September's woollen knittings

At the beginning of September I met with a good friend from so many years ago as she was back in Finland from abroad, visiting family and friends. We meet almost every year here for a latte and a chat. At home she spends a lot of time in an ice skating rink so I thought she would need a pair of warm socks to protect her feet from the cold.

The pattern is Lady-in waiting by Tiina Kuu, a free pattern available in English and in Finnish. It was fun but slow to knit as I'm not used to cables and using the extra needle. It was easy to see where I was going on the pattern, but I think I will leave cables for now and keep to my trusted methods.

My next project was to create "cheerful hats" for a lady who has lost her hair in chemo treatments. I searched the Internet for inspiration and found that the beanies for little children met the requirements better than any other patterns. The Flying Mitten, Lentävä Lapanen, had this baby merino wool in strong colors, so I knitted a basic hat in adult size and added the octopus tentacles on top.

The other favorite was a fox hat. My sister's idea was to add a tail to get some volume for the back of the head. As I worked without any pattern, just the idea, both the ears and the tail needed a second version before I could sew them on. This yarn is 50/50 merino wool and cotton, warm and soft and not itchy at all.

I hope these hats will be what the lady was looking for, and help her keep her spirits up. Maybe she will put a smile on other people's faces when they meet her wearing one of these!

New baby quilt, and yarn projects

Once I had the box with my father's old shirts out in the daylight when I repaired mother's old quilt, I took a better look at the ready cut 3½" strips and felt like making a little quilt with them.

It needed some more cutting but the 3½" squares for a 90 x 120 cm quilt were easily found. Now I have just the last white shirts left, and some striped squares. The blue fabrics for the star came from another project bag, the Business Class and Stained Glass quilts I made using my son's shirts.

This size is convenient for machine quilting on my domestic machine, so the quilt was finished in no time.

I even had the blue binding left over from some other project, and a light blue flannel with a baby print was in my stash of backings.

Octopus family has five new members!

Here is a closer look at the tubular cast-on I praised in my earlier post. It is easier to make every time I try, this is my third attempt now. I have tried it in a different way earlier, and I'm convinced this new to me way that involves crocheting suits me better.

The new pair of socks. 200 g yarn, two pairs of socks and still some yarn left.

Patched patchwork and new socks

A couple of years after my father died I made a light quilt for my mother, using father's old suit shirts. It looked like this, very light, but with a flannel backing warm like a hug for mother's little naps.

I took it back after my mother, and now after years of use it looks sad like this:

This one shirt seems to be more delicate than any other.

I read about repairing old quilts here , and decided it was time to save the quilt. I still had the last rest bits of the shirt collection in a box, so it was easy to pick new strips and hand sew them in place.

The new strip is grey, and I did the machine quilting on it the way it was before.

The weather is cooling down (and warming up again, like today), so I took out my sock yarns and bought some new ones, and started knitting for the Winter.

I really like this simple pattern with vertical stripes, used my muted colors and favorite heel together with the tubular cast-on. It makes the top edge look very professional!

After two pairs in the heavy yarn I picked a lighter one, and a brighter color, and finished this pair yesterday. The pattern is a simple knit 4 purl 2, moved two stitches forward after every four rows, and it looks like a cable pattern which I'm not very good at. Fake cables!

Today I'm trying to decide whether to knit another pair with this yarn and a different pattern, or to pick some other yarn or two. One color is tempting, it is so easy...

Forest Adventure of the Unicef Dolls

Hi again, we have not been here on the blog for a while, but this week we had a great day in the forest and Roger was Prince of the forest with a fern crown on his head.

There was a fine spruce, behind him in the first photo, so naturally he had to climb it.

Roger was so proud of his crown that Susan made me a flower wreath to wear, and put some flowers in her hair too. My wreath was so big and heavy that it was not very comfortable. I can imagine that gold crowns are not comfortable either, and therefore you hardly see princesses playing out in the palace garden with crowns on their heads. Maybe they wear them for dances and things like that only.

The yellow leaves reminded of another fairy tale where gold coins fell from the clouds like rain. Some birches are all yellow already, the Summer has been to dry here, and hotter than ever.

I felt special with the heavy flowers around my head, but the common yarrow was not the best flower for this purpose. Auntie told us that she had made a real mess with dandelions on her trousers when she was 8 years old and  tried to make the world's longest garland with her best friend. Dandelion stains are not easy to remove! Anyway, the garland was at least 15 meters long. White clover would have been perfect, no stains and a sweet scent, but their time is over for this summer.

After a long day out we were really tired, but luckily we had not been too far from the house, you can see the lawn behind our little hill.

Now we want to say hello to our new English friend Arthur, who may be reading this blog post. Hi Arthur! It is nice that you have the same first name as Uncle Ransome, who invented us all.

So, this was Titty again. Enjoy your Summer, or your Winter down there on the other side of the world.

Best Regards,

Titty

Twelve and counting

Summer projects are preferably lightweight, small, cool and fun. It is also a good thing to use up small rests of material, and it would be nice if the result would be useful to someone. I don't like to waste anything, not even my time, so when I'm watching something on the TV that doesn't require my full attention, I usually knit or crochet.

I saw this book in the Summer Sale of the bookshop, so I bought it:

The book has patterns for crocheted and knitted octopuses for premature babies or other persons who like to fiddle, like dementia patients, and many ideas for creating different looks for the octopuses.

I had many small rests of cotton and bamboo yarns from dishcloth making, so I started crocheting with the Tour de France TV broadcasts. So far 12 little creatures are finished and some empty shells are waiting for stuffing. I have stuffed them with the polyester wadding I use for the Unicef dolls but my bag is empty now and I hope to get some more today.

The tentacles take a lot of yarn so some have bi colored tentacles when I have seen that there is not enough yarn left for 8 tentacles. The book's instructions are good and they give explanations for their "rules" too. For safety reasons the max length of the tentacles is 22 cm. The octopuses will also have a hot wash in the machine before they get donated to a baby ward so they will be ready to keep company to the smallest babies.

Four new quilts in one weekend

after a long time of no quilting. You know I don't like to waste fabric, and one of my ways of avoiding waste is to cut irregular rest bits into squares and saving them for future use. Usually it means 2 ½" squares, sometimes bigger, but also 2" squares. I have different plastic trays and jars for the different sizes, and last weekend I decided to look into the 2" container. There were lots of little fabric squares! 

First I picked the ones in red, and some others, almost random, and the neutral ones, and arranged them into a 7 x 9 grid, and soon had the first quilt top put together and ironed. Then I used the remaining light squares together with the more feminine bits, and made another quilt. You can't see it really, but it is Titty's quilt in the bright sunlight below here. Digging deeper I found 63 squares in brown, green, grey and blue tones for the third quilt, that's Roger's above on the right.

I had been moving a stack of burgundy 2½" x 6½" strips out of my way, and noticed that I would get 3 squares from each very easily. I had some floral print rests from dressmaking, too oddly shaped to make a doll's dress but more than enough to make the second color for the last quilt. There was an uncut 2½" strip of the burgundy, and it was just the correct length for binding. Always a pleasure to use up something with nothing at all left!

Two of the other bindings were also finds from my bag of binding rest bits, one was what was left of a plaid border and also a perfect length. Naturally, the wadding was from a leftover strip of a normal quilt, and the backings came from my stash of recycled fabrics. Many reasons to be pleased: the joy of sewing and finishing the projects, using up material that has just been laying there, making something 'useful' with no material costs, and getting to play with the dolls a little.

The quilts could have been a little bigger, but as the dolls sleep very nicely flat on their back, they don't need bigger quilts. For picnics or sunbathing I can borrow them something more suitable.

Dishcloths, African Flowers and UFO finishes

After all my sock knitting I needed a fun little project to knit and decided to make some dishcloths to use up the bamboo cotton yarns I have bought many years ago.

With this one I tried i cord edging and bind off. It was not difficult but would look better with a simple pattern without a frame.

The red was a smallish rest ball and I didn't know how far it would go, so I started in a corner adding stitches in the middle, so my knitting would be a square from the beginning. The green was knitted in the same size just to make them a pair.

In the same box with the yarns were 23 African Flowers I had crocheted with the tiny rests when I knitted the first dishcloths. Now I figured out how to make half hexagons, and joined them all to this little blanket for my dolls.

Another UFO were these chenille pieces. They only needed the binding which I made with extra wide bias tape from my stash. They can be pot coasters or something like that.

Finally, the baby hats I knitted with the soft baby merino wool I swapped on the KIP day. They will be donated for newborn babies. Same patterns as before.

Our Flammentanz rose is soon in full bloom, there seem to be dozens of buds waiting to open. This is a rose we both had at home in our mother's garden, so it is nice to have one of our own now.