A couple of things that we found out you should not do (though they are quite obvious):

• Work with red chili peppers, not wash your hands and after dinner try to put in a contact lens. I ruined a perfectly new lens with such an action and could not tolerate a clean one (after thoroughly washing my hands) in my eye afterwards.
• Scare a vomiting cat. Matthijs just cleaned up a puke-trail across the room after scaring Melisse. He tried to prevent her walking onto the carpet by making a sudden move towards her. Result: Melisse racing over the carpet, onto the couch, up and over the cat-tree, past the open door to the litter box all the while puking. You can imagine the mess.

Yay, as promised pictures of my new winter coat. Made by Ork at Exodus last weekend, in the snow!

Here's a view of the complete coat, with me in it.

Closeup of the collar. It's a different color than the coat itself.

The back of the coat. If you look carefully you'll see that the tip of the hood is a different color than the rest of the coat, just like the collar.

And here's a nice shot of me against a tree with the coat flapping open, reveiling the yellow lining.

I still need to make the fingerless gloves out of the yellow fleece, still need to make the headband out of purple and yellow and I still need yellow cord for the hood, but I do have a yellow scarf!

The little vacation was great, even though it could have lasted 3 weeks longer. I had eleven (11) sewing projects on my list, only one of them can be checked off: the new winter coat. It's two kinds of purple with yellow lining and buttons. I love it very, very much and already have received a lot of compliments. We tried to take some pictures of it, but it was too early in the morning with not enough light so the pictures turned out way too dark. We'll try again some time later.

Of course a coat also requires accessories, so I added a scarf of the yellow fleece (which is the lining) and I'm planning on making fingerless gloves of the same stuff and a headband to keep my ears warm from both yellow (if there's enough left) and purple. I also still need to find the right color of yellow cord for in the hood of the coat so I can tie it shut when it is raining.

Matthijs helped me with it. Of course I had set myself a hard deadline; I wanted the coat to be (near) finished when we would visit Cora and Rene on the 2nd of January. We worked until 04:00 to get it finished enough to wear, all be it with pins to close the front. The buttons were sewn on in the train and at Cora and Rene's home. Matthijs helped me by drawing, cutting and sewing a very big part of the lining while I was thinking out the hood and collar.

This weekend is Exodus, so lots of preparations in the planning. I also need to do some Photoshop work for the Mus (Musilon 'magazine'). We had a great laugh yesterday when trying to pose for the picture. Alexander and I will sit on the flying carpet of Aladdin and you can't imagine how twisted Yasmin's body is and in real life they would never fit on the carpet together. :-p Rob and Renske are posing as Snowwhite in the arms of her prince, surrounded by dwarfs. We didn't wear costumes, because we don't have them, but will Photoshop ourselves to replace the original Disney characters.

Anyway, I'm working at the moment. Though I'm waiting for some feedback from my colleagues I've just thought of something that should be done soon. Back to work it is.