Baby things and finished repair job

This week we had baby news from a nephew, and I knitted this set of hat and booties for his brand new son. The yarn is 50% cotton, 50% acrylic, and the colour is more teal than in the picture.

This set counts for one stage of the Giro knitting. Two more stages to watch and knit!

Earlier I made this nursing cushion for my daughter-in-law.

The idea came from Dolores, and the pattern from one of the links on her blog.

I made two covers, the baby fabric one has the zipper in the inner curve and this other one in the outer curve, which seems to be both easier to sew and easier to use. For some reason this cover is not as tight as the other.

Last week I finished the repair of my daughter's quilt and gave the quilt a final touch by soaking it and giving it a gentle wash in the machine. 

Here it is drying on the line in the sun. you really can't tell the new blocks from the old ones any more. 

The garden has recovered from the winter very well and we have more pearl hyacinths both is blue and in white than we had before.

Change of view, new hexagons and tiny hats

This used to be the view from our kitchen door until mid May.

 And this is the same view some days later.

The young trees were growing so close to another that it was not easy to walk among them.

The trunks were left lying there, so a walk will be even more difficult, but we have much more light in our yard now.

For my daughter's quilt I made six new flowerbeds to replace the frayed ones. I saved some of the middle hexagons. These blocks are in place now, but when sewing them I found two blue hexagons that needed replacing too. Luckily I found a hexagon in the exact same fabric among the leftovers of this quilt, and one fabric that will do. I'm doing the hand quilting over the new blocks now.

The Giro d'Italia cycling tour has reached stage 14 today. I have been knitting these hats for newborns to be donated to the maternity ward of our local hospital, and it seems I have finished one hat per stage. We don't watch the whole race, but even a couple of hours in front of the TV doesn't feel so wasted when I can show the bag filling with hats. The Giro has 21 stages, and so does the Tour de France in July, and the Vuelta d'Espagna in August. 63 little hats sounds like a nice goal!

On Thursday night we had the first little thunder of the season, and after it a perfect rainbow.

Learning the hard way

For the quilt show at Villa Cooper in April I borrowed some quilts from their new owners, and one of them was my greatest effort in quilting, the Grandmother's Garden quilt for my daughter Kaija. It was also the beginning of this blog in 2008. The quilt was started in 1993 when I didn't know very much about quilting. One of the important things I didn't know back them was that it is not wise to use very old and very worn fabrics, however lovely and filled with sweet childhood memories they might be.

I picked the fabrics in my mother's attic where she had boxes of old clothes and fabric rests to be used for rag rugs, like old clothes usually were recycled in my country. Frayed fabrics were cut wider so they would last, no problem there. But if you find a lovely pair of doll's long trousers in the sweetest fabric with apples and green leaves and little red stripes, you are tempted to use that fabric for as many hexagons as you can, aren't you?  And look what happens:

The other fabrics are all nice and without any holes, but the apple pants just didn't make it. Six whole blocks, all with damages in so many hexagons that it it not worth it to try to save the best of them to make even one new block with them. I'm going to repair this quilt before returning it to my daughter.

At the moment Kaija's quilt has six gaping hopes like this:

I still had the paper templates I used to make the quilt, and some leftover hexagons too. 

  

I found some matching fabrics, and spent yesterday's Giro d'Italia TV time basting them on my papers.

Today is stage 5 of the Giro, and my plan is to finish the blocks, and maybe do some knitting.

P.S. I checked all the fabrics for the new blocks, and they are either unused or in good condition.