Ankantoiel's Diary

2 responses so far – published on Jun, 29 2010 at 16:29 under Hobby,Holiday,Site.
Tags: Amsterdam, Festival in the Shire, Kaprun, sewing

With astonishment I discovered that my last blog post dates from April 20th. *gomenasai* Well, summer is finally here… FINALLY. And that is a wonder by itself as only two weeks ago it was snowing down to 1200m – very unpleasant and cold *brrr*. But summer found its way and right now I am enjoying the warming sun. My herbs and flowers agree that life couldn’t be better.

So the question right now is, what was I doing the last couple of months? And I really would like to tell you some adventurous tale of dragon slaying and freeing a prince ( sorry, I am the hero here! ) in his tower, but actually that isn’t even true for DSA right now. In fact I did nothing extra-ordinary, but there are some things that will make the near future a bit more interesting.

I guess one can consider sewing an Elvish gown an adventure – for me it is after all. It took a while to select the fabrics I would like, but now they are here: A lovely creme colored Crush Satin for the dress and the same fabric in silver for the corsage. For the cape I will use a olive colored panne velvet (sounds cheap and was it at a price of 2,79€ per meter, but looks better than you might think) and a gold colored satin for the lining. Next week a friend of mine and I will start our work. She is planning to create a lovely Elvish mantle and dress for herself ( a mixture of Legolas coronation gown and Elrond’s and Celeborn’s robes). Hopefully we will not encounter too many problems. I am not experienced in sewing, so a catastrophe will surely arise somewhere. Tomorrow I will buy stitching silks and all the other stuff a good tailor might require.

We will have time until August 12th (latest!!) to finish our project. There we will be on our way to the Festival in the Shire and we would like to take the new gowns with us. The timetable is very tight.

Eva-Maria and I will be in Kaprun from July 23th to 25th for a medieval encampment. I am really looking forward to this weekend. As you may remember I was there two years ago, and it was so great. It’s absolutely fantastic that I have the possibility to see it from another point of view and to become part of the event by staying with the guys from Ausfall. Hopefully the weather will be good. Camping with rain is not that fun.

End of July I will also stay some days with my sweetheart in Amsterdam. There are some thing I would like to see there including the Heinken brewery, the Rembrandt and Van Gogh museums, make a boats trip in the Grachtengordel (the canals that are so famous).

I surely will have some pictures from the short-trip as well as from our sewing adventure, Kaprun and the Festival. I will promise to keep you more up2date in the future and that you, my imaginary readers, will be the first to know when something special happens. Maybe there will be a fallen over sack of rice in China to report.

No responses yet – published on Apr, 20 2010 at 11:26 under Hobby,Site.
Tags: flowers, Meran, South Tyrol, spring, Südtirol, Tolkien, Trauttmansdorff, tulips

Last Sunday I had the chance to visit castle Trauttmansdorff in Meran, South Tyrol with my uncle, aunt and cousin. The weather was unfortunately not that good. It was constantly raining softly. Nevertheless it was a very lovely day and it was nice to spend some time with my relatives.

I took some pictures of the very beautiful flowers that were blossoming in the gardens of the castle it is famous and popular for. The pictures are taken with my aunt’s camera (Nixon Coolpix S550) and I wasn’t too comfortable with it as it was quite different to handle compared to my Canon Digital IXUS 860 IS. I really missed the possibilities of settings or at least I couldn’t find them in the menu. I, nevertheless, think the pictures are nice for the first tries with another camera. What I really enjoy are close-ups and what better motive than a beautiful and colorful flower?

Last week I had some time and redesigned the website of the Tolkien Smial Tyrol. Guess everyone was right that the page was to dark and the text too difficult to read on the blue background – and after all I was never happy with the old design. So the new one is lighter with warm brown and green shades – remembering me of the Shire and Hobbiton. Additionally, a new site structure should make the navigation easier than it had been the last 2 years. I have also registered a new domain for the site, www.tolkien-tirol.com, and have moved it to my own server. The old domain should redirect automatically. I hope people will like it. It’s always difficult to say how people will react.