Knitting and Reading

Funny how writing down things reveals a pattern. From time to time I have talked about the books I love and  now I notice that most of then have one thing in common - the story takes place in the writer's childhood environment. That is true for Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables (my favourite book ever!),  Rudyard Kipling's Kim and to my latest discovery Willa Cather and the two books I have read from her, O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. I suspect that there is something special in the way you are able to describe the surroundings where you spend your first years.

I get a serious travel fever when reading these books and after My Ántonia I have been a bit obsessed with Nebraska. Few years back I visited Jane Austins house in England and it was fun to see where she lived and how the world looked liked when she lived. Would love to make a trip like that to Willa Cather's home.

I have been reading so much the last year and that is all thanks to the e-reader I bought. It makes reading so easy. I don't like to buy books because I don't know what to do with them after I have read them and since I live in the Netherlands I can only borrow books in Dutch and I prefer reading in English. Also Dutch libraries are not free!

One other advantage of e-reder is that you can't really see how big a book is. So I read Anna Karenina (downloaded for free) by Tolstoy. If I had seen how big it is I probably would have thought that I have no time for it. It was so good! And for everyone who thinks it is only about the love story - it really isn't. There are other, in my opinion, more interesting stories and characters in the book. And then there are whole chapters about mowing. I can see how some people dislike that but I loved it and I think I will be rereading just those chapters.There is a review on goodreads that perfectly describes how I felt about this book.

Moving on to knitting. It is has been so cold here that it really feels like autumn (13 °C, 55 °F!) so I guess the best thing to do is to make a cup of tea, crawl under a blanket and knit. I started knitting socks to my husband that I promise to make him along time ago. Nothing too exiting but still fun to make.

Officially started...

Joining Yarn Along

Scaryland

Lately I have been painting again and looked for knowledge and inspiration on Internet entering the scary land of art. I really enjoy the crafting community. It is so upbeat and positive and you can say what ever positive thing comes to your mind (oh! That reminds me of my grandma's scarf! I want to make that quilt!). Every encounter I have had with the art side however (and this has been outside Internet) has been much more focused on what is not cool and what is not art and all that negativity. I guess most of you are familiar with that? I have taken few painting classes in my time and I did enjoy most of them, but there where always this pressure to be on the right side of the "cool" (well, at least in my head), and very little focus on technique. 

I love to work with oil paint, but it is just not something I can do with little kids running around. Watercolours I can pick up any time and put away again in seconds. I did play with watercolours last year but that experiment was short lived. This time around I really want to focus on learning the technique. I used this tutorial for drawing the face and for the watercolour part I used this one.

I'm still working on it, but here you go. My first ever attempt to make a realistic watercolour portrait.

I already destroyed the paper around the mouth. It has been really fun to make, feels like making a puzzle. Now I just have to find the courage to continue. My goal is not necessarily to become a portrait painter, but I want to learn the techniques to do what ever I wish. When I was googleing for instructions I found this incredible Italian artist called Agnes Cecile working with watercolour. Her paintings are amazing but oh so sad!

Strings Attached

I'm participating in Rachel's Festival of Strings with the above quilt. This little quilt was so much fun to make! I received a suprise package of little string-scraps from Ms Minnado, mostly Liberty of London, and I love Liberty of London. There is something about the little floral prints that I adore. I had some free time and started to play with them. We all know the little voices in our head that tells stupid negative things, right? Well this time had compeletly different voices along the way. I head MelissaP telling me to play and let the fabric talk, Rachel incouraging me that quilting is allowed to be also easy, quick and fun and also giving a nice deadline with her Festival of Strings.

The fabric for the back I got from Muriël during our Double Dutch meeting. It was her ugly fabric for a swap. I like it and I like it even more with the brown quilting. I made the binding by turning the back fabric edges to the front. That is actually how I thought that the binding is always done when I started quilting. I think I will use that method more often, it is less hassle to make and like it how the back is peeking on the front. 

The quilt is hanging above my sewing table. It has no other purpose than brighten up my day and it really does make me smile everytime I see it. Big thanks to Muriël and Minnado for the fabrics, I adore them! 

Sunny Baby Quilt

The quilt is sunny but the weather here is not! Dutch summers where cancelled few years ago and now it looks like that we  lost the spring as well...

This baby quilt is finished and sent to the tiny sweet little girl it was made for. What a journey! It all started with a simple sketch and this is what became of it. I knew that it is much harder than you would think to give a random feel to a quilt top made of little pieces, but the orange made it even harder being such dark colour. Especially in the pictures it really pops up from the rest. I'm not sure I like it and if I would do this again I think pink would have been maybe a better choice. Or more soft yellowish orange.

I tried to mixed it up a bit by leaving in an irregularity that first was a mistake, and that one I like. What it comes to the two orange rows next to each other I can't remember was that intended or did I not notice? I'm not too thrilled about it, but I paid attention to it only when I had already sandwiched the quilt, so I left it. It can very well be that at one point I thought it to be a brilliant idea. 

The gingham fabric is a table cloth. It is 100 percent cotton but very different from quilting weight cotton and even though I did prewash it, it still made the quilt extra wrinkly. I think that is OK though. The binding was again a total nightmare. I tried to rush through it which was of course a mistake. Next time I really should see it as a mindfulness exercise and slowly work through it with help of some instructions videos or something.

My favourite part of the quilt is the quilting. I really like how it looks and adds texture to the quilt. It was also fast and easy to make. 

All troubles aside it felt very special to make this quilt to a baby whos mother I have known whole her life and most of mine. All the memories and thoughts of past present and future stitched into it. Quilting as it's best!

Books that I can Smell

My favourite childrens books are written and illustrated by Swedish writer Elsa Beskow. The nature that she illustrates is the same I grew up with. I know exactly how everthing in her books feels and smells, even taste like. I also love the idea of all the plants being little persons winking and waving at me when I pass by them.

So much memories come up when I look through these. I can remember walking in the lake among the yellow water-lilies when I was a child. Pure magic. 

Green and red goosberries!

This is my favourite picture. I can feel the exitment of playing by the brook when the snow has finally smelted. Good times! 

I really wanted my children to love these books as much as I do and almost spoiled the whole thing by starting to read these to them too early. They live in a very different kind of environment than I did (no forrest!). That makes me sometimes sad even though I know it is just different and they will have their own memories. Yesterday however they both wanted to read one of Beskow's books as a bedtime story, what a relief! 

The beautiful bag in the picture is what I got in our Double Dutch swap. I asked something to carry my knitting projects in. Betty van Os made this amazing bag for me. I could have never made something like this myself, thank you Betty! Now I just have to fill it with some projects.

Joining again with Yarn Along

Knitting and Reading

I have been following Plain and Joyful Living for a long time (I mention it here). One of my favourite features is knitting and reading taking part in Yarn Along hosted by Ginny. Even though I'm not very familiar with Ginny's blog I decided to join the fun today and take a better look at her blog. She has some really nice tutorials there!

Most of my knitting and reading happens in the evening so on the right you see a bad but truthful picture. Actually for me it seems to be one or the other. When I'm working on a knitting project I don't read and when I'm reading I don't knit. In that way they seem to be connected that I do them on the same time slot and state of mind.

At the moment I'm reading O Pioneers! by Willa Cather and really enjoying it. The time period is my favourite era and the background story of Swedish immigrants in America fascinating.

What it comes to knitting I tried to crochet something with the lovely merino wool shown on the picture, but since crocheting is not really working for me, I decided that I will knit some baby socks instead. But first I have to finish my book!

Makeup Roll... and some bloglovin

Oh Google, why did you have to leave me. As you probably know they will shut down google reader. Luckily there are a lot of other providers and I decided to move my bloglist to Bloglovin. You can Follow my blog with Bloglovin and of course with all the other providers. I just had to add the link to claim my blog.

Moving on to something more interesting. We had our second Double Dutch quilt group get-together, this time with a mystery swap! I have never taken part in any swap thinking that I would get way too stressed out and insecure about my sewing skills. But this time it was a lot of fun and it did of course help that I knew the person I was making the suprise for.

Eva-Marie from zusjeb wanted something she can use. I have been so happy with my Makeup roll and use it almost everyday, so that was an easy choice. You can buy Rachel's pattern here. I think (hope) Eva-Marie liked it. (I don't get paid for linking to the pattern, I just love my makeup roll!)

The inside upside down