

sweet treasure #7:

Les enfants du marais. (the swamp story)

sweet treasure #8:

Les choristes (the choir story)

sweet treasure #9:

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps (the girl from Paris gone farmer)

xx

PS Michel Serrault & Gérard Jugnot have since become two of my favourite french actors.

…it’s adorable. I found this pretty embroidered silk number in a little vintage boutique earlier this year, in a sweet seaside town outside of Sydney where my dear friend Jenni lives. We saw it together, both fell in love with it and spent the following moments passing it from one to another “no you have it”, “no you saw it first, you should have it” “no no, you have it”. Jenni insisted I take it, so I did. And now it lives with me here in Amsterdam. It’s a lovely summer bag, and even though I don’t get to use it much here in the north, I have it hanging on a hook in my bedroom where I can see it everyday and think of my dear friend.