Number 85

A box. Not really interesting, is it?

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!

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 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.

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.

Happy Little Quilt

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.

   

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. 

   

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

Stashing Thrifting and Decluttering - a Brain Dump

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.

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!" :)

Pink Invasion

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.

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!