Hearts, and memories of snow

Last Friday when I was strolling around in the blogworld, I bumped into hearts. This is almost like making rag dolls for Unicef, and naturally I took the challenge. Over the weekend I took some time and made two hearts for Mirabel, and yesterday I mailed them to Australia. If you are interested, there is still some time to participate.







The first heart was really easily made. It is of vintage mattress cover, a piece of string and some polyester wadding. The second one took me some more time. It is of red linen. The one side is cut open, the opening covered with golden fabric and sewn back together with big stitches of green, the colour of hope. This one is, in a way, a heart of gold.

On the other side I embroidered with romantic pink the text broken hearts can be mended. It takes time, but with hope it is possible.

The pictures are once again of a cloudy day quality, and I have already sent the hearts away so I coudn't wait for better weather conditions. This time of the year I begin to notice how the days are getting longer. The snow we have been getting regularly for several days now has made even the cloudy days lighter, and when the sun peeks out it really looks like diamonds on the snow. I live on the countryside and it is very clean here, the snow remains white. It reminds me of the childhood winters when, naturally, the snow covered the country from December to March, skiing was fun, and when the temperatures were -15 to -37 degrees which was really cold and I could take the bus to school instead of walking 2 km. If it was warmer, it was so close to zero that we could make snowballs and snowmen and snowcastles. The snow formed little lumps in our mittens (knitted by Grandmother), and we used to tear them off with our teeth and eat them (the lumps of snow, not the mittens). They were all hairy from the wool, but being outdoors we could of course spit the extras on the ground. I could also take some snow just for eating it. We never got sick from eating snow, and nobody knew anything about pollution. Of course we didn't eat any yellow snow from the roadside, but freshly fallen, soft, flaky, wonderful snow. It was also fun to try to catch big snowflakes directly from the sky on my tongue. And the woollen mittens: they gradually shaped to the from of our hands, the palm side all felted tight and only the top remained stretchy. It sure was a sight to see our boiler room after a day of winter holiday when we all were kids: six times four pairs of mittens, two pairs of socks, overalls or anoraks and thick trousers, felt boots, skiing shoes, skates, scarfs and caps drying on the lines and floors and the rest on radiators in the entrance. When it was "skiing holiday", a week's break from school in February, it really meant skiing, skating and playing outdoors for a week. We had a crate of oranges (10 kg I think) from the shop for the week, and Mother used to make us hot cocoa for afternoon coffee. I hated the film that formed on top if I allowed the cocoa to cool a little, so I usually drank it too hot and burned my tongue. The snowflakes cooled this off.