Never throw anything away

This is my first attempt to write a blog. I'm inspired by some beautiful blogs I have been reading in the last months and wanted to share some of my own doings with likeminded people. My mother taught me not to throw anything away because it can be used for something. My husband went through the same school at his home, our parents have started their families during the war. So now I'm stuck with enormous amounts of leftover pieces of materials from my own, my mother's and even my grandmother's sewing and unfinished projects. Luckily we have never moved house and the house is rather big. My idea was to show all kinds of stuff I have made, mainly by recycling but also of new materials which are so hard to resist. This first picture is a doll I made for Unicef to be adopted by anyone willing to pay the adoption fee of 20 euro, the price of vital vaccinations for one child. In Finland these are called Anna and Toivo dolls, the words in Finnish mean "give" and "hope". School classes, mothers, anyone can make a doll with the Unicef pattern and label and give it an identification card from Unicef. The other half of this card is a postcard which the adoptive mother can send to the one who made the doll, informing that the doll now has a family. This particular one is called Ulla and it is a custom order for my sister. The doll's skirt is made of a skirt my sister and I and my little sister have worn when we were little.

The name of this blog comes from my childhood memories, when listenig to the radio was an essential part of the day. There were weather forecasts and announcements to seafarers, including information on sea water levels all along the coast. One (perhaps the first?) location was the town Kotka, and the measuring point was on Rankki island. They could say "Kotka, Rankki: minus 30 centimeters, ...". To a child'd ear this sounded like kotkarankki, kotka meaning eagle in Finnish and the rest being a mystery. My mother had a beautiful wooden box for Gütermann sewing threads, almost black, shiny lacquered and with a picture of a big bird on the cover. We started calling the box kotkarankki. If I can locate the box again, I will show you a picture of it. The threads were so beautiful, in all colours - think of a child being given a box of 78 crayons to arrange any way she pleases. The box must be somewhere, naturally.