New Quilts, Good Bye Splendid Sampler

Back in 2016/17 I was struggling with the Splendid Sampler QAL, making two new blocks every week. Or at least almost so. Here are some of my 100 blocks waiting for assembly.

Mid March the same year I had managed to create two halves of a king size quilt, each with 10 rows of 5 blocks, and borders on three sides. I was hoping to quilt it like that on my own machine, but the task seemed overwhelming, and so the top halves found their place at the bottom of my unfinished quilt tops.

Finally this Autumn the idea came to me to make smaller quilts by some rearranging of blocks and making new borders. This was the bottom left corner with one vertical row rearranged to make the quilt rather long than wide, 4 x 5 blocks, and a new border in brown added.

Top left corner 5 x 6 blocks as it was, with original borders added where there were none.

Bottom right 5 x 6 blocks of the original arrangement, just borders added to match the existing ones.

And finally the top right corner with similar changes as in the other smaller quilt.

These four lap size quilts joined the Paper Dolls quilt to keep people warm when they go out in wheelchairs or just want to take a rest and feel the nice flannel backing and look at the pictures of cupcakes and coffee cups, flip flops and flowers, and pincushions and sewing machines, and all kinds of stars.

It feels good to have this finished, and to have done it in a practical way, all materials from my stash and no problems with the quilting.

Night at the Library

This week Auntie took us to the local library for an adventure with the nice librarians and a bunch of soft toys. Over 30 of us were there!

Dogs, teddy bears, baby dolls, a piggy, an octopus, a snake ... we had such fun. Roger and I played some football with the other boys .

There was a little campfire, and all guests could have some tea by it, or hot chocolate. We were given tea as we are British.

I think some grilled sausages there too.Titty was cutting some Christmas spirited bookmarks with the help of the librarians. Her photo is at the end of this set. We were also shown how all the machines and printers work, and how to look for a book by its title or by the author.

A whole set of photos was made with us alone. The Instagram text here says that we are Unicef dolls and inspired by the characters of the Swallows and Amazons novels.

Here am I with the Finnish translation of the first book about us.

Susan with a matching color book cover.

Titty with a book matching her quilt - the librarians knew without saying which quilt belongs to each of us. Aren't they clever?

Roger with Auntie Ulla's Finnish edition of Swallowdale. The other books have not been translated into Finnish.

Finally there was a good night story before we all cuddled under our quilts and blankets for the night. Some monkeys needed a banana before they could sleep.

All those links are to the photos the library published on their Instagram. The library ladies sent these photos to Auntie today for this blog post. And here we are ready to be taken home on Thursday afternoon.

It has snowed a little again, and it is not at all so dark even the days are getting shorter by several minutes per day.

Everyone who stayed the night at the library could take home a certificate stating that and telling a little about the visit. There was also a list of recommended reading for children at different ages. It was a good list, and we have seen many of those books here on the bookshelves too.

We also got a paper photo of the whole group so we can remember our new friends. We had a very good time. The librarians asked if we would like to come for a longer time in the Winter, so that many people could meet us, and we agreed with pleasure!

On behalf of the Swallows

John

Touch of Winter

A little while ago I took one of my Unicef dolls, John, out for a walk and to run some errands. We saw trees full of rowan berries.

There were lingonberries in the forest, perfectly good even after some night frosts. They get a sweeter taste after a frost bite.

On the following Sunday morning a week ago it started snowing a little. This willow was the only tree or bush with leaves, all the trees were naked.

By six in the evening the landscape had changed white. The snow remained for several days but is now almost gone again. We have minus degrees so it feels like the Winter is coming. Up here we have four proper seasons, but we have names for the "between" seasons as well: autumn winter, spring winter, spring summer and autumn summer. This is definitely autumn winter until we get proper snow and proper cold weather, and the calendar says it is December.