Autumn is here

In an earlier post I mentioned that our strawberries in the flowerbed keep making berries until September. Well, it is October now, a quarter of it gone, and there still are strawberries slowly ripening! The taste is not what it used to be, but they are edible.

I have been away from home for a while and therefore not so busy with quilting or knitting, but managed to finish a pair of socks in Autumn colours

once again in my favourite colour combination.

Then I almost used up some rest balls to make these socks with my own grandmother's pattern.

That is all new finishes, but I can show a picture of my blue and white quilt with the quilting and binding on. It is now hanging in Villa Cooper, where visitors can vote for their favourite gift for Finland's 100th Anniversary.

The Autumn has been very rainy, but luckily the leaves shine bright when there is just a ray of sunshine coming through the clouds.

The last flowers in the garden

Here is exactly 20% of our apple harvest, so I'm not cooking any apple sauce this year!

Unique yellow and blue quilt finished

Here it is finally, my own design:

Unique is the leading charity providing specialist information and support to families coming to terms with a diagnosis of a rare chromosome disorder and the medical professionals caring for them. This quilt is for their fundraising. I had the idea of yellow and blue chromosomes from their logo with the curved lines. The string pieced strips are my artistic view of a chromosome. Twenty three pairs of chromosomes could not be divided on equal rows, so I filled the empty gap of the last row with the appliqued Unique logo. 

The twisting border reminds me of a DNA, the stuff the chromosomes are made of. I hope they like the quilt and raise a lot of money with it.

Socks of the week have stripes in light blue and turquoise, for a boy or a girl.

The summer flowers are still looking good.

Border blocks for the new quilt

The yellow, blue and white quilt is getting some borders.

These blocks will be 4" finished.

Socks of the week with half fisherman's rib in two colours. The rib is thick and warm and nice. Socks for a fashionable young girl who goes out with bare ankles even in cold weather.

Knitted in Schachenmayr's Regia 4-ply wool, perfect for socks you want to wear with regular shoes.

Our tiny strawberries. I get a handful every day, from the end of July to mid September.

Yellow and blue strings

Tiny scraps sorted according to colour. I used these to make 1" wide strings. No wonder my fabric stash is getting smaller so slowly!

Now I have as many blocks as I need, and the quilt centre is ready. A couple of borders will be needed to make this a nice size for a child's bed, or for a wall hanging.

My socks of the week are very traditional, in the warm and heavy yarn men seem to prefer, in the perfect pattern my mother always used for the best fit.

I hope you had a good week and will be enjoying a nice weekend.

My trick for knitting error problems

Recently I have widened my knitting repertoire to some simple lace patterns. Knitting and watching TV is OK as long as the pattern is easy, the hands can almost work on autopilot. The problems start when you ought to add and lose stitches, and sometimes a stitch is lost a couple of rows back before you notice the mistake. Earlier I used to lose my nerve too and unravel everything and take an easier pattern. Then I found that I could unravel the knitting past the mistake and to a recognizable row of the pattern. I hated having to do that too. Having two socks on the same long circular needle added to my disappointment.

A while back I had the idea of dropping some stitches around the wrong stitch all the way to the mistake and usually I could find a plain knit row below it. I picked those stitches on a double pointed needle, like here. I have gone three rows down as you can see from the three loops of yarn.

Then I just knitted the missing rows, not in the round but back and forth, purling the plain rows on the wrong side and knitting the pattern on the right side, using the loops of yarn I unpicked.

And here it is, all stitches in their right places, and it only took a moment to correct it. I don't know if this is a well known way of doing it, but I have not seen it anywhere but invented it myself in the spring.

I have started a new quilt with my very own pattern, and learning from my mistakes. Yellow string strips

combined with blue ones, between scissor cut lines.

I wonder what becomes of all this!

Log Cabin quilt top and a Lover's Knot scarf

Yesterday I finished the Log Cabin quilt top. It is 6 x 8 blocks and large enough to be used as a day cover for a single bed.

Because my quilt will not be a square but a rectangle, I decided to use this setting.

Florals, stripes and plaids, nighties, aprons, summer frocks and shirts happily mixed together.

The Solomon's Knot or Lover's Knot stitch is one I have been thinking of for a long time. It looked too difficult, but I decided to give it a try anyway. My 25 g ball of Rowan's Kidsilk Haze just called for a pattern like this.

As usual, my first crochet rows had more tension than the rest of the scarf, but you really can't notice it easily. And yes, the pattern was super easy, and only a couple of times I had to unravel to the previous row because I had skipped one stitch or made one too many.

My pink peonies are just starting to bloom, much smaller flowers this year and about a week later. Our June was exceptionally cool and we had lots of rain.

Summer trip, old books, Moomins and other nice things

The first weekend after Midsummer is traditionally the time for old literature and second hand books in Sastamala. We have been there more than ten times in a row, and many times I have shown you some of our loot. This year I found two new old crime novels by a Swedish author, Maria Lang.

And Mr K. too found something missing from his collection of old fishing catalogs and some fly patterns and a book about trips in the North.

After a satisfactory tour among the book tables and shelves we took a scenic route to Tampere. There we visited the brand new, world's only Moomin Museum. The exhibition is large, with lots of Tove Jansson's original illustrations for the Moomin novels, and scenes from the books built by Tove's life partner Tuulikki Pietilä, Tove and their friend Pentti Eistola. I grew up with the Moomin novels, and enjoyed reading them as a grownup. Last year I was lucky to renew the reading experience together with Melanie, and this year I read the biography of their author, Tove Jansson, written by Boel Westin. This again led me to buying the only adult book by her I didn't own, the Summer Book, and now I'm reading it, again with Melanie.

Today I have been building my log cabins again. Finding different fabrics for each round is a bit like Sudoku.

Last Autumn I planted some new bulbs in the garden, Allium Hollandicum, or Purple Sensation. They look pretty handsome!

My flower box colouring is this year pink, blue and purple.

Mr K: and I had a little garden helper on Thursday. He has his own little watering can just like his grandfather's.

Green socks

Here they are, my new long bedsocks:

The colour is right in the top photo. I used the pattern on the cover photo of Melissa Morgan-Oakes' book Toe-Up 2-At-A-Time Socks for the shaping and measurements but simplified the lace pattern and made it my own.  I think the heel is very pretty here.

It was hard to estimate how far my yarn would go so I started the ribbing early. Binding off looks a bit curly but it mustn't be too tight.

I have been cutting more strips for the log cabin quilt. Still a lot to cut, but it means that I will use up many of my fabrics. and that is the point. Use up fabric, have fun sewing, get a quilt. Win-win-win.

Almost Summer

Suddenly, on Wednesday or so, it was warm again. After a little rain shower the nature just burst into greenness and growth. My green socks are slowly growing too. I'm going to knit them as long as the yarn allows.

Today I made a test block for a new quilt. I have what feels like tons of light blue fabrics, and some brown ones left over from the Shadow Plaid. I have never made a Log Cabin quilt, just single blocks, so I thought it was time to give it a chance. I have always liked brown and light blue together.

I have a fair amount of 2" strips cut already but need more. I'm also going to cut them to the required length before sewing to keep my squares square.

Scilla Sibirica in our garden. I would love to have more but they seem to take their time to spread.

Today I had tea in the garden, in my short sleeves, and really enjoyed the +21 C temperature. 

The new plaid quilt

Here it is, my new plaid quilt.

It is a mixture of very different shirts which have come to the end of their career in the clothing business or, in one case, never even made it so far but spent some 50 years or probably more as a UFO, cut parts carefully folded with some of the paper patterns pinned to the smallest parts. It could have been meant for me, the pale yellow and grey. A blouse with short sleeves for a girl of maybe 9-10 years of age. Some of this fabric is still left for smaller blocks in another quilt. The obviously female fabrics were my mother's blouses, too small for me to wear so I finally decided to give them a new life. The rest of the plaids are from my usual stash of old men's old shirts. As the previous quilt top only had blue shirts mixed with solid white, here I used all other colours but blue.
It is always fun to plan a new quilt and watch it grow from piles of squares to piles of blocks, then rows and finally a quilt top. The next step is less fun but vital, building the quilt sandwich and pinning or basting it. I have hand quilted only one large quilt in my life, the Grandmother's Garden quilt for my daughter Kaija, and some preemie quilts. I can manage machine quilting on my sewing machine if the quilt is not too big. Maybe I need to start considering these next steps, because this top is already the fourth waiting to be quilted!

Liverworts, Anemone Hepatica, have opened their flowers. I moved these to our garden from "back home" on my last visit there.

Sneak peek of the new quilt

Now that  the blue and white baby socks are all knitted, I came back to my colourful yarns. I found four balls of this lovely yellow in a shop and knitted a pair of socks in adult size, and went on in a smaller adult size. Because there was still yarn left, I knitted a third pair in a child size. Each pair has a slightly different heel. After having knitted three pairs I still had those two tiny balls left. I thought they will make a nice stripe in a new pair of socks in a different colour.

I was putting the rest yarn in my storage box where I keep this type of yarn, and guess what? I found two more balls of the same yarn I had bought last year because I really liked this colour, and the rest from the first pair I had knitted. That means I can knit two more pairs in a child size!

When I arranged the blocks for the blue and white quilt of my previous post, I played with them a little and came up with an idea. I really liked working with big blocks for a change, and the plaids look better in them too. So I took this lovely grey flannel I have been hoarding for many years, and a pile of other than blue shirts, and made these blocks:

Next time I will show what became of them.

We had some sunny days and migrating birds started coming. This small thrush, redwing, is a welcome guest we have not seen in many years.

Yesterday's weather brought new snow. We had already decided to keep filling the bird feeder until the weather gets warmer, and now with the snow it is essential to take care of our little friends.

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!