Friday, November 23, 2012

Thankful Ramblings

Since we are copying American holidays like Halloween, why not Thanksgiving? Sounds like such a positive holiday and it involves food - perfect! Here are some random thoughts I have been thinking about lately. Its the little things, right?

  • I have finally found something to watch on TV! Since Gilmore Girls stopped, Grey's Anatomy got too dramatical for my taste and Oprah stopped (such a house wife cliché, isn't it:), I have not found anything to watch on TV and I have really missed having my own party for one in front of the TV. I do watch some series with my husband, which is nice, but I was longing for something for me. And now I found Parenthood and I like it, so yay! I have my weekly TV moment. 
  • A big upside of adopting Halloween are the pumpkins. I love the look, the taste and the Dutch word for it - pompoen. Doesn't it sound funny? Our local store sells organic pumpkins which are super delicious and not too big. Yesterday I roasted a whole pumpkin in a oven and made pumpkin bread. Yummy!
  • Thinking of pumpkin recipes, the first time I prepared pumpkin was when I lived in Sweden (I studied there) and Tina made it on her show. She is my favourite TV chef ever! 
  • After experimenting with Twitter some years back and quickly visiting Pinterest, both mediums that did not work for me, I really like Instagram! I'm piecesoffab there. It is visual and delightfully imperfect full of shots of peoples everyday life. Celebration of the little things in life I would say:) 
  • I found myself yelling to the kids (not that I would never yell to my kids...) "if you don't have anything nice to say then say nothing" when one of them was criticising other ones drawing. What a great advice for me too! Like something? Enjoy it. Don't like? Move on. This is a practice for me since I feel we are taught to think that being critical is being clever. Complaining and criticising is oh so very easy, but it does not really brighten up my day I must say.
  • So I will try to focus on what I like and am thankful for, take some picture of it to remind myself and share them. Here is one  your:
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Have a lovely day!

Thursday, November 1, 2012

This and That

Even though it still feels that I have not got anything done this autumn, there is some small progress. I almost done with a scarf for my son. It is the most basic thing that you can knit, just straight knit stitch. I have some more advanced projects in making but it has been hard to find time to work on those because I need to think when knitting unlike with this scarf. Also on both of my other projects I have made some mistakes and really dislike the idea that I have to unravel and correct them. I have a long history of not finishing knitting projects...
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There it is in my little do-to-box
I have also been working on a Alabama Chanin skirt. It has been a very interesting process and I'm just so fascinated by Natalie's work. It is so simple but due to the level of detail also kind of complex. In her books she describes every single tool they use and it really does matter. For example I did not have the right kind of thread and now I finally found something similar that she uses and it really makes a difference. She does sell all materials and tools on her website which I think really is great concept. On it best the process has been almost a meditative experience and at its worst very frustrating, but the frustration usually kicks in when I try to rush things.

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I also want to introduce you lazy gardeners two best friends, Jerusalem artichoke and mangold. The first one was gifted to me at the beginning of the summer. You can just pull them out at the beginning of the growing season and plant somewhere else. I had put them in a bucket of water, forget about them for a whole week, and finally in a hurry planted them in the corner of my kitchen garden. I was sure they will die, but no, they survived, had beautiful yellow flowers and produced enough for a big pan of soup! The mangold is a old favourite of mine, you just plant it and you can cut from it the whole summer (I just learned from wikipedia that when the tempature hits 85 F / 30 C the season is over. Lucky me, it didn't get even close to that here this summer).
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Friday, October 5, 2012

Yellow Roses to Brighten up Your Day

My creation
Few weeks ago I got these amazing roses from my son who had bought them for me with little help from his father. Photographing is still not my strongest point so I did not quite catch on camera how amazing they where. Blogging really teach me new things about myself. I clearly have a thing for roses. Never though myself as a rose person but I keep on photographing them... They are amazing though. 

I'm sorry to say I have nothing else to show. Me and some portion of the kids have been sick the last weeks with only a little break in between. Nothing serious, just the usual stuff, but oh so exhausting and boring! I feel however super motivated to finish my voile quilt, would have been lovely to cuddle under it during the sick days. 

Friday, September 14, 2012

Getting Ready for the Cozy Season

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Bright colours, dark evenings, knitting, drinking tea under a self made quilt. Autumn is here and I love it. On the top right corner is a collection of fabrics that I'm using to make a quilt for me. I already have started cutting and sewing and I'm a bit nervous about the whole project to tell the truth. One of the fabrics I use is missing from the picture but you can tell already that the colours don't match. One minute I'm convinced that it still works and then I'm second guessing again. I want to keep this quilt on our sofa, so I will be looking at it every day. Well, I will just keep calm and carry on and trust that I will love it in the end.

I also started knitting. First I got frustrated for not having the right kind of needles and yarn and then finally decided to get started with something super easy I could do now without having to hunt for new supplies. It will be a scarf for my almost 4-year old.

I have also been reading and finally added a new page to my blog with book recommendations. Always fun to see what people are reading, isn't it? I'm getting all commercial here and use affiliate links to Amazon, but I do love my Kindle... It was the easiest way to make it work so why not. Not really expecting to make any money out of it. And what about you, what are you reading? I would love to know!


Monday, August 20, 2012

I'm Officially Vintage

In etsy you can call item vintage if it is over 20 years old. So let me present you an original vintage fabric from 1990, my old curtains and a cushion cover remade to a baby quilt! I remember when I chose the fabric with my mother, I thought the black and white text fabric was so cool! And now it is all fashionable and trendy again, so I made a baby quilt of it to my nephew. I also had this idea that when he is older he probably thinks it is cool to have baby blanket made from my old vintage fabric, but then I realised that in years to come it is quite unlikely that he would think his aunts old cushion cover is cool :)

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Isn't he cute!

It is funny though how the older kids at my daughters school use same kind of clothes that we used when I was about ten - neon colours and all. Now that the 80's and 90's vintage look is so in I'm thinking is this the time to make my childhood dream come true and dress like one of the Bangles in the Manic Monday video? When it came out I was only seven and too young for the look, but I did think that when I grow up I want to look just like her.

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Completely unrelated to the above,  I got a lovely email from Cath who had been at the Festival of Quilts and had taken a photo of my quilt! I am so happy to have the photos! Really made my day.

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Saturday, August 18, 2012

The Festival of Quilts

At this very moment my quilt is hanging at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham! I started working on this quilt a year ago. I first made the fish and then slowly build the rest around it. I used the Ruth B. McDowell's piecing workshop as a guideline.

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I'm so happy to have found her book. Thanks to her method I can work in a rhythm that suites my brain. I can separate the creative work and technical work. With her method almost everything is possible and there is so much room to grow that I will need a life time (or more) to master it, but that is fine because I love the process of it! It is like magic for me.

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The fish is inspired by tattoo art and the image of the koi-fish has been in my mind for years. During the making process I really tried not to over think it, just follow my intuition.

There was of course some last minute panic. When I had made the last stitches and tried to hang the quilt, it did not hang straight! During  the whole process it had not crossed my mind that that could happen. Thanks to internet I found a solution that worked liked magic: quilt blocking.

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Blocking my quilt
And of course I forgot to take pictures until the very last minute when the lightning was all wrong and my husband had already packed his camera lenses for our vacation. Lessoned learned for the next time!

Monday, August 13, 2012

Design

Olympics are over and there is more time for blogging. It was the first time I could watch sport with my children and that was so much fun!

My creation
London has been in my mind in other ways as well. I'm reading Virginia Woolf's Night and Day and found the following description in it very amusing :

"...and then Mary left them in order to see that the great pitcher of coffee was properly handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china."

So that is my china that you see in the above picture. During our vacation I took one day "off" and when to Helsinki all by myself! My program for the day was to eat lunch in some nice cafe and visit one museum or gallery. I had never been to the Design Museum, so there I went. You are not allowed to take pictures there, which was a shame, so I took photos for you of my own collection of Finnish design. If you are Finnish and I guess especially if you live abroad you will have some of this stuff at your home. And as it turns out, I have plenty. Most of it are, very appreciated,  presents.

I also visited three handmade shops. I really need a cover for my phone so I thought it would be nice to support the handmade and buy one from those shops. It was very disappointing. All of the covers I found did fit my phone, but where not particularly well made, had all the same simple Velcro closing and where not firm enough to give proper protection. No innovation what so ever and at least for my taste, nothing that gave me the impulse to pay the extra money for the handmade-factor. When there is no additional design element added to the product (which of course is a matter of taste), I start to think that I'm paying for the fact that it is handmade by western hands.

That is something that I have been thinking for a long time - how we talk about handmade like the rest of the sewn stuff would have been made with big factory machines when in my understanding most of it is done by people sitting behind sewing machines. Just like us. Of course if it is done here in Europe I know that the working conditions are good. It is also a local product and supports the local economy. But I can't help thinking that I kind of want the people in Asia to be able to keep their jobs as well and be able to support their families. As you can see - shopping is not easy for me.

Back home I added a new item to my china collection.
My cup
(photo from instagram. I'm piecesoffab there if you feel like following)
I have always been a mug person and have been drinking my coffee from a Iittala Teema mug as long as I can remember (see the top right photo on the photo-mosaic). But when I saw Carolina's coffee cup I started to long for my own special coffee cup with a saucer. I saw this one in a regular boring suburban department store close to our house and loved it, but I thought I want to buy the cup in some place special. When we came back from the vacation I saw it again and though, what could be more special in this time of my life than a coffee cup bought from a store which excellent cafe I visit regularly with my children?

You could only buy it as a set of four cups in four different colours. The whole set cost me seven euros. Especially after visiting the Design Museum I have a whole back story for my Teema mugs, but nothing for this made in china -cup. I wanted to see if I could find something on the internet and I did! The collection is called Veronica's Garden, which was not mentioned anywhere on the packaging. What I could not find was how the design came about and who design it. Since I don't know I choose to believe that it was made by someone who's dream came true when she got the chance to work for Topchoice and design this cup. I also found out that it is actually not a coffee cup, but a tea cup.

So what did I buy? A story (my special cup from a special place), a functional/quality cup (can be washed in a dishwasher, my suburban definition of quality;) and design that for some reason appeal to me. What it comes to the phone cover I had the story but the functionality/quality and the design elements where missing.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Strawberry Crazy Love

My creation

I'm back from the summer holiday from my home of origin Finland. As I only spend two to three weeks in Finland during the summer, I never know what part of the short summer I get. This year we were very lucky to catch the peak of the strawberry-season. When we arrived one liter strawberries cost 5 euros and it dropped to 3 euros during our stay there. I have learned from blogs that in some warmer regions the strawberries belong to the spring, but in Finland it really is the taste of summer since they don't ripen before end of June, begin July.

The Finnish strawberries are grown outside in the sun and are sold fresh on the market or on little pop-up shops outside of supermarkets. You buy them fresh and in large quantities. They taste ten times sweater than the berries that are grown in greenhouses. Last year we spent the whole summer in the Netherlands and the thing I missed most were the strawberries.

What many people do is to buy a couple of carton boxes seen at the first photo and store the berries in their freezer. Since that is not an option for me I make jam. I love jam making! I use a special sugar for making jam that has pectin in it. I like to use that although my jams don't need to be as jelly-like as they prefer here in the Netherlands. I guess it is just what you are used to. The sad ending for my strawberry-story is that I forgot to pack the jam-pots with us, so there they at my parents house. I hope they enjoy them :)

We also bought souvenirs, a juicer and an apple peeler/slicer. I'm looking forward to making our own apple juice and cider. We are already making liqueur out of our own blackcurrants, very exiting! Our one and only shrub had a really good year this year.

Another exiting thing that I have not seen for years were the wild roses called midsummer roses. I love the ones in my garden with their big  flowers, but the simple beauty of these wild ones is amazing thing to witness as well. It was really hard to take good pictures of them, but I think you get the idea.

Midsummer Roses


Friday, July 6, 2012

Number 85

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A box. Not really interesting, is it?

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Getting more interesting? Yes, I'm taking part on The Festival of Quilts 2012 in Birmingham UK! I'm so exited about it, I have been working on this for a year now. I will tell you all about it in August when the festival is held.

ps. If someone who is going happens to read this and could take me a picture of my quilt hanging on the exhibition I would be forever thankful!


Thursday, July 5, 2012

Back from P.E.I - On My Way to India

And I'm time travelling too! I just finished the last book in Anne series, Rilla of Ingleside and even though my body might have been in 2012 in the Netherlands for the last week my mind was on Prince Edward Island in Canada during the first world war. Really got me thinking about how it shapes us on which era we are born in. I feel so sorry for the writer Lucy Maud Montgomery who died in 1942. She was born during peace and grew up pretty much without wars and then came the WW I that was devastating and then of course the second world war, but she got to never see the end of it.  I would like to shout to her where ever she is that we are all alright now and that I love your books. I hope she hears me.

In her books quilting is mentioned quite few times among many other details of every day life of that time. How wonderful that it is preserved for us to read. That is the stuff that really interests me - the everyday life of people. That is probably why I like blogs so much!

Maybe the reading is to blame, but on the garden front it hasn't been a great year. This spring I really tried to make a clean start with my flower bench working the ground and trying to eliminate all the weed. I sowed lots of different flowers and hoped for the best. Below you see the results.

Weed

Weed only, no flowers. And I was so hoping to have my own little Englih cottage garden. My problem is that I want the flowers to grow haphazardly but when I sow them like that I never know what is weed and what is not. In my kitchen garden I sowed two rows of coriander and only one coriander felt like showing up. So when everything else fails, I cheat. At least what it comes to gardening, I'm not sure that is a good rule to live by on other areas of life. So this is how it looks like now after a trip to a garden center.

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Look, we have paprikas!

Garden taken care of I'm of to www.manybooks.net to download Kim by Rudyard Kipling to take my mind to India. Little tip for Kindle users - Amazon does only have a fraction of all free e-books available, but you can easily download them to your Kindle in the correct format from manybooks.net.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Happy Little Quilt

Stack of scraps to start with

Last week I started with the above pile of scraps. A dear friend of mine gave birth to a little baby girl and I thought this is a perfect opportunity to use scraps left from my daughters quilt.  Even thought I have mixed feelings about giving people hand made as a gift I wanted to do this for her. I'm always worried that people don't like what I have made and don't know what to do with it. All my hard work ends up being clutter in someones closet! Being constantly battling with clutter myself that really would be a horrible gift to give.

At the end of the day I already had a nice stack of blocks. I'm getting kind of good at this - or at least fast! And I'm so enjoying this process. You should have seen me when I was cutting and piecing these with a big smile on my face. Happy happy joy joy! Silly, really.

  Blocks for baby quilt 

And this is where I am at the moment. The border in aqua is quite outside of my comfort zone but the colour really reminds me of my friend and I think she will like it. It also makes the quilt more fun for me to make. Exploring new possibilities is always fun. 

  Baby quilt in making 

I have now one week time to finish this thing, which would be OK if that would be the only thing I have to finish this week. I hope to be soon back to tell your about my other project (fingers crossed).

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

My Travel Gear and Some Book Love

Oh boy, where did the May go? I try to blog twice a month and now I missed a whole month!

I was travelling for one week and here below you can see my travel gear. I feel like a real sewing queen for having self-made travel gear. On the left is a make-up roll and you can purchase the pattern from Rachel from Stitched in Color. I love it! I don't use a lot of make up, so everything I own fits in it. I made it as a gift to myself last summer and I just adore it. On the right is a cover that I made few weeks ago for my newly bought Kindle. I used a free tutorial by Whipstitch Fabrics. I was a bit sceptical would it work but it really does. I added a ruffle to cover the elastic. I'm may not be a ruffle kind of girl, but the elastic had a very ugly yellowish white colour.
Travel Gear

I'm experiment using my phone with filckr app to take pictures. I usually use my husbands fancy camera, but when I tried to blog in May about these I managed to delete all the pictures from his memory card! Luckily he could get the pictures back, but I feel more comfortable sticking to my own equipments for now.

Travel Gear

Curious about what I'm reading on my fancy new Kindle? Anne of Green Gables. It was my favourite book when growing up. I remember when I was around ten years old my teacher said she was reading it to see if she still likes it as an adult. I was completely devastated by the idea that I could grow up to be someone who does not like Anne of Green Gables! I thought to myself it is best that I never read it when I grow up so that I don't have to find out that I don't like it. But no worries - I love it! And I mean truly love it, not in a nostalgic way or anything like that. And now I get to read the original version and not a translation of it. Little story for those of you who know Anne - when I finally realised 12 years ago that my now husband is the one my exact thought was "he is my Gilbert!". His name is very similar to Gilbert as well, so it really is all meant to be:)

I wonder if I ever get to reading new books since after I have finished the Anne series I would like to read Kim by Kipling, also one of my old favourites. It is such a thrill to notice that I enjoy same books that I read when I was a child. At least my spirit is still young!

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Quilt for My Oldest Son


I finished the quilt for my oldest son (I have to giggle a bit when ever I think he is my oldest son. He is only three years old, still a little baby in my mind). I love it! It is mostly made of  fabric that I got from family. I had so much fun making it! I didn't have a plan, I first made the four rectangles and continued from there. I don't even remember when did I start sewing it, maybe a year ago? I used "organic" straight lines to quilt it because I just could not bother to try to make them all straight.


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I didn't have enough fabric to make the binding blue or the same colour as the back of the quilt, so I mixed those two. Looks a bit funny but that's OK. Otherwise binding went quick and easy so I guess I'm improving!

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The fabric on the back is from Marimekko, Kanteleen Kutsu by Sanna Annukka. My son loves all the animals on it. All in all he was very pleased with his new quilt.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Stashing Thrifting and Decluttering - a Brain Dump

My creation
I just came from a fabric store and bought only what I needed - a large piece of fabric for the back of a quilt in navy. As I'm congratulating myself for not buying more than I need at the same time I can not stop thinking should I not have bought more when I had the opportunity to be fabric-shopping alone in a real shop.

I have trouble spending money on anything (exception being food and shoes for my children...) so fabric stashing does not feel like a natural thing to do for me. At the same time I would love to have all kind of fabric at hand so when ever I get an idea I could just start sewing. Also sometimes fabric starts to "speak to me" and in order to let that happen you really need to have it at home. So building a some kind of stash would be handy. I try to do that by buying some fat quarters and other small inexpensive pieces, but then I usually end up having too little fabric for the project I have in mind. So I'm constantly debating how much I should buy and what should I buy and is all this buying justified when at the same time our home and the whole world is drowning under stuff as it is... On top of that there is the debate in my head over designer fabric and the cheaper stuff found in "normal" fabric stores. And of course should I not only buy organic fabric... What it comes to designer fabrics some of them inspire me beyond limits so buying at least some feels justified. I also love the quality of it.

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I have a small stash of fabric that was gifted to me, some of it is probably 30 years old and still looks perfect. I used that pile for my older son's quilt (will show it to you when I'm done with quilting) and it felt good to put the random pieces together as oppose to ordering some matching designer fabrics as I did for my daughter's quilt. It really felt that I was getting back to the roots of quilting that must have emerged from the need to use every little piece of fabric out of necessity.

More environmentally friendly and less expensive way of stashing could be buying more secondhand fabric. I'm just so very bad at thrifting! I don't like shopping and shopping in thrift-shops even less because you never know what they have. I will also be honest and admit that against all common sense buying used fabric (old curtains and such) makes me a bit itchy. I know when washed it is as good as any other fabric and that there is no logical reason for me not to buy it. (By the way I don't get the same itchy feeling at all when the fabric comes from someone I know).

Having three kids I'm constantly carrying big plastic bags full of clothes they have grown out of to the charity and sometimes I'm thinking this is fabric too. I should be creative enough to make some use of it. But saving it for later conflicts greatly with the other ideal of our times - decluttering. I definitively enjoy having less clutter in  my house but I also think there is a fine line between decluttering and throwawayism.

As you can see, I could go on and on, but I will stop here. Now you have a little glimpse of what is going on in my head. I sometimes think my slogan could be something like "if the answer is simple I can make it complicated!" :)

Friday, March 30, 2012

Pink Invasion

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My little girl turned five yesterday and our home is covered with colour pink. She loves loves loves pink so that is what she gets. When I was little I was passionate about yellow and I can see that she feels the same way about pink.

As a child I was really sensitive to pick up the message that girly is stupid. Sewing girly fabrics in general and decorating for my daughters birthday in particular is clearly filling some girlishness deficit in me. I might have even gone little bit over the top with the birthday cake but I really enjoyed making it. Making the marzipan roses was like playing with play dough. They are all a bit different as are the leaves and yellow flowers as well, but isn't that how nature works. I just seem to have a great dislike for anything too repetitive.

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I believe there are quite a few women out there who love it that after a day in office they can change the gray power suite to something more comfortable and start stitching Jennifer Paganelli. Isn't it great that we can have it all!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

XO Kaffet Fassett Table Runner

Tabler runner
I finished the table runner last Wednesday. For a moment I considered making it double sided, but that seemed like too much trouble.
Free motion quilting

I thought this was the perfect opportunity to practice free motion quilting. I decided to make curvy lines and I was very suprised how smoothly everything went. Not perfect, but pretty good for the first timer and I'm so glad that my machine can handle it so well! Sewing the binding was as frustrating as always. I was thinking the next time instead trying to rush through it I should make it a mindfulness practice.

Blue rocks :)
My three -year-old found this rock outside our house and wanted to paint it blue. I love it and see how it matches the table runner!
Drawing stones
Since I decided to get serious about my drawing practice I have tried to figure out clever practices to make it part of my day. Having my sketchbook and pen on the bar that separates the kitchen from the living room has worked quite well. In general I want the bar to be neat and tidy to have at least one place at home that is not cluttered, but I make an exception for the sketchbook. 

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

In February 2012

I got smitten with the colour combination blue and orange.


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Maybe this birthday card I got from my mum (thanks mum!) won me over? I do like it a lot. Here is a link to the artist Anna-Liisa Hakkarainen.

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I made the strip first for my son´s quilt that I´m working on, but it did not work with the rest of the quilt. I had to come up with a new use for it, and I finally got the table runner fever. I thought for the longest time that table runners are not my thing, but now the bar looks so dull without it! Have to finish that one soon.
Table runner
I just love it how my daughters paintings on the chair sneaked into to picture :)

I have also been practicing drawing again (hard!) No matter how frustrating it sometimes is, I want to practice some more. Working with pen and watercolor is new for me and I really like it.
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I went through all my seeds. I have enough for a little farm. Luckily for me I did not have any flower-seeds left, so I get to shop for those!
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During the month February I have enjoyed having  flowers at home the whole month. I will continue with that. 
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Friday, February 10, 2012

Lazy days - oh where are you...

It has been beautiful winter weather here in the Netherlands for a week now but  we have missed all the ice-skating fun because of a flu. I'm still not completely over it and I really would like to have one of those good old lazy days doing nothing, but I can't. I don't know if it is the motherhood, the crafting or the age, but I just can not sit still any more. Probably it is all three of them combined that is to blame. Obviously if I'm home alone with all my three children with ages 0, 3 and 4, I really can't. But even if I would be home alone or just with the baby, I still can not do it. It would feel like such a waist! There is always so much to do! Household chores obviously, but for two years now also loooong list of crafty projects waiting to be finished or started. Don't get me wrong, I do feel lazy all the time. It often feels that everyone else with zillion kids get so much more done (and someone always will, so why do I keep on comparing :). I just can not be lazy for one day and be OK with it.

I love crafting. I love it that I'm creating and doing when ever I can and bubbling with new ideas all the time. But I also would like to be little bit more balanced with it. Have little bit more zen into it.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Frozen


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It has been a really mild winter here in the Netherlands. As you can see we still have roses! They even survived the frost shown on the picture. It will however get colder next week. Good reason to keep on knitting! (lets focus on the positive side of things. I have to admit that I have enjoyed the mild weather - makes dressing three little ones so much easier!)

Despite the colder weather coming our way I hope that I can plant spinach in February. In coming weeks I also want to do a inventory on last years seeds and order some  new organic seeds from here. They also sell in UK, Ireland, France and Germany.  I have been very pleased with their products and service in the past and look forward to browsing their catalogue again. If only I had a bigger kitchen garden to fit everything I would like to try! That would be fun especially when making plans for the coming season. Maybe not so when trying to get rid of the weed :)

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Knitting

Socks


January 15th and I have my first finish of the year! Wool socks for my 3-year-old. The first sock for my daughter is also done.

Three weeks ago I was certain that I will not pick up knitting again. I learned to knit at school and it is the only type of craft that I did somewhat regularly outside of school when growing up. But I never managed to make something I really liked. I was always trying out something without a pattern and then getting frustrated because it did not work out. Crocheting on the other hand was something I wanted to try again and I asked for crochet hooks for Christmas. My mum included a whole set of knitting needles to the package and before I knew it I was knitting socks. I had not knit for ten years but apparently it is like riding a bike. And if you do have a pattern and the right sort of yarn for the project, you can actually make something useful.

I did some research on knitting and learned that there are different methods how to knit. I seem to be doing it the continental style with a special kind of technique for the purl stitch. I learned all that from here. I'm knitting with bamboo knitting needles and love them! They feel nice and warm, make less noise and prevent sliding. I will never go back to the metal ones again! When I have finished the socks for my daughter I want to try something new and make these type of socks for myself.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Goodbye 2011 Hello 2012

Dear 2011, you were really good to me! Even if I did slow down this year I was still sewing, gardening, baking, hand printing and embroidering. I even added knitting to the list at the very end of the year! 

And Hello 2012! What a beautiful beginning with sun and snow. 

I wish you all happy and joyful new year!