Loepsie’s Life in October

Happy November my lovely readers! Can you believe there’s only two months left in this decade? The idea that we’ll be entering the 2020s soon is insane to me.

Also, welcome to a brand new Loepsie.com! I suddenly felt like the blog needed a bit of a makeover, so here’s an updated version, ready for the start of a new decade. The content will remain the same, but the layout is all new. It’s a bit of a simpler and more modern look, which I really like. Let me know what you think!

Anyways, October is over, so it’s time to give you a peek into my monthly photo diary. October was a fun month for me. I picked up a completely new hobby, went away for a weekend, had a few fun nights out… Let’s take a look at the photos I took.

Back at the opera again. My friend and I went to see Mozart’s Cosí Fan Tutte. I love how they staged this production! The storyline is rather old fashioned, but they performed it with a lot of humour which is unusual for opera, but worked really wel. It’s a story about two young men who set out to test the faithfulness of their lovers by dressing up as foreigners and trying to seduce them. This particular performance was set in a 1950s sea-side youth hostel, and combined with the playful interpretation of the story, it made for a very entertaining show.

The moment I had been dreading for years was finally here: I was about to have my wisdom teeth removed. I’d always hoped there’d be enough room in my jaw so that I could leave them in, but alas, it turns out all my teeth are equally crooked. You may not know this about me, but I went through four different types of braces and three surgeries as a child to get my teeth looking like this, haha! Because of those past experiences with in-mouth surgeries, which weren’t very pleasant at all, I was really apprehensive about getting my wisom teeth out. But the day has come after all.

I tried to take one last picture of my wisdom tooth still firmly in place, for memory’s sake :)

I was so pleasantly surprised by how easy the procedure was! It only took a few minutes and wasn’t nearly as scary or painful as I feared. Really, had I known this is it, I would’ve done it a long time ago. I left the clinic with one numb hamster cheek, and my mom took me home.

Let the pampering commence. I wasn’t in any pain, but I did feel tired and I had taken the day off anyway. Might as well enjoy it.

Look what’s new in the Netherlands! Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough was always my favourite icecream, and now they came out with a vegan version. What a time to be alive.

On World Animal Day I headed over to the pet store, got some new accessories for the rat cage, and completely re-arranged the whole thing. Rats love exploring new cage setups and I really don’t do it enough, but now I took some time to give them something entirely new to explore.

The funniest thing is that certain toys they had no interest in before, are suddenly fun again once they’re presented differently.

I got this wood and rope bird toy for them to destroy. There’s nothing like destroyable toys to keep rats happy.

Ok, stay with me here. I’m sure every one of you have at some point in your childhood been told to enjoy fastfood with moderation and thought “when I grow up, I’ll eat all the fries and burgers I want”. I visited my friend one night and well… We decided to do it. This is the most massive pile of French fries and veggie nuggets I’ve ever faced, and we got a veggie chicken burger to boot. It was ridiculous, it was indulging to the max, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, we finished nearly all of it. All that was left were five nuggets, haha! Not something you do every week, but man did we have fun.

Of course, I spent a lot of time filming, editing and writing this month as well. Lots of new content, yay!

This is the winter coat I wore all throughout university. At a certain point the pocket linings tore, buttons fell off, and I decided it was time to replace it. I got a new, similar coat, but it was neither as pretty nor as warm as this one. I could’nt get myself to part with this coat and it survived more decluttering sessions than would make sense. This year I decided I need to either repair it, or donate it. Obviously I chose the former. There were a few buttons missing, but I found a couple of them in my sewing kit, and used the two buttons at the shoulders to replace the rest. I put two new black buttons where the shoulder ones had been, and now the coat is wearable again! I just need to quickly stitch the pockets up and it’ll be all done.

I’m so glad to have this coat back! It feels much better than the one I’ve been using the past few years, and I’m really happy I didn’t get rid of it even though I felt I should. Sometimes minimalism is great, but it’s also important to follow your gut when it comes to keeping things.

I’ve been cutting Robbert’s hair for years now and even though I still have no idea what I’m doing, I think I’m getting better at it, haha!

There’s something I’ve been itching to get into for a while, and that’s sewing. I used to love sewing as a teen and made a bunch of my own clothes back then, but I didn’t do it very well as I was impatient and had little knowledge of how my sewing machine works. The perfect opportunity presented itself in the form of a video collaboration with Skillshare, and I decided to dive into the world of sewing once more. I bought a PDF of the manual to my 60s sewing machine in English so that I could understand it well, watched a few of the sewing courses on Skillshare, got an amazing deal on fabric at the Albert Cuyp market, and set out to make my first properly made garment.

Guys, I’m so proud of myself. The project turned out so much better than I’d hoped, and I even managed to do some pretty advanced things such as attaching a zipper and making gathers the right way.

I now have an absolutely lovely pinafore dress that I wear all the time. It’s super warm and comfortable and I adore the way it looks. I couldn’t have asked for a better first project, and I LOVED making it, too. It was a lot of fun and I’m super excited for my next project.

Robbert’s parents invited the family out on a weekend away in Den Bosch, a beautiful city in the south of the Netherlands. They rented the most adorable old little vacationing home, which I fell head over heels in love with. If we ever acquire that kind of money, I’d absolutely love to buy a historical house like this.

The home is owned by the same people who run the antique shop next door, and it’s completely furnished with antique furniture. So beautiful!

St. Jan’s Cathedral in Den Bosch, a breathtaking piece of architecture.

It was an amazing weekend. We shared lots of good food and belly laughs throughout, went shopping (I finally got myself a beret!), wandered through the city and played games.

On the last day Robbert and I hopped into the Hieronymus Bosch museum. I’ve been fascinated with his work since I first came across it as a child. If you haven’t heard of this renaissance painter before, I strongly encourage you to check out his work. This was a man with a very vivid imagination, and a colourful idea of what hell must look like. It’s definitely up there with the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.

How I do my hair for a video…

And how I wear it for the rest of the day. Whenever I do more extreme hairstyles, I tend to kind of “normalize” them before going out. This turned out really cute, in my opinion!

My brother got his bachelor’s degree in computer science with honors! He’s well on his way to get his master’s now, and I’m so proud of him :)

This month, the pumpkin spice lattea was born. All the best of the pumpkin spice latte, without the coffee. We don’t much favour coffee over here ;) The pumpkin spice lattea is such a perfect autumnal drink, it feels like a warm, fuzzy blanket. I’ve made it many times since.

Little Cefin peeking out from his favourite box.

Albert Heijn dropped a bunch of new vegan mock meats and I’m so excited! It truly is a wonderful time to be a vegan. There’s now a replacement for nearly every type of meat I used to eat when I was younger, and they keep getting better and better. This smoked sausage is delicious and perfect for wintery potato mashes and thick soups.

I have a collaboration with Function of Beauty coming up. They make custom hair care products tailored to your own needs and preferences, you take a test on their website to determine what formula your hair needs and they mix it for you. I made my products pink with a floral scent, and focused on hydration and hair and scalp health. I’ve been using them for a few weeks now, and so far I’m really pleased!

Five hairy rats :)

That beret I bought? I’ve worn it almost every single day since. It’s the perfect thing to wear when it’s chilly out, but not quite cold enough to wear a knit hat. My beautiful wide-brimmed floppy hats, although beautiful, tend to be really annoying when there’s a strong wind blowing (which happens a lot these days) so this is a perfect alternative.

The leaves only started changing colours towards the end of October. We don’t really get those beautiful orange, red and yellow landscapes over where I live. We have so many different kinds of trees that usually half the trees have completely lost all leaves while the other half still looks like it’s high summer.

My brand new hand-made hair rat in action. There’s nothing like a good Edwardian hairstyle, if you ask me.

Vegan fish and chips! This was delicious, but next time I really need to prepare this with a lot more oil. Fish and chips from the oven just doesn’t cut it :)

Robbert and I went to see the new Joker movie. Man, was that depressing. It’s a very dark movie and very different from what I expected going in. It’s good, but know what you’re getting yourself into if you decide to watch it.

I headed over to my parents’ house to pick up some of my old sewing supplies, and while I was there I pulled out this little box that contains my milk teeth. I was hoping to put my wisdom teeth in here too but upon closer inspection there’s no way they’ll fit, haha!

I also bumped into this thing right here. This is what I used in the earliest days of my YouTube career, but I don’t think those videos are even up any more. Such a huge camera, haha! This was what you needed to record HD video back in the day.

One of my favourite things: a warm, cuddly pile of sleepy ratties.

I received some beautiful new sunglasses for an upcoming video. I feel like such a diva in these, haha!

While I was re-organising the files on my computer, I came across this old photo which I believe I took for the LHC forum at the time. Can you believe I once had all this hair? I have less than a third of this amount now.

I try not to let it get to me and usually it doesn’t matter to me too much, but my hair was my absolute favourite physical feature of mine before it fell out in 2011. My hair keeps slowly getting thinner as I get older and at times I do kind of struggle with it. The nature of my job means I’m confronted with the state of my hair more often than I’d normally be, and I can’t help but feel sad when I see how gorgeous my hair used to be, and how short and thin it is now. I keep telling myself my hair is still thick enough to look normal and the length is ok, but deep down I just really miss the hair I had in this photo.

Every time I share something about the hair loss my diet is inevitably brought up, so I just want to say I really don’t believe the two are related. When I initially lost most of my hair I still lived at home and ate an omnivorous diet, including meat and dairy nearly daily. I continued eating meat, dairy and eggs for several years after and only started slowly adopting a vegetarian and then vegan diet years later. There’s no noticeable difference between the fullness of my roots between now and 2012. The only thing I struggle with now is that my hair won’t grow as long as it used to, but I attribute that mostly to breakage from heat styling and backcombing.

I did have my thyroid checked and bloodwork done when I first experienced the hairloss, and nothing was out of the ordinary. At this point my only hope is my hair will grow thicker when (if) I get pregnant one day, haha!

A while back the explorer scouts designed this logo to be printed on the back of some new hoodies for them. It’s a hand in the scout greeting pose, filled with the words to the explorer law. It took me a while to actually make the logo, but as I finally got Photoshop earlier this month I was able to finalize it at last.

We decided to give the logo a test run and screen-print some t-shirts. That was so fun to do!

They turned out amazing, in my opinion. I noticed there was a spelling error in one of the words right on time, so we were able to take that out, haha.

This has been the reality of life ever since I started wearing more vintage-inspired fashion again. Bare ankles are a huge part of the look, whether you’re wearing skirts or pants, and one needs pantyhose to make that bearable in this weather. So this is what my laundry looks like these days. Pro tip: you can totally layer two or three pairs of skin coloured pantyhose to keep warm and still look nice.

Ending this diary with an adorable photo of Bran, clutching his tiny fist. Little rattie fists are one of my favourite things, especially when they hold on to each other’s fur mid-cuddle :)

So that concludes October for me. I hope you’ve had an amazing month, and that November is off to a good start. Talk to you soon!