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:
• 

Have a lovely day!

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...

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.

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).

Yellow Roses to Brighten up Your Day

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. 

Getting Ready for the Cozy Season

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!

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 :)

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

(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.