Dolls with long legs

Hello again! I have been off line a lot but thought I could drop a line or two again and show you what I have been doing. I got this pattern from a dear friend many many years ago and wanted finally to use it to make an Autumn doll with oak leaves, flannel bloomers and button arms.

Making the doll was fun (except for the turning of the long thin legs), so I used the same pattern to make a Summer doll. Short sleeves, embroidered flowers for the dress, fine broderie anglaise bloomers.

Before Summer comes Spring, and in the Spring come the migrating birds. I embroidered little birds in my Spring doll's dress.

The Winter doll is preparing for Christmas and knitting a scarf for her friend. Appliqued holly garland with embroidered red berries in her flannel dress. Her bloomers are made with warm flannel, and she has wool socks instead of shoes.

Then it happened that my sister saw the dolls and wished for one for Christmas. I made it for her birthday already, and one for my other big sister.

All six dolls are here together.

This one is the birthday doll.

And here knitter doll with her button dress.

Silver Darlings

You'd never guess what I have been sewing this week. I needed this self-painted polka dot polyester satin.

 

I used the shiniest silver lame I could find at the local fabric shop with my sister P. My mother's fabric saving pattern placement advice came in handy:

They are herrings, nick-named silver darlings in Scotland and Ireland, and my niece needed them for her stall instead of a bunting. She is Ireland's only herring pickler, and her company's name is Silver Darlings. Look here: @silverdarlings1.

I copied her logo herring, enlarged it, did my sewing tricks, Mr K. made a 16 mm punching tool for the eye fabric (and cut the eyes for me),

 

and now the 14 jolly herrings are on their way to Ireland. My niece Kirsti has her stall in Limerick's Milk Market every Saturday, and she will take part in a special event in May. Imagine a tall young pretty Finnish blonde with her pickled herring jars, and these silver darlings dancing above her head at the stall. They must put a smile on everyone's face, and people will come and taste some of her almost exotic Nordic style pickled herrings and buy a jar to take home.

This year the Winter was almost non-existent, and so the season between snow and green grass seems endlessly long. This coltsfoot is the first wild spring flower, photographed in our yard yesterday.

 

Ages ago our crocuses were showing, and now they are showing half an inch more, but they are not green yet, or showing buds.

 

The tulips I planted last year are about two inches tall. This morning we had -4C/27F, but it will be a sunny day and get a bit warmer.

 

What has been the strangest thing you have sewn?

The eBook Winner is ...

... Tammy! Congratulations! I will share these flowers with you, and with all the nice people who made the blog book tour with ten stops and ten possibilities to win their own copy of Stephanie's new book Uncommonly Corduroy.

 

 

 

The flowers are from my sister. She came to get the pompom hats for her granddaughters and swapped my purples and yellows for the purple and yellow primroses.

 

 

You have heard my complaints of no real Winter this year, just the cold period in January. Last week (one of the last days of February) Mr K. noticed the first snowdrops in bloom in our garden, and I took the picture on March 1st, when we had a sunny moment:

 

Normally they make their way through snow in mid April, like this in 2012:

 

 

This makes the Spring about 6 weeks too early. It doesn't feel like Spring though, just feels like the Winter is having a hard time dying. We have had some snow a few times now, not enough to cover the grass on the lawn, puddles everywhere and dull skies. Luckily the amount of light is increasing rapidly and in about two weeks we all will have the full 12 hours of daylight. After the Spring Equinox we up here will keep getting more and more light and longer days until the Summer Solstice. That is a comforting thought.

SC 5 and some PIPS finishes

Today is the day which meant end of school and the beginning of three whole months of Summer holidays when I went to school. My first Summer holiday started with my first wristwatch and measles.

Wagtails have returned from the South, marching busily on our lawn and catching insects.

I set myself a goal to finish the Scandinavian Christmas top by the end of May, and so I did. The hearts for the outer border were easy to applique.

The top grew so much bigger with the borders! I will use the greyish brown linen of the inner border for the binding too.

Yesterday I visited my big sister P, and now I can show you what I have been making for her new cabin. First, a tea cosy with the same fabric as in the old big tea cosy from our childhood summer place. I have the original one, and mother had given me the leftover square to make a potholder or something. It was not very big, so I used black cotton for the other side. I hope my sister will remember all the lovely summer outdoors afternoon coffees from back home when she uses this.

Her new basic apron used to be her own kitchen curtain. I made one apron to be a "staff uniform" for the Villa Cooper shop earlier this year using this same fabric,

and here is another of her fabrics I used for an apron then. P asked for covers for guest pillows used on a sofa when not needed for sleeping. Both have a hidden zipper at the back.

That was about everything from the sewing front.  All these have been waiting in my PIPS box for my mood to change so I can get them done. It feels good to see the project bags disappear from the box! I have been knitting baby things for the hospital in the evenings but there is not much to show yet.

Our apple trees are in full bloom now. This was a few days ago, now the petals are falling from the tree in front, but the bigger tree is still getting whiter. I could use the apples again, as last year there were hardly any apples. The weather is not warm now, but I have seen bees around the trees so let's hope for a good harvest. A moderate harvest, please.

How hard can it be, really?

I have been trying to learn a new skill. You may remember the tatting shuttles my eldest and youngest sister gave me recently, both inherited from Great Auntie Saima. As a happy owner of at least two shuttles (I still have not come across the one I believe was given to me years and years ago) I thought I ought to try to learn how to tat.

First thing to do was to buy a book: Learn to Tat by Janette Baker, with a DVD showing how to do it. I also bought a ball of thread to see how it should be. So far easy beasy.

Second step was to start learning the basics. Like instructed, I started with two different colours of thread, orange and red, because they were the same thickness.

Almost even knots, looking all the same. The result of about two hours twisting and turning and bending, and rewinding the shuttle once. Then I noticed that each and every single (double) stitch was wrong. They were red (shuttle thread) instead of orange (ball thread).

New day, turquoise cotton yarn for the ball thread. I played the DVD Lesson 1 over and over, learned to hold the shuttle and the left hand thread properly, but not the shuttle thread. Look at this, it is supposed to be turquoise knots only with no red visible:

For me, it is really hard! I have not given up yet, but I'm no longer thinking I will learn the basics in February. February is such a short month, too.

My stash reducing is not going too well either. I don't even count the fabrics my sister P dumped on me because I didn't ask for them. I just happened to buy some more fabric I felt I absolutely needed: Brown I just must have, always, grey I need for the big wall hanging project and the yellow was too pretty to leave in the shop. They are in fact bed sheets, good quality 100 % cotton at 7.90 € for 2.7 m which makes a little under 3 €/m. If I buy the same fabric by the meter, it will cost at least 5.50 €/m for the 1.5 m width.

On Friday I sent the 10 pillowcases to Jackie, so she can take them to the children's summer camp when the time comes. I hope she will get the 2,000 pillowcases she was planning to deliver this year. Here are the last two I made this month, and I used my Husqvarna Sapphire to write Good Night Sleep Tight on the green accent strip.

  

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone! We call it Ystävänpäivä, Friend's Day. I'm glad to call you my friends.

Big Sort Out Day

Yesterday my big sister P was being my little elf like she promised in December. We spent almost three hours here in my cellar sewing room:

She had promised to bring me a couple of old white sheet so I can make more Unicef dolls, but she came with three big plastic bags. I was being brave and rejected one bagful of her things, and later gave her back some curtain fabric of hers I hade been taking care of for a couple of years.

Then she helped me lift boxes, sort out rags and history and flannels and shirts

and re-name boxes and start new boxes and empty some plastic bags and fill some other plastic bags until it started to look like this in Mr. K's end of the room which we had borrowed:

You are supposed to notice the empty floor there!

My end looked like this when we came up and made some tea:

Unfortunately there are still 5 untouched boxes under my desk, and four big ones on the stove. What we managed to do gave me hope that this project one day will end. Thank you P, you have been a tremendous help! I forgive you the two plastic bags of lovely fabric. And the lace and the yarn, too, and the pins and needles.  After all, we said goodbye to this:

    

Five bags tightly packed, and in the background are the two bags full of my old study papers. Someday, I hope, Mr. Kotkarankki will sit at his desk tying flies, and I will sit at my desk sewing seams, music is playing quietly and every now and then one of us says something, and we both live together happily ever after.

Vintage Thingies 13 - old handicraft books

This week I'm participating again in Vintage Thingies Thursday, hosted by Suzanne. For some reason Mr. Linky is not working so there is - at the moment at least - not a list of links to the participating blogs, but in the comments you will find their addresses. Let's hope the link list can be fixed soon.



Last week I saw here pictures from a Swedish book and I thought I had the book. Well, my mother probably has it, but I have many other old handicraft books. The first one is about bobbin lace making. I have inherited the lace cushion and bobbins from my great aunt Saima, the loveliest os spare grandmothers anyone can imagine. My daughter Kaija has just recently posted some pictures of her. I have learned the basics of bobbin lace making, but never finished anything useful - yet.

Here you can see her handwriting. The date is 1st of November 1928.

These are some patterns from that book. I have read somewhere that bobbin lace making came to Finland with sailors who on their travels had learned this skill. Rauma on the western coast is famous for the lace. Sorry the link is in Finnish only.

The second book I'm showing today is about traditional Finnish embroidery. The book is published in 1950, but the material is based on the author's trips to Eastern Carelia in 1938 and 1939, before the war.

The following two pictures refused to turn, so you may need to tilt your head a little to see the birds. These embroideries were traditionally sewn with double running stitches, using red thread.

The cloth pictured here is called käspaikka , a towel. With all the embroidery and the lace it was not just any towel but also something to be given as a gift.

The book had a few coloured pictures as well, and this little table cloth or cushion cover was my favourite.

That is all for this week, I have more pictures and more books for Thursdays to come.

I had the most welcome comment on my last post. My dear "sister" Linda from Tucson, Arizona, had received my Christmas card with a note telling about this blog, and she popped in to say hi. Linda spent a summer in my family in 1964 as an exchange student. I was so young that I had not started learning English at school yet, but I could communicate with her on some level, with the help of my elder sisters and brothers. I kept in touch with her on and off over the years. When she was living in Switzerland, we corresponded in German, and later I learned English so we switched to that. In the sixties my family had three times a summer student, and one girl staying the whole school year, but Linda is the only one still remembering us. It feels good to know that we could make her feel welcome and safe, being all alone on the other side of the world. It was easy to like her from the first day she arrived. She travelled back to USA with my real sister Maija, who was going there for a year as an exchange student in another family.

Gifts, and ponds

This autumn I have been writing a lot about old dyeing methods, plants and mushrooms. Melanie has been my most eager reader, and she wanted me to have this little book about "The History and Practice of Eighteenth Century Dyeing". Thank you, Melanie! I feel a little ancient here among the bloggers sometime, but this is history for me, too. I'll read the book and maybe I get some ideas for outdoors dyeing sessions next summer! Mentioning the old times here made me think of the children of my sister P, who once wanted to know if their grandmother had known and met Jesus when she was a little girl. "Long time ago" is not always so easy to understand for a child!




Melanie also sent me the beautiful recycled (made of 9 plastic beverage bottles) shopping bag, very light to carry in my shoulder bag.


And there was more:



You may have seen the apple shaped tea mug coasters on Melanie's blog; it is nice to think she has a similar set. Almost like having tea with her! There was also a beautiful needle book made from her rest bits from the original Polka Dot Girls Block of the Week quilt. Very convenient, as I didn't have time to make the needlebook with the Stitchers' Angels Swap pattern. And that was not all (do I sound like the TV salesperson with the knife set?): she remembered our mushroom discussions and made me the pretty bookmark using a Japanese fabric with the cutest amanita toadstools! Thank you Melanie, this was so sweet of you!


Yesterday I was having another combined health and errands walk, carrying the camera, and I found this last example of Finnish wild berries, the wild strawberry, with a late blossom for the second time round. You can see the little white flower right in the middle of the picture, and you can click it larger. It is the Fragária vésca, the "meadow strawberry", small and very aromatic; the big cultivated strawberries are nothing compared with this. But they are not easy to find in big amounts like bilberries or even wild raspberries.



With the leaves almost all on the ground, you can see the ponds of our village better. There are many ponds here, as the brick industry has taken clay here for the bricks they made in the 19th and 20th century. This is a small pond right in the middle of the village. It was called "The Pharmacy's Pond", as the pharmacy used to be in the corner you can see behind the trees.

And this is our little beach by the school. This pond gets its water from a spring (in the others, ground water gathers in the pit), and it is a swimming place during the summer. During hot periods there will be algae and it can not be used. It is now called "The School's Pond" but was also known as Death Pit, because during past decades of time many people have drowned in it.

There are lots of wild ducks (Anas platyrhyncos) in all the ponds. They gather in the village when the hunt starts; they know where they can live in peace! Last week there were white swans here also, stopping to rest on their migration to open waters for the winter. The Cygnus cygnus was a threatened species in Finland some 60 years ago, but now they are left in peace. This straight-necked, beautiful swan has been chosen as the Finnish national bird. The writer Yrjö Kokko wrote a book about this swan in 1950 and changed the general opinion for the swans. If you happen to see a 1 euro coin with a pair of flying swans, it is a Finnish coin!

This picture of the third pond "The Laundry's Pond" was taken already in April, although the trees look just like that now, no leaves left in most of them. The birds swimming here are called goldeneye (Bucephala clangula), they nest there and I have seen them in the last weeks as well.

This may be my last post for a week, as we are going away early on Tuesday morning and will be back on Saturday next week. The trip will include super-interesting, loud machines on a fair, a stay with my sister Maija, and most of all quality time with DH, with nobody else to take care of, not even cooking, cleaning or laundry! The next days will most probably be spent with cleaning, laundry, ironing and packing, and just a little blog reading. Have a nice weekend and next week!