Scandinavian Snowball Fun, finished at last

Sorry to interrupt your tour at the Villa Cooper! I have an important announcement to make: I have finished a quilt. I'm trying hard to remember if I have finished another one this year, but I'm afraid this is the first one.

It is the Snowball Fun quilt Melanie and I started together in 2012, she sent me the fabrics and I sent her the pattern, and we were going to make it for Christmas. Well, Melanie made it for that Christmas, but I finished mine on Sunday.

I had the three stitcheries almost done in 2012 when other things happened and I lost interest in the project.

We don't really have snow yet for good so snowmen are not around, but it is slowly about time to take out the Christmas lights and to start decorating the house.

Mrs. Snowman has taken her child Christmas shopping. I wonder what they will eat, ice cream maybe? Melanie is showing her quilt today too, so follow this link  and find out what it looks like!

The tour inside Villa Cooper will continue tomorrow.

Tour de Fibre 2013 - Finale

The Tour is over for this year, and I managed to get one project finished during the three week period of watching TV and sewing. It is the Peek-a-Boo Street quilt.

 

 

Let's walk around this neighbourhood but maybe we can take a cup of coffee with cake in the café first? There is a café in both corners of this first street, and between them a fabric store and a shop that sells both sewing notions and silks for fly-tyers.

Around the corner is something for babies in two shops, yet another café (!), and a yarn shop.

 

The Lavender Shop sells herbs and spices, the next one is a music shop. The shop with the yellow roof is specialised in mushrooms, wild berries and such. I had to think hard to find a suitable product for the shop with my sun-dyed leaf fabric before I had an excelent idea: In Finnish we can use the same word, lehti, for a leaf and a newspaper or magazine, so this is a newsstand.

Along the last street runs a little brook. There is a plant nursery (because they have a very big backyard up here), the first house for flowering plants and the second for trees. Next is a place where you can buy treasure maps and all kinds of equipment you might need for adventures, and the last one is a fishing gear shop. Test fishing is possible in the brook.

 

Thank you, Stephanie for the pattern! This quilt will go to the nursing home where Mr. K's father spent his last years. It will keep someone warm when they go out in wheelchairs, or whenever their old bones feel like they need to be kept warm. This quilt is also for my Cratft Olympics, my second thimble for the New projects category.

 

Scandinavian Snowball Fun is now my main project:

 

 

And this is the secret project I started and finished during the Tour, now arrived and taken into use. It is my version of Kaffee-Momente stitcheries by Diana.

 

 

To celebrate the end of the100th Tour de France I baked a cake and had an Oops experience:

 

 

 

With a fairly liquid inside the cake collapsed, but the taste was still nice. Next time I'll need to bake longer and test more than one spot!

 

The July stitcheries of Happy Scrappy Spring are also finished and I'm putting the row together between other projects.

Tour de Fibre 20 - more stitching

Yesterday's post reminded me of the Scandinavian Christmas quilt I was stitching last year as a part of the Tour de Fibre 2012. I took out another Lynette Anderson project, Scandinavian Snowball Fun, that I was going to stitch together with Melanie last Autumn. Life (and the opposite) happened, and I couldn't get my project started. Melanie has finished ages ago but said she will keep her project secret until I'm ready.

 

 

So I have built a cosy nest on the sofa, where I'm surrounded by the pattern sheets, three snowball blocks to stitch, and my floss and thimbles and needles.

 

I had prepared the blocks months ago but for some reason - again - didn't proceed. I know I have too little dark red floss, so I have stitched on all the blocks with other colours and keep on doing so until on Monday I can buy that missing floss. There is still so much to stitch here! The long  Eurosport broadcasts from the Tour de France in the Alps have been just perfect for this project. Yesterday the Finnish reporters told about a lady who was supposedly knitting on her 4th sweater during the Tour, and they found the idea quite hilarious. They immediately imagined a family wearing a yellow, green, white and dotty sweater. How little do they know! In addition to our Tour de Fibre I have seen a Tour de Fleece for spinners - and they were not having a spinning group at a gym, but making yarn - and there must be other more or less loosely formed groups, who all combine the great cycling event with things to do with their hands while watching. Three weeks of intensive work on old and new projects mean good results! A stitchery in the hand also prevents me from eating all the time quite efficiently.

 

In the garden the hosta is in bloom. We planted 5 plants of 4 different species of hosta some three years ago, and it looks like we have to give them a little more space and replant some of them in a new place.