Cake and flowers

The busy schedules of February with Time for Tea Swap and my trip to Germany left me no time to do my BOM for the Country Calendar. But this month I have sewn two blocks; here is the February block with Valentine's Day hearts:




And this is March with tulips. I'm doing this the easy way, machine applique and just some hand stitching for the details.


In my garden there is no hope of any kind of flowers this time of the year, but I have some tulips from my bigger brother, who needed three pairs of new trousers shortened.

I happened to have a little reason to celebrate, my birthday was yesterday, so I hade some more flowers. The sweet roses are from my biggest sister P.

And the orchids were sent by my brother-and-sister-in-law.

After having received all these flowers I baked a cake; and had only male company to share it with me, Mr. Kotkarankki and our two sons. We had quite big portions!

I had some unexpected presents. You already met Raggedy Ann and Andy, Eileen sent them for my birthday. But I also had something from AnneMarie from Norway. I know her through the Summer Stash Challenge 2008, the Stitching Angels and the Time for Tea Swap. She sent me a beautiful floral print in my favourite shades, some wooden buttons with hearts engraved, and a thimble from Norway. The picture of a reindeer walking in front of the midnight sun could as well be from the Finnish Lapland; we are neighbour countries up there. It was really sweet of her to send these gifts for me. The blog world has given me such dear new friends!

I had this very thick book for my birthday from DH. To be honest, he didn't choose it but let me have whatever I wanted from the bookstore. I had been looking at this book many times and hoping they would reduce the price, and now I'm really glad he bought it for me. It is about Finnish rya rugs over a period of 270 years. Maybe I'll show you some of the contents later.

Last Thursday was my first sewing group night in 5 weeks, and I was going to continue my photo transfer project there. My transfer experiments failed very badly and I need to start over with other material choices. Instead of that project, I was able to sew some 6" Maverick stars, and today I made 5 more and rotary cut background squares for more. I hope to finish that quilt for the spring exhibition in April. Suzie from Little Busy Bee told in her blog that this is a National Quilting Day in USA, and suggested it could as well be made international. I agree, and even if I can't go to any quilt shops, I have done some quilting related sewing today. By the way, she has made an excellent tutorial on the Lemoine Star. Happy Quilting Day everyone!