Granny Squares

This week I finished my first crochet project in several years. Pip from Meet me at Mike's inspired me to crochet granny squares, she is making at least one a day. I wanted to make a small banket only, to go with one of my Unicef dolls when I finally find myself in the mood to finish their clothes.



The dolls have been a long-time project with inspired moments and long periods of shifting the bag around. Almost all dolls are ready but their clothes are not. There are no patterns for their clothes available, which makes it more complicated for me. The clothes also need to be easy to take off and put on again, but no buttons are allowed because of choking hazard.

As you can see, the perfect outdoor photo background, snow, is finally gone and now I use the brown, mossy lawn instead.

I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend!

Taking it easy

Last Friday I had to admit that I am more like a cow than a goat when it comes to walking on steep rock paths like the ones I took last Tuesday and posted under Morning dew. I had to go and see a doctor and show him my aching, swollen, hurting knee. He gave me some pills which seem to help a little, and told me to take it easy for a week. "Only the obligatory walking, and ice packs 4 times a day on the knee." So there will be no walks this week. Yesterday, when I was in town, I didn't walk to the fabric shop, not even to look at fabrics. Instead, I enjoyed the florist's shop in the shopping centre where I have my latte or tea. When I sit in the cafe, I can see all this:


And this:




It was easy to spend an hour there, with my notebook and tea and a piece of cake. Yes, you see, when I can not get Brownie points for my walking badge this week, I can at least see to it that I have earned my tea drinking badge and cake eating badge. Every cloud can have a silver lining!


Last night we had frost again. It has been windy and the leaves are falling from the trees. After a frost it only takes a little breeze and the leaves start falling on the ground. This is a picture I took this morning in our yard. I tried to catch a titmouse in the picture, but even without it I like the pattern of the branches.



The Bergenia leaves are turning red. They roll up like this when it is cold and open again when the air is warmer. The grass looks grey because of the frost.

I have been able to finish two of my Stitchers' Angel Swap projects, and I'm going to send them to my partner tomorrow. This is the mini tote Blue Wren's Nest designed by Natalie from Cinderberry Stitches.

And this very big pincushion is designed by Karen of Cotton Spice Blog.

There will be space for all kinds on pins and needles!

I am still working on the stitching of May Britt's angel stitchery for my own bag. The Stitchers' Angels patterns are all free to be downloaded for your own use, even if you are not participating in the swap. I have enjoyed this new kind of handicraft and I think I will keep making stitcheries even after the swap. But at the moment I'm feeling the need to start a new quilt, even a little one. And I really ought to start working on my Unicef dolls if I am going to get them ready for the auction in November.

About Unicef rag dolls

This is just a little post on a busy sewing/housekeeping day. Since I have not finished anything for a while, I'll show you one more Unicef rag doll:

She is a typical Finnish girl with blond hair and blue eyes. She lives in Germany, like my sister, who has organized the international adoption of several of my dolls there. Yesterday I found the perfect place to give my yet to be made Unicef dolls. I was reading Kaija's blog and she had been visiting Tampere, my old home town where I was born and lived until the end of my studies. Tampere is a Unicef city 2008 (unfortunately that part of their website is not in English), and they have a big adoption event for the dolls later this year. The dolls will be auctioned, so there is more than the minimum fee of 20 euro to be expected for each doll. So now I have decided to make the final 9 dolls for that date, and celebrate being a "birth mum" for 50 dolls total.

After Work

Yesterday was my busy day in a nice way. In the evening I had my sewing class/group, a quiet one this week because we were just 4 and the teacher. I finished the apron I started a week ago for my daughter, and I made some doll's clothes for a Unicef rag doll. The apron may not become Kaija's favourite in spite of the tool pocket, because the fabric seems to be that awful clingy kind that forms a knot in your lap when you walk. It looked OK, thick and soft and dark brown, just waiting for hands to be wiped clean. I'll try rinsing it with fabric softener.



I have had two favourite aprons my mother has made for me of dark, thick cotton fabrics. Both have been worn until there were holes in the pockets and the strings were just a collection of threads. After having dutifully served they ended up in this:

I called this quilt Töiden jälkeen, or After Work, because it is made of men's old flannel shirts and other heavy, dark shirts they have worn to work, and of my old working clothes, the aprons. There are some bits of children's clothes as well, including our old skirt I have shown with my very first Unicef rag doll shown here. The yellow frame is the same fabric I used for Chu-Hua, the Chinese Unicef doll. The backing is new plaid flannel in beige and red. I used to sleep in a recling chair under this quilt many, many nights when my shoulder was newly operated and I couldn't find a painless position in my bed. This is my comfort quilt, and it gave me the idea of a series of other quilts I made in 2006.

Little joys

Here are the two other rag dolls custom ordered with Malila, the native American. On the left is Sini, she is a Finnish girl of about 10 years of age and likes baking cakes and bread. On the right is the Chinese girl Chu-Hua (=Chrysanthemum). She learns foreign languages easily and she is energetic. She has one long braid of hair. The front hair is too short to stay in place, and I'm not happy with her face either. I'm not good at drawing, and these faces I make with a stencil with textile paints. When I was in third grade we made a rag doll at school. We had to embroider the face, and my poor doll ended up with pig's eyes and a mouth like a hooker's, and two dark red holes for a nose. Nobody can play with a doll like that. That's why I prefer the painted faces. The white doll is made of recycled sheets, the yellow fabric I have bought. All clothes are made of recycled or leftover pieces, including their underwear.



Yesterday was a good day. First, I received my first ever Etsy purchase, hand printed fabrics from Hollabee. Second, the February issue of Quilting Arts magazine was also in the mail. Third, my daughter Kaija found a new apartment she really likes. This is really the most important one of these, but they happened in this order. I'm planning to use my hand printed fabrics for shoulder bags I make for a local handicraft shop. Now is not yet the time, they are more like summer bags when I make them of linen or linen/cotton.

Little progress report

Today I finished sewing and cutting my chenille piece. Next I shall bind the edges and it will be ready for the final touch by my washing machine.

Today's picture is another Unicef doll custom made for my sister. This one is called Harri and his shirt is made of my son's old T-shirt and the trousers are a leftover piece of his anorak. The rag dolls are about 45 cm tall, just fine for small children to carry and hold. The idea is to make useful items at low cost, because the person who makes the doll will not be paid anything. The whole adoption fee goes to Unicef. The maker will receive from the buyer the postcard attached to the doll, so she or he will know where the doll has found a home. Usually the dolls are sold to strangers in Unicef campaigns or other occasions.

Räntää or wet snow falling

Today is what the Finnish winter should not be: temperature above zero, wet snow is falling and the ground remains green or muddy. Last night it was raining all night long. This shouldn't be happening to me, I recycle and sort everything and my globe should not be warming like this. The worms in my compost are wriggling happily when I bring them potato peels and tea leaves. Normally the compost works as a waste freezer at this time of the year and warms up to working order again at the end of March. On the other hand, enormous sums of money will be saved in heating expenses, snow ploughing etc. And the pavements are not slippery.

This lousy weather means also that I can't make nice pictures, so I just show another rag doll I made for Unicef. By now I have made 41 of them, and I'm planning to reach 50 this year. That will make 1,000 euro for Unicef in total and 50 vaccinated children out there. Just trying to do my share and enjoying it.

This doll is a native American and her name is Malila, "a salmon going fast upstream". I chose that name because my husband is a flyfisherman.The shirt is made of chamois leather, and I made a tiny woven pearl necklace for her. Normally they should not have any details which could be dangerous to little children, but this doll was another custom order for a woman in Germany. She wanted a collection of black, red, yellow and white dolls.

Never throw anything away

This is my first attempt to write a blog. I'm inspired by some beautiful blogs I have been reading in the last months and wanted to share some of my own doings with likeminded people. My mother taught me not to throw anything away because it can be used for something. My husband went through the same school at his home, our parents have started their families during the war. So now I'm stuck with enormous amounts of leftover pieces of materials from my own, my mother's and even my grandmother's sewing and unfinished projects. Luckily we have never moved house and the house is rather big. My idea was to show all kinds of stuff I have made, mainly by recycling but also of new materials which are so hard to resist. This first picture is a doll I made for Unicef to be adopted by anyone willing to pay the adoption fee of 20 euro, the price of vital vaccinations for one child. In Finland these are called Anna and Toivo dolls, the words in Finnish mean "give" and "hope". School classes, mothers, anyone can make a doll with the Unicef pattern and label and give it an identification card from Unicef. The other half of this card is a postcard which the adoptive mother can send to the one who made the doll, informing that the doll now has a family. This particular one is called Ulla and it is a custom order for my sister. The doll's skirt is made of a skirt my sister and I and my little sister have worn when we were little.

The name of this blog comes from my childhood memories, when listenig to the radio was an essential part of the day. There were weather forecasts and announcements to seafarers, including information on sea water levels all along the coast. One (perhaps the first?) location was the town Kotka, and the measuring point was on Rankki island. They could say "Kotka, Rankki: minus 30 centimeters, ...". To a child'd ear this sounded like kotkarankki, kotka meaning eagle in Finnish and the rest being a mystery. My mother had a beautiful wooden box for Gütermann sewing threads, almost black, shiny lacquered and with a picture of a big bird on the cover. We started calling the box kotkarankki. If I can locate the box again, I will show you a picture of it. The threads were so beautiful, in all colours - think of a child being given a box of 78 crayons to arrange any way she pleases. The box must be somewhere, naturally.