You have now spent the first weekend with our new issue and we are very excited to hear and see what you think of it, what features you liked best and what recipes you want to try! We first took a little weekend break, drank lemonade, put Italian sunglasses on and ate pasta ;). Now we are starting the new week full of energy and first want to let you look behind the scenes of our cover shooting.

The Theme and our cover dress
After the theme “Do you know the land where lemon trees bloom” was clear, Evi had the idea of ​​the lemon dress. First of all: it is of course an exaggeration. Paola was even wearing hip pads under her skirt to make this over-the-top wonderful Sophia-Loren-silhouette. A little bit we got inspired by the Chanel Resort 2013 Collection (look 17 or 18 for example).

The production of the dress was a time-consuming affair, actually the hardest design yet! The lemons we sawed by hand on a scroll saw, the edges were sanded, then a hole was drilled and finally sewn onto the dress. The skirt is incredibly heavy and definitely not for everyday use :). As sisterMAG readers probably know: With our cover dresses we intentionally go a different path than usual women’s or fashion magazines. We don’t want to show the latest trend, the newest collection or the most beautiful pore-free face but rather show the ideas, colours and topics of the issue. We want to create dresses made out of interesting materials you would never see in real life.

Shooting day

We were particularly pleased to be working with a talented and really great stylist from Berlin. Hair and makeup was done by Lena Schleweis, and we hope that we can do many more projects together in the future. Definitely take the time to look at her site lenaschleweis.com .

The shoot took place at the Botanical Garden in Berlin Dahlem. Ashley and I had looked around the whole area before (you can read her blogpost full of wonderful pictures of their cacti here ). That was really good because on the actual shooting day, we only had 1 hour to photograph three different locations. So I became the slave driver, shooing my two photographers Ashley and Cris (who made the video) and model Paola through the jungle.

Paola I know for quite a while, because she had been a loyal Neu4bauer-reader for a long time. Eventually we met for coffee at the airport in Bari, when I was there on vacation and we have kept in touch ever since. Hence she did not only take Cris and me on a tour through her city (Bari – see the whole feature on pages xx following in sisterMAG N°7), but also came to Berlin this April and modeled for our cover. We are very excited and a little proud to show our true-Italian friend on the cover of our Italy Edition ;). By the way: Paola has her own blog where she shows her vintage finds and what she sells on her Etsy shop etc. Click through to “Paola’s Vintage”

The images that didn’t make it
Always hard to choose only TWO images from more than 500! See some of my favourite shots, which just didn’t make the cut to be the cover ;). Click through to our Pinterest Cover Board to save the image for yourself or use in a blogpost (click on any image):

And now there is only one last thing to show: the Behind-the-scenes video, which Cris shot from our day of shooting day and which came out really really wonderfully! Definitely have a look and see how Ashley and I work together!

Even though all the pieces of your collection have something in common, they all have a different content – and by chance might even contain some grains of sand from a beach you have visited, a stamp or even a beer mat. That’s because books are something which is often connected to memories. Something we collect quite unconsciously but which we like to look at again after some time. Especially in times of new technologies which are constantly changing and keep coming into our lives before leaving us again, books are something that stays in our lives from the very first time a book has been read to us as children. We develop a preference for certain kinds of books: novels, cook books, love stories, or special interest books, … this list could go on and on, and on.

This variety of stories in combination with the experiences and memories connected with it made us decide to put the year 2013 under the guiding theme “Year of Books”.
In this year’s issues you will not only find articles on reading books, writing books and making books (digital or print) but we have also dedicated each issue to a certain book which by its title sets the topic and the tone of each issue.
And there is of course you and your very own collection of books. We would like to invite you to share your best picks, your page turners and constant companions.
Follow sisterMAG on Facebook and/ or Twitter (#yearofbooks13), post your favourite book titles, explore the favourite books of others and if you are lucky you and your recommendation might end up in one of our upcoming issues!
Have a look at our Facebook-account where we have started to collect some quotes and book titles already. Share a quote from the book you are reading below this article or on Facebook and join the sharing 

May is coming up quickly and therefore many exciting events for the sisterMAG team. A highlight is definitely the Blogging Conference The Hive, 25th/26th May in Berlin.

Therefore it is time to look back on the past year, in which we were able to visit a number of blogging conferences throughout Europe.

Exactly one year ago we not only took part in our first blogging conference with The Hive, but we were even allowed to hold our first presentation (post about presentation). We met so many great people, many of them are now among our closest friends.

In July 2012 with our trip to Tel Aviv a dream came true. We had wanted to visit this city for so long, which is repeatedly described as the young heart of Israel. At the invitation of Saloona, Israel’s largest website for women, we spent three unforgettable days in the city, held in front of hundreds of enthusiastic bloggers a presentation about “The Blog as CV”, got an amazing insight of Tel Aviv with the help of the Kinetis team and swore that we will come back for a longer trip soon.

Right at the beginning of the dark, cold season in November 2012, the Blogging Conference “Blogst” (http://konferenz.blogst.de/) organized by Ricarda and Clara took place in Hamburg. It was just unbelievable to finally meet many of our German blogging friends with whom we had often talked in emails and comments or on Twitter and Facebook. It was like a big reunion! We were asked to give the opening speech and introduced the topic with a presentation about “Lifestyle Blogs – Virtual trivialities or media potential?”. The research for it was very interesting, because of course this is a topic that we have to deal with frequently when working on sisterMAG. In particular, the discussion with Clara (http://www.tastesheriff.com/), Ricarda (http://23qmstil.blogspot.de/), Daniela (http://klitzeklein.wordpress.com/) and Angelika (http://ichweisswo.blogspot.com/) brought up some interesting statements how bloggers themselves see the topic. Our conclusion: Bloggers must definitely not hide themselves and the work of bloggers has a lot of potential.

The next trip we took was to Stockholm at the beginning of February 2013 for Meet the Blogger Stockholm. After we had participated in the event in Amsterdam in June 2012 as a visitor, we were looking forward even more to speaking in Stockholm. We like the concept of Meet the Bloggers very well: 1 day lectures, 1 day design tour – combined with design bloggers from all over Europe, a great location and wonderful food. Our presentation was all about the creative process behind sisterMAG. We explained a little about how we developed the “product sisterMAG”, how to get from a rough concept to the individual articles and how one of our cover garments is created and photographed.

Lots of love,
Toni

The Californian girl has been living in Germany for quite a while now. Over a year ago (correct me if I’m wrong ;) she moved to Berlin. Our first “meet-cute” was more or less a blind date orchestrated by Toni. It had been my sister who had found Ashley’s blog “Chasing Heartbeats” three years earlier and had developped a little blogger crush for the dark-haired lifestyle blogger. On a sunny March morning the two of us met up in the Berlin Mitte coffeeshop Oliv to discuss a possible collaboration for sisterMAG in the future. I talked and told her so much during our meeting – she must have thought I am a total nutcase ;). However it was the beginning of a true friendship.

Since then Ashley, who has been a photographer for over seven years and is a wedding photographer in “normal life” (more infos about her wedding photography on her wedding blog) and studied photography at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, and I have had several adventures together: Shootings in Copenhagen with Brittany, in Freiberg with my mother – who half-adopted her as our third sister ;), cover shoots in my empty flat in Leipzig or on wanky wooden boards in the workshop of my home OR – that was only last week – in the Botanical Garden for our upcoming issue.

You should definitely subscribe to her blog, because her pictures show Berlin as the city I know and love, which is NOT all about graffiti and run-down corners: the Hansa district in sunlight, Tempelhof in fall and on her pictures even the Stasi Museum looks inviting. After all, it took Ashley to convince me to sit on a scooter and smile dully in her video camera in the Everplaces image film. It might have been the revenge for the Souvenir Shooting when we photographed Ashley in summery dresses in Berlin and forced her to do graceful jumps in high heels which were two numbers too small. I am really sorry for that – but I still love the pictures ;).

Be on the lookout for this credit in sisterMAG or any other publication in the world: Photography – Ashley Ludäscher!

Text: Thea Neubauer | Profile: Donata Proske

All shootings from Ashley in sisterMAG:

• “1 Pattern – 5 skirts” in sisterMAG N°3
• Cover of sisterMAG N°4
• “Wide fields” – Coat Shooting in sisterMAG N°4
• Cover of sisterMAG N°5
• “Blouses” – Blouse shooting with Brittany in sisterMAG N°5
• Berlin Lover’s Guide in sisterMAG N°5
• “Knitting Party” in sisterMAG N°6
• Cover of sisterMAG N°7 – cannot wait to show you this!

After Toni described what we got in our package the other day, it is my (Thea’s) part to tell you a little bit about our childhood memories and the content of our boxes. When Toni heard the theme of this swap, she instantly turned to me and said: “We must do a cellar cake”. A cellar cake (in older times also named Lukullus after the great Latin gourmet and commander Lucullus) is a chocolate cake made of cacao, coconut fat and layers of shortbread cookies.

However, something that has shaped our whole life is a saying my mom used to tell us all the time: “Everything must change in order to stay good”. Living after this aphorism, our childhood was never full of traditions and the same meals, food or even Christmas Trees but rather experiments and new stuff. That’s why we decided to spice up the good old Lukullus and try it in different versions. In the end we made four different versions of the chocolaty treat:

• A White cellar cake with cranberries and whole wheat cookies
• A more traditional Lukullus in mini square format with a hint of amaretto
• Squared mini cellar cakes with a surprise of red jam inside
• Finally Mini Cellar Cakes in muffin shape with meringues and pieces of whole wheat cookies

Then (very much like in our childhood) Toni ceded me to do the packaging :). I’ve always been a buff for paper, boxes and everything around Packaging. Thus I rummaged through my “Structural Design” books (by Rabbit Press) and made up these square and rectangular boxes made out of sturdy cardboard paper in Yellow, Blue and White. Each recipe got another audiobook series, which we really loved in the past. Toni and I both collected ridiculous amounts of tapes –never CDs and we also do not believe in CDs for children today, because there is this certain atmosphere about cassettes! CDs take away the joy of arguing about who is responsible for pulling the magnetic band ;). Toni used to make homemade cassette covers for the ones we had copied *ehem* (back in the days we were not as indulged in copyright laws as we are now ;) and I knew my “Bibi Blocksbergs” so well, that they would stop the cassette after 5 seconds and I had to guess which episode it was.

Just on the morning of sending the package, I baked MY childhood memory cake: the simple sugar yeast cake made by mom and cut into little rectangles. Simply heaven, especially when still warm!

You will find our recipes later this week on the Foodboard, which our lovely organizers of “Post from my kitchen” have created.
We hope you like what we came up with. We definitely love all the ideas we saw around the web! Thanks so much, Silke, for being an awesome swap partner!

Yours, Toni & Thea

Post aus meiner Küche or #PAMK, as it is abbreviated in the Internet, is an institution in the German blogosphere. Hundreds of small packages with wonderful delicacies on a given topic are sent across the country several times a year and recorded in photos on all the blogs. Thea and I found it each time mouth-watering.

Three of our favourite bloggers have founded this great initiative: Clara von Tastesheriff, Jeanny von Zucker, Zimt und Liebe and Rike von Lykkelig. So we just had to participate!

On the subject of “childhood dreams” immediately various ideas came to our head – and we also noticed how different our two culinary memories are. I, as a child of East-Germany, the former Communist part, was primarily raised on homemade sweets and Thea, who remembers Grandma’s corner shop as her playground. Be surprised, how we combined this :-)

But before we want to tell you about our trip in Silke’s childhood memories in this post. Silke writes the wonderful blog “Elbkind”, in which she shares her thoughts about inspiration, photography and food. Definitely have a look on her blog – the photos are just beautiful.

Fortunately, we received the package when we were together, so that we could start unpacking immediately with a camera in Thea’s hand.

Little by little a complete meal was revealed:
- Pumpkin and ginger soup (which we ate with gusto as lunch)
- A Braided Bread with jam (perfect for Easter!)
- Quench lemonade in raspberry red (waiting for the warm days hopefully coming soon)
- Hanseaten cookies (which are almost all eaten already, because they taste so good).

It really was like a little trip into the past, as Silke had embellished each packaging with a small picture of her childhood and you could read up on the content on little tags.

Thank you so much, dear Silke, that we were your exchange partner.

Next time, we tell you more about our childhood memories.

Happy Easter,
Thea and Toni

Everyone loves to meeting friends. However when your friends are spread around the world because you have met them digitally through blogging, Facebook or their wonderful Pinterest findings it is much harder to meet up.

This coming week we have another chance to catch up with some of our friends from the blogging world. We will go to Stockholm to attend and speak at “Meet The Blogger Stockholm 2013″. We are really excited about this bunch of lifestyle and living bloggers we already know and value

• Liselore, who is the organizer of the MeetTheBlogger events
• Chi from OneZeroSixKids, who was here last year for The Hive Berlin and is one of our valued proof readers for English
• Mary-Ellen from HOPinteriors, who we’ve shared a lovely coffee in London with and who is the official blogger of MeetTheBlogger and will again do the challenging task of live-blogging
• Lovely Jeanette from Byfryd, who we started loving at The Hive and who is one of the most talented lifestylists (= Thea’s neologism for people who just make their live beautiful)
• Frida Ramstedt from the popular blog and iPad magazine Trendenser, who did the last keynote in Amsterdam – a very inspiring woman
• Emma from Emma’s Design Blog – Thea had the pleasure of getting to know her during the Blog’nhagen tour in Copenhagen last year
• Judith from Joelix, who will be contributing to sisterMAG in the next issue and who is a dear friend we always love meeting (Hive, Hello Etsy Eindhoven …)
• Of course Elodie Love from Hamburg with one of the rare flower blogs out there (Madame Love) and who Thea had the most fabulous tour at Blogst conference
• More TheHive friends from Berlin: Caroline from Trend Daily and Toni from Skandivis
• Our good friends from Germany Ricarda (23qmstil) and Clara (Tastesheriff), as well as Kathrin from Happy Home Blog
• You might remember her project from our past issue: Steffi from I Love Eco – a really great Dutch blog about eco-friendly prodcucts
• Deborah from Kickcan and Conkers, who always has the best stuff she shares on Facebook :)
• vtwonen author Laura who has been incredibly nice and generous about our magazine

And as always there are some names you have seen around in the World Wide Web and you finally get to meet in person. We are especially looking forward to getting to know:

• Nina Holst from stylizimo
• Desiree from Vosges Paris, who I’ve had lovely email conversations with, but we have never really met and talked
• Of course Will from Bright Bazaar, we definitely are looking forward to hearing his speech and finally meeting him in person!!

We are also really honoured to be able to speak at the conference. Our topic will be “Our creative process”, which is a very exciting topic to talk about. However if you cannot attend, don’t be sad! You can follow all the activities and speeches through the Social Media channels of Meet The Blogger: their live blog over at meetthebloggerstockholm.com, their Twitter feed @meettheblogger or you can follow them on Facebook.

Now we only have to still put together our presentation!! But it wouldn’t be fun without the last-minute pressure, would it?

All pictures: Meet The Blogger Amsterdam 2012

Sometimes the best things happen when you don’t expect them. On a bus ride back from the rewardStyle Party (see post about that here) the lovely Andrea from Ginger Vintage and Jasmin from madametamtaam offered to give me their spare ticket to the Lena Hoschek Fashion Show on Tuesday.

Lena Hoschek is an Austrian designer from Graz. After school she graduated in Fashion Design in Vienna, afterwards worked as an intern for Vivienne Westwood which inspired her to open her own atelier in Graz. Today she has shops in Vienna and Berlin Mitte. She is one of the set designers of Berlin Fashion Week. Her collection could be described as “Punk and Folklore” with many Russian influences mixed with hardcore biker boots. Her dresses are known to be very retro, inspired by the fifties with wide skirts, small waistlines and you could also find these ingredients in the most recent collection. This time embroideries, puffy sleeves and Russian inspired hairstyles dominated the looks.

It definitely was an exciting atmosphere in the Mercedes Benz tent with such a big show to start. Many celebrities or wanna-bes gallivanting next to the runway.

Take as an inspiration:

• Large shoulder scarves with bold patterns
• Mix and match biker boots with dresses (not sure you will see me doing that but as you can see it is legitimate)
• Braided hair (definite yes)

All in all the collection reminded me a little bit of Ulyana Sergeenko with a rougher edge.

I also saw the next fashion show from Rebekka Ruétz, but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow ;).

Yours, Thea

Twice a year there is a buzz going through our capital. It didn’t used to be such a big deal but with Berlin becoming “cooler” and “hipper”, also Fashion Week seems to become more and more luxurious and exclusive. For me (Thea) it is the first time to actually BE in Berlin during Fashion Week (booked travels, exams or other things have prevented me from being here for a full week every time!).

We have decided to let you take part in some of our activities at sisterMAG. This is NOT an official coverage but we’ll let you see the town and activities through our eyes. We started off the week by converting my wardrobe into our office area (it seemed appropriate ;).

Monday evening we withstood the urge to stay home next to a radiator and faced the ice-cold temperatures to stagger on high heels to Hotel Adlon on Pariser Platz where the rewardStyle Preview Party took place. It was a small and intimate party held by the president of rewardStyle from Dallas/Texas (Amber Venz – Blog: Venz Edits) plus two of her colleagues: Dave Murray (Business Development) and Colleen Bulfin (Customer Relations). Sidenote: don’t you just LOVE Amber’s red coat??

IFB has described what rewardStyle actually is: “Reward Style allows it’s members to link out to shopping sites from their blog, and earn a commission if readers purchase items through their links. To maintain a standard for their clients, rS is not available to everyone.”
Yesterday they introduced their newest product: rS Analytics – an alternative or better a supplement to Google Analytics, which also reads your traffic from Pinterest and other Social Media tools etc. Very very cool and exciting to see.

In addition to that it was great to catch up with some known faces and get to know new ones. Ashley (Chasing Heartbeats) was there with us and also Andrea from Ginger Vintage. A new videoblog friend with very interesting stories about her time in Korea: Jasmin from madametamtaam. Of course there were a lot of other lovely ladies – as always it would be too much to put them all on here. But be sure to click through the ones shown, there are some lovely posts behind each link!

Hope to meet you all again soon!!

And don’t forget to scroll down to read her answers to our little contributor questionnaire. Thanks so much for answering!