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.

Stash use report for July, and PIF still open

July with the hot, lazy summer days is gone, and it's time to look back at the fabric piles. It  looks like they didn't melt away! I didn't manage not to buy any fabric at all, but I only bought 1 m calico for stitching as it is something I don't usually have in stash. My fabric use was very moderate too, but I had a lovely little project I finished last night. Earlier this year I got this old iron bed:

I cleaned and washed it, mended the net on the sides, and washed the fabric covering the original bottom half, and made a new one to replaced the missing half. They are hinged together with twine in the middle.

Then I made a mattress and a pillow using old mattress fabric to suit this antique bed. I don't want to repaint it.

The bed needed sheets as well, naturally, and I unpicked the lace from an old, worn out sheet and used the good parts for the pillowcase and the top sheet.

I finished the hexagon quilt in about 17 days.

It is in the bed now, with the lace sheet and pillowcase. Too bad the bed is too small for me to sleep in! All I need now is to make myself some dolls to keep in the bed.

Here is a better look at the little hexagon quilt. The border is the same fabric as I used for my DD Kaija's quilt three years ago, the one that took me 17 years with pauses to finish.


The bed project used about 1.5 m fabrics in all, and washpeg aprons, a secret bag and a bag for Mr. K's bamboo rod took 2.2 m more, so the stash was reduced by 3.7 m. I hope to show the bag soon, and I'm planning to make a completely not quilting or sewing -related post about Mr. K's bamboo project. Oh I almost forgot the polka dot bag, I don't even have a picture of the white one. They were both sewn in July, and used up 2 m of fabrics. Total use was 5.7 m, not very much but not too bad either.

There are still two more possibilities to sign in for my PIF, as Barbara and Heather are so far the only ones on my list. You can read more about this offer in my previous post, if you are interested.

Tour de Hexagon & Pay It Forward

In my last post I promised my new Grandmother's Garden quilt would not take another 17 years to make, as I had one flower block as a leftover from the big project. I had the remaining fabrics still left in a basket, and a handful of basted hexagons. It took me some time on the Pyrenees (with Le Tour de France, on TV, naturally) to make these:

As the cyclists are torturing their muscles on the Alps, I'm stitching. That was quick, wasn't it? I must admit this quilt is not a very large one.

A while ago Melanie announced the PIF challenge she took, and I was one of her lucky three who promised to carry on and pay it forward to another three persons. Do you know what this is all about? The original idea is from a film, and it is living its own life in the blog world. The rules are simple: I promise to send a handmade (by me) gift to the first three people who are willing to join in. I don't know yet what the gift will be, but I will send it within a year from now, probably much sooner. What you need to do to get that gift, is write about the PIF on your blog and make the same promise. I have played along once before, when I had just started my blog, and back then I only had two answers. Therefore I promise a gift to the fourth person as well, to keep my original promise from 2008. Now I'm just waiting for my PIF gift from Melanie to arrive before the end of the year, but meanwhile I would love to start planning nice gifts for you, my dear readers. To give you an idea of the kind of gifts we are talking about, check here (scroll down past the interesting Egypt tour if you just want to see her gift) what Melanie got from Anne Marie, or what I got from a Swedish Ulla.

The weather has been too hot again. Our tomatoes five weeks ago were like this:

And now they are as tall as I am, almost at least. There are some tomatoes too, all green and small but they seem to grow fast. Like they say in the song in West Side Story "everything's big in America".  The tall plants are from the seeds we had from Candace and Mr. Squash. In the lower right corner you can see our Finnish tomato plant in a pot, about 30 cm high so they have hardly grown since the first picture was taken.

I hope you can enjoy the summer, remember to drink enough water if the weather  is hot. Who wants to sign in for the PIF? Be sure I can contact you when you leave a comment.

Some finishes, and new toys

You may remember I was working on these hexagons many weeks ago. Now I have finally finished them, with heavy interfacing and honeycomb weave backing. I think they make nice coasters.



The other day I was playing with my textile paints. I printed some hearts on this kitchen towel.


Yesterday I received a package from the other side of the Atlantic. You can imagine my surprise when these two fellows climbed out of the box! They are Ann and Andy, and Eileen made them just for me! Thank you, sweet dear friend! Eileen used an original pattern from 1940, and I can dress and undress the dolls. The way Andy is behaving, I'm afraid there will be laundry to wash sooner or later. Every detail is perfectly sewn.

Raggedy Ann and her brother Andy wanted to sit in the snow at first, because they thought it was a little exotic at this time of the year.

Ann wanted to see if there was anything to see in my flowerbed, because at Eileen's there are crocuses by now. Well, I have snow. Oops, her pantalettes are showing!

Ann came in and needed a nice cup of hot sweet tea with some cucumber sandwiches. She even brought my old kettle to her tea table, to freshen up the tea when Andy comes in. By the fierplace it is warm to sit. Her little biscuits are in the tin. What a lucky girl I was to receive this tea set from my Time for Tea Swap partner Dawn earlier this week! I have had a porcelain tea set in doll size but it must still be at my mother's house.

Guess what Andy was doing when Ann sat nicely and had her tea? He was climbing in the oak tree in our back yard and wanted to see Charlie the squirrel eating at the bird feeder. Of course none of the squirrels, not to mention the birds, dared come when there was a little boy just a couple of feet away. I had to get him in before he caught cold.

Speaking of birds reminded me of something beautiful I saw Monday afternoon when coming from town: a white hooper swan was flying to the South! It must have come here to check if there was open water anywhere, and went back because everything is still covered in ice and snow.

Small scraps can make a difference

You probably know I can't throw anything away, because I might need it for something someday? So I keep even small scraps of fabric. They can be used like this:


But my tiny scraps are not always big enough for a project. I wanted to make a set of four coasters, and use a pretty pale yellow floral print in one of the trapezoids. Well, my scrap was big enough for three, but for the last one I had to take a different fabric. It is the first trapezoid from the top clockwise in the bottom hexagon.


Here is a blue set under construction. Next I will make the backing and then top stitch the coasters. I found the pattern in the new Stitch magazine.


Talking about hexagons, there is a project called Hexagons of Hope going on for the bushfire victims of Victoria, Australia. The idea is to send EPP fabric hexagons so the women who have lost their houses and everything else and their fabrics and needles and sewing machines, could put their hands on a new project. I first heard about this from Suzie, and I think it is a great idea. There is a lot of information about the size of the hexagons and how to make them, just follow the link.


Today I finally had a chance to mail my wonky Maverick stars to the Bushfire quilt project. I got a little carried away and instead of the originally planned 12 blocks I suddenly found myself making the 25 to finish a quilt top. I thought my recycled men's shirts (the man is not recycled, I'm his first wife!, but the shirts are) are so different from other people's fancy quilting fabrics, and so I took my scrap bag and went on happily.

This star is one of my favourites, a combination of a plaid flannel shirt, a twill shirt and our living room curtain fabric.

And this is the top finished. I got to make the fun part, and the good ladies in Australia will provide the batting and backing and machine quilting and binding.

My almost eternal project in Grandmother's Garden

Today I'm taking my biggest ever quilt project to the sewing group to once again start with the quilting part of it. This is a single bed size quilt (about 160 cm x 230 cm at the moment, with the framing not cut to the final size) for my daughter. We started on it together in summer 1993 when spending a week at my parents' home. She really was a little girl then, but she sewed some of the hexagons together and basted many of them on the paper templates. We used leftover pieces from my mother's stash to begin with, and at home my own. (See "Never throw anything away".) Over the years I continued on this project, mainly during the summers, and in just ten years I had put together the 2,191 little hexagons. Then I made the framing of dark blue fabric, sandwiched the top with cotton wadding and a blue extra wide bedsheet for backing with nearly a hundred safety pins and started quilting. By hand. Inside the seamline, meaning through double top layer, the cotton wadding and the thick and solid backing. No way. Not in a million years would that be possible. So I put the project to rest, again, to wait for better days to come. It only took five years.

Around new year I started thinking about the quilt again. I knew I needed a thinner backing and started looking for a suitable one. Kaija didn't want flowery patterns, I knew I didn't want plaid or stripes to emphasize how not straight the backing may end up. On Monday I decided it will be stars, and bought this:

And tonight I will take advantage of the big big tables of the school and sandwich all layers again, and maybe baste them this time. After that, I will try to use my three hours every Thursday evening in the group quilting. I made this public so I can not so easily find excuses to postpone the unevitable. I need to finish this quilt someday. I will report occasionally on the progress, if any.