Day out with Daughter

Last week I had a very nice girls' day out with my daughter. We went to see an art exhibition showing textiles and collected items by Anu Tuominen. We had seen her potholder color circles in Jyväskylä too, and I have posted about that here.

You may have noticed that I'm a keen knitter nowadays, so this sock was my favorite in the exhibition this time. It is called "The Measure of a Woman? (A heel of a sock)". Knowing how to knit a heel of a sock may still be considered here as some kind of a basic skill every woman ought to have. I think this multi heel sock could happen if you knit and watch TV and don't concentrate on your knitting properly!

Another version. She also had a square sock with three heels all turning the same way.

Here are most of the color circles. Potholders recycled, found or bought from charity shops.

For some reason this piece had a girl's name, Pirkko.

I have only shown here some of her textile pieces. There were also wonderful works using other materials like old dining plates, ski shoes filled with pussy willows, crayons or color pencils, nesting enamel bowls, you name it.

After the art we had some lunch, spent some time at a big book store and finally had coffee before she took me to my train and went to work. Lovely feminine boost day for me.

My sewing machine has been away from home for service but came back to wait for a new part, so I have tried to keep up with my own challenge of making nine-patches almost every day. Here are ten new ones in random colors.

This week's color is red...

... and here are my seven new nine-patches.

Other projects have kept me busy, so there is nothing nice to show. We have had a sorting out week, thee big plastic bags are filled for the charity shop, more than that has been binned, and the paper recycling container has been fed with old magazines and shredded documents.

On Friday morning I slipped on a frosty spot and had a great fall, for the first time in decades, I think. Naturally the first part to hit the ground was my titanium knee! Luckily nothing was broken, metal doesn't feel pain, so I just have a swollen knee and I'm waiting to see if it will turn black and blue or not. Oh, and later I looked in the mirror and noticed that my glasses had cut me a little by the nose and I was bleeding there, but no harm done to the glasses either. 

Green patches

This week all my 9-patches are in greenish shades. I try to keep it limited to my plaid shirt collection, mixed with some solids and some stripes.

This no-snow Winter is confusing for the nature. Blue tits are looking for suitable houses for their nests already, but their normal house-hunting season is in April/May.

The first snow bells are open in our garden, at least a month too early.

New blocks and a finish

 A finished project for January! When I was making the QAYG blocks for Australia, I had to disqualify some of my blocks. One for using the same fabric in it twice, one for too heavy batting and one for using the finished size (10½") for cutting the backing which made a too small block. So I just needed to make one more block, cut them all to 8" and so I had this bright new cushion for a kitchen chair.

This week's 9-patches are in red and blue.

In the evenings I have crocheted some granny squares for Oz Comfort Quilts, and I will send my parcel tomorrow. The grannies are 10 rows making 10" squares.

We have still no real Winter as you can see. We had two new visitors, European Roe deer, never seen in our garden before. Sorry for the reflections, this was taken through the kitchen window when we all were having breakfast. The boy, on the left, has little antlers.

That little snow from Friday is gone again. No snow means depressingly dark days, cloudy days with rain instead of crisp snow with proper frost, blue sky and sunshine. I'm thankful we have not had those slippery wet ice conditions, but would love to have at least some weeks of real Winter before Spring can come.

Nine-patches

are a challenge I took when I saw the blog post by Dolores  introducing many challenges to choose from for a good start of the  year. I'm not on Facebook so I'm just sewing my 2½" squares into 9-patches on my own and will show them to you when I feel like it. This first lot of  seven is made with ready cut squares from the trays I have. I'm ahead of the schedule already, as I read about the challenge 5 days ago!

When I'm cutting fabric for a project and there is a small leftover strip, I cut it into squares, or if it is a long one, it goes to the fabric string boxes. The white background squares usually come from making Unicef dolls.

Our grandson has his birthday around this time. He likes outdoor life and can already have long walks, so he has his own rucksack, torch etc. I made this insulated pouch for a small thermos flask so he can take hot chocolate along when they go out to explore the forest next time. His initial is made with reflector tape so the pouch can be easily found if it should get lost on the ground ;o). 

Little ones wear reflector vests here when they are on an outing from kindergarten, each group has their own color.