HAPPY NEW YEAR followers 🙂 Hope that everyone came into the new year with smiles, happy thoughts and a lot of love!

We spent New Years Eve with some of our best friends (the picture below) at a nearby restaurant. Normally we spent New Years Eve at our apartment as we live in Midtown and have room for a great party 😀 But this New Years Eve was special as our beloved friend Ditte (on the picture) turned 25 at midnight…. Therefore we chose to let her decided what to do this year, and kind as alway she decided that Chris and I should have the day off to party instead of cooking and cleaning for 10-15 guests. Not that we don’t enjoy cooking for parties, but sometimes it is nice to be waited on instead of waiting on others.

After dinner we went back to our place to drink champagne and eat marzipan ring cake (a new years eve tradition in Denmark) and celebrate Ditte’s 25th birthday 🙂

A lot have happened the last year and one of my new year traditions is to look back at the previous year and list dos and don’ts for the upcoming year.

Looking back at 2013 there is especially one thing that comes to mind, which is why this post isn’t about food but about passion and good craftsmanship.
When we first meet back in 2009 I got very inspired by Chris’ creativity and passion for developing trash into gold. During the year his skills has developed enormously and today he makes most of our furnitures himself.  He was never good in school, he couldn’t (and can still not) sit still and listen for more than 5 minutes and so on…. But what he can do is use his imagination and hands to build whatever pops up in his head. The pictures below is a sample of the furnitures he build.

 

Dining Chairs
These dining chairs are handcrafted from 1 mm black iron. All the curves are made by hand and tools were handmade especially for this purpose.

 

Dining Table
This beautiful dining table was a hand made wedding gift for me (what a lucky girl I am 🙂 ). The top is made of African Azobe wood (also called iron wood) that was used to build the old harbor here in town. When the harbor was updated and renovated the old wood was set to be discarded – luckily Chris found it and transformed it into the most perfect wedding gift anyone could ever give me 🙂

The bottom of the table is cast iron parts from an antique clothing roll. The table bolted together with handcrafted bolt in black iron. All iron has been browned (heated and dipped in oil) so that it gets a beautiful old finish.

 

Coffee Table
The most recent project was this coffee table made from old timbered oak which we have been collecting from different parts of the country. Some of the iron part is cast iron from the clothing roll which was bought to make the bottom part of the dining table while some of the wooden parts (the handles) are from two old workbenches.

The top is assembled with old-fashioned handcraft methods, meaning that  it doesn’t contain any screws or nail. The wheels are iron cast wheels found at a local hoarders junkyard where we sometimes go to look for special items. As with all the other furniture bolts and everything else is handcrafted and browed to make it look a bit old.

The hight of the table can be adjusted using the two handles on top.

 

Creativity & Passion
I could keep on writing about all the fabulous furnitures and how proud I am of my husband, but I will spare you for that instead I will just say:

 

Be creative, be passionate and dreams might become reality!

(if you haven’t already guest it, we are big fans of cigars and whisky 🙂 )

All pictures of furnitures are taken by Martin from Applepark Photography.