A new project and some new houses

Mr. K has been building new houses again, for our little friends. If you click the picture, you can count four in the trees. One came to replace an old one the squirrels had used, and one of the old bird houses was damaged when we had to cut down some birches.

 

 

The morning after the six new houses were put in the trees and four other ones spring cleaned - did you know the birds make their own spring cleaning too? - I saw house hunters at four new houses. Here is a blue tit, he chased some great tits away as he was showing this place to his sweetheart.

 

This is a birch where we never had a birdhouse before, but it was obviously a good place, because there were many young couples interested to see the house. "A modern, compact house in a respected area", I think. An old birch would possibly have natural holes tits use for their nests. The titmouse went in and spent a long time checking the workmanship. I hope there will be happy families in all the birdhouses so we can enjoy watching birds during the non-feeding season too.

 

 

My new  project suitably begins with a birdhouse stitchery:

 

The first row for Kaaren's Happy Scrappy Spring ROM (Row of the Month) is almost done. Tonight I will stitch a juicy big carrot and add that block to the end of the row.

I'm using all kinds of scraps from my stash, recycling plaid shirts and whatever happens to please my eye. The light outdoors is strangely blue in the last picture, where my row is on the snow. Yes, still plenty of that on the ground, and we had some new snow on Sunday and Monday, to brighten up the world. - This quilt should be finished in the Autumn so I think I can find a suitable category for it in the Craft Olympics Sylvia is hosting this year.

Special treats and new challenges

We continue our sightseeing tour in Järvenpää. This is Halosenniemi, the studio and home of Pekka Halonen from 1902. He was one of the artists of the Golden era of Finnish art. Melanie introduced another local artist of that time in her travel report here, Venny Soldan-Brofelt. We visited her 150th birthday exhibition at the art museum of Järvenpää.

 

Because Melanie is such a fan of Villa Cooper, I wanted her to see the "sister villa", Sibelius' Ainola.

The roof of this home museum has been repaired during the winter and the place will open for the public again in May. The timber walls have been boarded over at an early stage, but you can see details like at Villa Cooper.

This is an earlier picture of Villa Cooper, the big dining room windows facing town.

Melanie brought me a suitcase full of girly treats for a birthday tea. I had asked her about scones and clotted cream, so she brought those too, along with strawberry marmalade. We ate the scones ages ago, but I tried the delicious ingredients on biscuits and on toast too. The marmalade goes first:

Yumm! Here you see the wrapping from the container ....

.. and read some history:

 

In exchange, we gave Melanie a chance to try a Finnish specialty, which could also be worth a Protected Designation of Origin, mämmi:

 

 

Mämmi is a traditional Easter or Lent food, made of rye, malt and water slowly baked in the oven. It has a porridge-like consistency and is served with sugar and cream. Melanie is either really well behaved or she just happened to like it, because after the test spoonful she had a normal serving like the one in my picture.

 

Now that the busy season with birthdays, Easter and Melanie's visit is over I have had time to join this year's Craft Olympics, now hosted by Sylvia. If you need deadlines (at the end of this year!), have UFO's (new category) and feel like having company when doing your projects, you can click the button on my sidebar and find the new rules for this year's Craft Athletes. Sylvia hosts both in German and in English. Be a good sport and join in! My other new project is a BOM at Kaaren's blog, The Painted Quilt. Happy Scrappy Spring only started yesterday so there is still time to join in and make a scrappy quilt with some stitcheries and some wool applique. I'm planning to make this quilt entirely from stash, preferably with recycled fabrics. The instructions for the whole first row are waiting! A button on my sidebar will take you to Kaaren's blog.

Visitors

Recently we have had some rare visitors. Two weeks ago a trail of new tracks came from the forest to our yard, something bigger than the usual hares.

 

In the front garden it looked almost like little children had been skiing there, spoiling the virgin snow cover.

Then we had a better look, measured the marks and checked with a book "Tracks on Snow": Not a deer but an elk! We know they live in the forest but this was a first visit so close to the house.

A week later another new visitor came: Melanie came to celebrate our birthdays. I'm five days and some  many years older than she, so Friday was just fine for our birthday cake. It was wonderful to finally meet her in person after five years of blog friendship. I was so happy to notice she was exactly as I imagined her.

On Saturday we took the train to Järvenpää and started our tour with the number one on her wish list, Villa Cooper. As you can see, we had beautiful weather for our walk.

Just some Easter pictures from the inside. Decorated twigs like the ones children would bring you on Palm Sunday with their blessings in exchange for some chocolate eggs.

Lovely white feather wreath.

I think I will leave the rest of my tour pictures until Melanie has shown hers on her blog so I don't spoil her surprise. This is what I knitted her for her birthday, to make sure she will survive our cold March days during her visit. I'm slowly learning the toe to top method of knitting socks, but I'm still having difficulties with determining the distance from toe to beginning of the heel.

 

With these yellow tulips from my sister I wish you all a Happy Easter!

 

Tracks on snow, and finally a finish

It has been so long since I last posted, there just haven't been any new finishes to show. I have been knitting squares for a blanket using leftover yarns and some unexpected finds from my stash, but on cloudy days taking photos is a nightmare. A couple of days ago this leftover piece of the moon was still on the sky when the sun was rising.

 

 

The nights are cold here, around -20C/-4F, when the sky is clear. Cold weather means the birds need nourishing food, so the woodpecker had some fat with seeds to keep warm.

 

 

Yesterday we had a snow shower that covered all the old tracks. Look how many hares, squirrels and birds have been running and jumping in our yard after that:

 

A hare's footprints closer, the smaller prints are from the front legs.

 

 

Here is finally my Helping Hands quilt with binding and label. The striped fabrics are all pieces of Egyptian scarves from Melanie, who made a quilt with her friends' hands in applique almost two years ago. I finished this top last summer but somehow it just became a WIP.

 

I used my scarf pieces to make this quilt. It will end up warming somebody, who needs a helping hand. I remember that Simone used her pieces for a scarf.  - Yes, we have this much snow left, it is still very much winter.

 

One last snow picture from some time ago. Can you guess what has been going on here?

 

 

Two hares (or one, making two rounds) have come running from the left and sliding down the steep slope. I have heard of otters playing like this down the riverbank, but not hares. I hope they had fun!

Mittens

The knitting cafe Lentävä Lapanen / Flying Mitten organised a design contest together with the town of Järvenpää in order to find a Järvenpää mitten they could use as a PR gift. 26 pairs of mittens participated, and they were hanging in the window of the shop for everyone to see and to vote.

 

 

Sorry about the reflections. Many mittens had a musical theme, because Jean Sibelius, the famous Finnish composer, lived here.

 

The coat of arms of the town is shown on the mittens to the right in the next picture.

The winner, Eva Roos-Rautakorpi, left, and the chairwoman of the jury, Anu Harkki, wearing the winner mittens. They are inspired by the name flower of the town, Anemone ranunculoides.

 

My mittens came third, they are the grayish blue ones on the table here, and the only ones knitted in just one colour and with a surface texture rather than play with colours and figures. The winner mittens are next to the hand here, and a better picture is here. The black and white ones on the left came second, and the two other pairs got special nominations.

 

After the winners were announced, we had coffee and mitten cake.

 

 

When I was ready to go home, the sun had set and the tiny lights in the trees by the station were shining. This time a better photo, because I was standing outdoors and not sitting in the car. The tree I was trying to show you earlier is near the lake and much bigger.

Birds, puzzles and boxes

There must be some kind of lazy bug in the air as I don't get my sewing  going. I have ideas and plans, but all I can manage is some knitting in the evenings. The birdwatching nearly two weeks ago went fine, we saw 8 species but no big numbers of individual birds. The Common Redpoll was this year's most frequently seen bird. We have one male who has already started to change colour and grow red feathers on his chest.

 

 

The Great Spotted Woodpecker has also found our bird restaurant and enjoys the peanuts and the fat, but he also looks for insects in the trees.

 

With no inspiration for sewing, I have been playing with jigsaw puzzles from my childhood. Actually they are from my mother's childhood and youth in the 1920's and 30's, all hand sawn. We used to assemble them on rainy days in the summer. The original boxes are folded of heavy brown paper, many of them crushed and torn, some mended with masking tape.

 

 

I wanted to try if I can make new boxes to replace the worst ones. I took one box apart, made some measurements and started. Some of you know that my dear daughter is a master bookbinder; I think I have inherited some of her skills because this went really well for a beginner.

 

 

One width from the paper roll gave me three squares so I needed cut another strip to make a lid for the odd bottom I made with the third square. And so on...

 

 

First box completed. I added a picture of the finished puzzle in the box because some of these puzzles are really difficult.

 

Here you see this one: look how the pieces are cut on the colour lines on the minarets.

I made nine boxes in slightly different sizes, copied the original logos from the boxes and glued the copies on the new boxes.

 

 

I think I must go through every jigsaw puzzle, put it together, measure it, count the pieces, take a photo, and add it to to box with the pieces. Some puzzles have a note about missing pieces, but I also have a box with some spare pieces. It would be fun to find the right picture for all of them.

 

 

Winter lights, knittings and bird watching

There is a big tree with winter lights in Järvenpää which we pass every time we drive to town or back home. Yesterday I tried to take a picture of it when we stopped at the red lights. It wasn't very dark yet - our days get longer by about 6 minutes per day already. The sky really wasn't this black then. Anyway, you can only get the idea of the shape of the tree. There are 28,000 tiny lights on it, and the tree is huge and beautiful. I will try to take a better picture soon.

 

 

I'm still just knitting, but I have changed to Spring colours and a bamboo/cotton blend from my new favourite shop, the knitting café Lentävä Lapanen (the Flying Mitten, if Finnish names are hard for you to remember).

 

These dishcloths are fun and easy to knit, and it takes me two TV nights to finish one.

 

 

This winter the weather has changed more than during the past two winters, when we had no wet days at all. I haven't built snowmen on the warmer days, but we have had our bird feeders full, and after Christmas Mr. K carried our Christmas tree from the front yard to the back garden, and put a sheaf of oats on the top. Yellowhammers soon found their favourite treat, here is a couple of them on the ground under the tree eating. They must have other restaurants too, because I have not seen them again here.

 

The Big Garden Birdwatch event is again this coming weekend. We are going to watch the birds during one hour in our garden, and make a list by species and maximum number of birds seen at a time (so we don't count the same individuals over and over). BirdLife Finland will then make a list on their website with nationwide results.

 

The bullfinch also found delicious seeds on the ground, and the new snow caught on his face feathers.

 

 

 

I hope to see many birds and all our regular visitors on Sunday!