Publishing my new book

Yesterday I had once again lovely mail: Karen sent me the pincushion I won in her giveaway. It will be my "public" pincushion I can boast with in the sewing class! Here is a group photo of all my pincushions:

The white pretty one is the one Karen made. The other round one has an elastic band to hold it on my wrist, but I never learnt to use it. My daughter made it for me as a schoolgirl. She later made the brown one with polka dots. It is very good to keep by the sewing machine: it's big and easy to hit even when not looking, and it stays on place because of the heavy filling. It is filled with used, curly wool yarn from not mendable mittens and socks. The last one is a Cathedral Window experiment by me.

This morning I finally finished the tactile book for advanced readers.

This one has a plot, as you can see on the cover.

Soon will be spring with first flowers and migrating birds.

Then comes summer with strawberries and an abundance of flowers and butterflies.

In autumn there will be mushrooms, and the leaves turn yellow, red and brown.

And then comes Christmas and winter with snow. And then you can start from the beginning, because after winter there will be spring.

Sunday lunch recipe

The weekend has gone and I haven't done anything sewing-related. I have been cleaning and washing and cooking instead, and now I feel full of sewing energy again. I even cooked so much for our big family dinner on Sunday that I don't need to make lunch today, just warm up the rest of our yesterday's merimiespihvi. This is one of my favourites, my mother used to make it often for Sundays in winter when we were a big family. It is made of sliced (raw) potatoes, beef (slices fried in a pan), and fried onion rings and a couple of carrots sliced as well, for colour. The incredients are layered in a ceramic pot, starting with potatoes. Top layer is also potato slices. Add some bay leaves and peppers, a little salt on each potato layer. Then add a strong broth, almost reaching the top. Put it in the oven for 2 hours or more, 180 degrees C. Put a lid on the pot when the potatoes start getting brown. Yum! Serve with pickled cucumbers, red beet and lingonberry jam. For 1 kg of beef I would use 10-14 average size potatoes, one carrot and two big onions.


As I was so busy cleaning, I also needed to put something on the table after taking all my tactile book stuff (Yes, it has occupied our big dining table this long. We eat in the kitchen.) and my ironing to the bedroom. I chose this little runner I made a couple of years ago for Easter, which is this year very early, next week.





I'm experiencing serious difficulties with uploading the photos. I'll go and put some new laundry in the washing machine and hang the first load, and try again.

Yes, a break is always good. Five attempts before going to the cellar, and now on first attempt the pictures are here. This Easter flower is made with the paper-piecing method, where the patchwork is sewn with a paper pattern on the reverse, along the lines. This makes it easy to make small details correct and all blocks alike.

My new book and new plans

This is the new book Kaija brought me for by coming birthday:




There is only very little English text in the book, but the pictures are inspiring and beautiful, and there are drawn instructions in the "How to make" part of the book. I already started making one bag, or my version of it. I just had to start, because I bought this at the fair:

"This" means now the floral print at the bottom. I got the book before we went to the fair, and when I saw the print I knew I could use it with some natural coloured linen for my favourite bag from the book.

I know I have not finished the second tactile book I have been working on, and of course there is the hand quilting to do. (Household chores don't count, because I keep doing most of them, and the rest can wait.) Sometimes a girl just needs to do something else instead of the things she should be doing. And so do I, in case I don't count as a girl any more, being a mother of three grown up children. If there is a sewing/crafting person out there who always finishes one project before starting any new ones, please come forward. You must be a very special person!

And, by the way, my pinwheel block was on the Sew, Mama, Sew! blog today, in the bottom row of a group of nine blocks.

Tussilágo fárfara

Yesterday I was working on my new book for more advanced readers. The first picture reminded me of my schooltime herbarium. Coltsfoot, this is, I just checked it in the dictionary. I had never known that before, but for at least 46 years I have known that leskenlehti's Latin name is Tussilágo fárfara.

At my time, we had a really long summer vacation from school, but it included some duties. We had to collect our own herbarium, 120 wild flowers and plants when I was at that age, in three years' time.








Then we had to identify them, write (in ink) the plant's name, its Latin name, the Latin family name and description of the place where we found it, as well as the date. As you can see, I was a very stylish little girl, because I had green ink in my Mont Blanc fountain pen.







In autumn we then had to bring our herbariums to school to be inspected (some naughty pupils used old plants their elder sisters or brothers had collected), and then there was the examination, to show we actually knew our collection and all the names. I still remember lots of them. When I collected mine, we didn't take the plants with their roots, and so our herbariums were smaller than those of my elder sisters and brothers.







I liked learning the names, and when we got married my husband and I started our new herbarium. We got about 80 plants but also three children and less time. But as long as one of us can bend and pick the flowers, we can continue this hobby if we like. When the children were little, I used to teach them the Finnish names of any wild flowers we saw on the roadside on our way to the library or village center. I don't think they minded this, because at least Kaija has continued on this path with her Botanical brooches and journals. For some reason none of my links in the text seem to work, but if you go to paperiaarre through the (working) link on the right, you find the way to her etsy shop and the Botanical series.

Not exactly a world literature classic

Yesterday when my husband came home, I told him I finally finished the book. He asked me how it was. I was a little puzzled, but then I told him the truth: there was hardly a plot, but there was a certain depth in the main character. Easy to read.

Why did it take you so many weeks then, he asked. At that point I had to admit I wasn't talking about my Christmas present, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.

I explained it was this book I had been making all over our dining table and living room and downstairs in our "Hobby Hall" where my sewing machine and his fly-tying bench are. He looked rather pleased, because he obviously thought it ment clearing the table at least.

But he didn't know I just only started the other book with more pages ;)

Kiran Desai will be ready after 90 pages.

Today was the first day for the sun to rise before eight o'clock. The day is nearly three and a half hours longer now than it was just before Christmas. It is a promise there will be spring and summer too. That is the theme of my other book as well.

New project in progress

Today I have been busy with these:

and these:

They are the result of my Sunday's thinking and now on their way to be a little book or two. The bigger pieces will be the pages and the little rests will make the pictures. I keep my fingers crossed that my sewing machine will perform the satin stitches nicely ( in Finnish we actually say we keep the thumbs up, either way is very unconvenient when you have to hold the fabric at the same time) ;) . The machine is normally as obedient as anyone can wish for, but when I have a deadline, it often gets nervous and starts making jump stitches.

One example of the not very good cooperation of my Pfaff and me is this little quilt I intended for Nuppupeitto, a charity project for premature babies. They get a mini sized quilt or blanket from the hospital to keep as a memento of the time they spent at the hospital just growing and getting some strength before going home. Since both my sons were born prematurely, this project touched me more closely than many others I have participated. Anyway, this quilt ended up being my first attempt of free machine quilting:

It is far too stiff for a tiny little baby, and so I never took it to the hospital with the other ones I quilted more lightly. And then I have another one still waiting to be taken to the babies:

This one was at the exhibition of my sewing group when I donated the others. I always wanted to try this pattern, and the baby quilt was a suitably small project to be sewn by hand (by this time Kaija's quilt was taking a rest). The quilt is bound at the corners of the blocks only, and it is my favourite of all Nuppupeitto quilts I have made so far.

Cloudy days are best used for planning

Today the weather is really nothing like this, our little bit of snow is once again almost gone and there is water on the icy parts of the road. Slippery, grey and wet.

This was taken a little over a week ago, and this is how I would like it to be.

My sewing projects are not proceeding during weekends, but I have been thinking of many nice things I could do. For example, tactile books for little children, with fabric pages and clear images. Just pictures of forms for the very little ones, and for the bigger ones 8-page stories. A few years ago I took part in a contest for such books for the Celia library for the visually disabled. It took me nearly a month to make that book, and I woudn't have finished it without Kaija's professional help. She taught me how to bind the pages to a book that opens well although the pages were thick. It was worth it, I won the second price in the series Salaisuuksien kirja, or A Book of Secrets, for children up to 12 years. The price was a Kalevala Koru silver necklace. The books I'm now thinking about would be soft ones, machine washable and all. But there is still a lot of thinking to do, and to help that thinking I'm going to put the kettle on and have some tea to cheer me up.