Helping through the Red Cross

What has happened in Europe since the 24th of February is hard to understand. Never in my lifetime has a war touched so close, and the willingness to help Ukrainians in need seems to be great. Our club or group of handicraft people at Villa Cooper have donated some of their products to be sold to raise money to the Finnish Red Cross, and our customers have found this a good way to help and to be sure the funds go where they are meant to go. Many members have created new products just for this, using blue and yellow colours as they are the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

I made this quilt top in 2018 for the Red Cross, but didn't have the energy to layer and quilt it.

Now seemed the perfect time to finish the project and as I happened to have a backing fabric large enough for the quilt at home, I only needed to buy some batting and get to work. The batting price was a little shock for me, five times as much as the one I had bought before this.

The quilting is as simple as possible, and I finished it in three sessions. I have a bad habit of pulling my shoulders to my ears at the sewing machine, so I needed to have a break after an hour or so.

I quilted diagonal lines except for the bright red cross where I went around the outlines.

These blue and yellow chicks are also for the aid for Ukraine project. Half of my first lot was sold in the first few days so I made some more.

These tiny ones with more details I made earlier in March for the normal sale as hanging Easter ornaments. I made the fundraising chicks larger so they can sit on a table as a couple, and used only blue and yellow fabrics and felt.

 

Luxury scarf

The messy little knitting was like the ugly duckling who grew up to be a beautiful swan. After damp stretching my scarf grew in all directions, shows now an almost perfect lace pattern and will be proudly worn in the cool April weather.

The free pattern Nurmilintu by Heidi Alander can be found here at Ravelry, also in English and in several other languages.

My blue and white quilt top is finished. The herringbone pattern looks a little like knitted stitches too.

Here is an Easter Bunny for you. I don't like the little brown eggs he leaves behind so I bought us some Mignon eggs from the shop.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter

Tiny Easter chicks

 

Even tinier bunnies

Tete-à-tete daffodils

First Brambling of the year. We usually see one or two in the Winter months, and in the Spring they come with common chaffinches.

 

Allergics, stop looking! Pussy willows:

 

Birches full of pollen this morning.

 

 

Yesterday was warm up to 16C/60F and it was all the nature was waiting for. It feels like Spring is really here!

 

 

 

Happy Scrappy Spring finished

Last Spring I started the Happy Scrappy Spring quilt Kaaren of The Painted Quilt designed and offered as a free BOM. Actually it was the whole Row of the Month, with pieced blocks and some stitcheries. I made the stitcheries in red, and used, as usual, mostly recycled fabrics for the blocks.

For the wool appliqué I had to buy some wonderful wool felt, and that kept me from finishing this quilt right the way.

I really enjoyed the new(ish) for me experience of wool appliqué. It feels great when you notice you can easily make it look good!

 

The third row was the most work, five stitcheries including this big one for the centre.

 

Spring is also Easter, so the quilt has lots of bunnies, eggs and egg baskets.

 

 

Wool felt appliqué flowers, carrots and birds.

 

 

The little bunny with a kite is one of my favourites.

So is this little chick in her wellies and umbrella. Notice the tiny Easter eggs on the left.

I left out a dozen or so leaping bunnies on the checkerboard rows between the stitched blocks. In February I finally sandwiched the quilt, in March I machine quilted it and just this last week hand sewed the binding and a hanging sleeve.

 

Here the finished quilt is hanging in Villa Cooper, waiting for buyers. With Kaaren's  kind consent, my Happy Scrappy Spring quilt will be (hopefully) sold to raise money for the New Children's Hospital 2017 project.

 

 

It says so on the label here too:

 

 

In the Summer the Villa Cooper people will have an exhibition with the theme "Birds", also for the New Children's Hospital 2017 project. Our members are invited to make their own projects under the theme, using their favourite technique, and to donate the products to be sold at Villa Cooper. 100 % of the money raised will go to the hospital project.

 

Special treats and new challenges

We continue our sightseeing tour in Järvenpää. This is Halosenniemi, the studio and home of Pekka Halonen from 1902. He was one of the artists of the Golden era of Finnish art. Melanie introduced another local artist of that time in her travel report here, Venny Soldan-Brofelt. We visited her 150th birthday exhibition at the art museum of Järvenpää.

 

Because Melanie is such a fan of Villa Cooper, I wanted her to see the "sister villa", Sibelius' Ainola.

The roof of this home museum has been repaired during the winter and the place will open for the public again in May. The timber walls have been boarded over at an early stage, but you can see details like at Villa Cooper.

This is an earlier picture of Villa Cooper, the big dining room windows facing town.

Melanie brought me a suitcase full of girly treats for a birthday tea. I had asked her about scones and clotted cream, so she brought those too, along with strawberry marmalade. We ate the scones ages ago, but I tried the delicious ingredients on biscuits and on toast too. The marmalade goes first:

Yumm! Here you see the wrapping from the container ....

.. and read some history:

 

In exchange, we gave Melanie a chance to try a Finnish specialty, which could also be worth a Protected Designation of Origin, mämmi:

 

 

Mämmi is a traditional Easter or Lent food, made of rye, malt and water slowly baked in the oven. It has a porridge-like consistency and is served with sugar and cream. Melanie is either really well behaved or she just happened to like it, because after the test spoonful she had a normal serving like the one in my picture.

 

Now that the busy season with birthdays, Easter and Melanie's visit is over I have had time to join this year's Craft Olympics, now hosted by Sylvia. If you need deadlines (at the end of this year!), have UFO's (new category) and feel like having company when doing your projects, you can click the button on my sidebar and find the new rules for this year's Craft Athletes. Sylvia hosts both in German and in English. Be a good sport and join in! My other new project is a BOM at Kaaren's blog, The Painted Quilt. Happy Scrappy Spring only started yesterday so there is still time to join in and make a scrappy quilt with some stitcheries and some wool applique. I'm planning to make this quilt entirely from stash, preferably with recycled fabrics. The instructions for the whole first row are waiting! A button on my sidebar will take you to Kaaren's blog.

Visitors

Recently we have had some rare visitors. Two weeks ago a trail of new tracks came from the forest to our yard, something bigger than the usual hares.

 

In the front garden it looked almost like little children had been skiing there, spoiling the virgin snow cover.

Then we had a better look, measured the marks and checked with a book "Tracks on Snow": Not a deer but an elk! We know they live in the forest but this was a first visit so close to the house.

A week later another new visitor came: Melanie came to celebrate our birthdays. I'm five days and some  many years older than she, so Friday was just fine for our birthday cake. It was wonderful to finally meet her in person after five years of blog friendship. I was so happy to notice she was exactly as I imagined her.

On Saturday we took the train to Järvenpää and started our tour with the number one on her wish list, Villa Cooper. As you can see, we had beautiful weather for our walk.

Just some Easter pictures from the inside. Decorated twigs like the ones children would bring you on Palm Sunday with their blessings in exchange for some chocolate eggs.

Lovely white feather wreath.

I think I will leave the rest of my tour pictures until Melanie has shown hers on her blog so I don't spoil her surprise. This is what I knitted her for her birthday, to make sure she will survive our cold March days during her visit. I'm slowly learning the toe to top method of knitting socks, but I'm still having difficulties with determining the distance from toe to beginning of the heel.

 

With these yellow tulips from my sister I wish you all a Happy Easter!

 

Wintery crafts and migrating birds, or waiting for the Spring

The Spring is taking its time to arrive in our nick of the world. On Saturday we had some new snow again, you may see the white lines of wet snowflakes in this picture. As you can see, there is not very much snow left from the winter between the trees.

This kind of weather suits well for wintery crafts, so I knitted a pair of mittens after a traditional pattern from Northern Finland. I wanted to try this pattern, but in natural wool colours and not in the suggested bright colours you can see on the magazine's picture of their modernised mittens. The yarn is thick so the mittens were knitted in no time on 5 mm needles.

I have also been working on Scandinavian Christmas block 3. The cross stitch frame is finished, and most of the embroidery. The blanket stitching around the appliqué is on my list now. Mr. K said the other night that there is quite a lot of work in that piece of fabric, and I couldn't agree more!

We have had some sunny days too, and the yellow daffodils I bought for Easter can stay out in the night too, as the night temperatures are keeping around freezing point, not too much under. 

 

New birds keep arriving these days. This dove came to taste our sunflower seeds. There seems to be a lot to eat on the ground under the bird feeder, when the bigger birds like jays mess around and look for peanuts on the tray and drop what they don't like!

 

A flock of finches has been there too. They are mainly insect eaters and really need the energy they can get from the seeds, as it is far too cold for almost any insects yet.

 

Every day there is a little less snow, maybe a new green point of a future daffodil to be seen. The snowdrops I showed in my previous post, and at the moment in my header, are still in bloom. Meanwhile the also looked like this

when they came out again after we had some 15 cm or 6 inches of snow at Easter. I could do without the snow by now. Really. Then I could start sewing other than woolly and christmassy projects too.