I'm ready for Christmas!

 I never specified which year. Did I?  This is my Julehue, a stocking hat with Scandinavian color work in grey and red. The pattern and yarn are from Stoff & Stil. I can't seem to find it on their website any longer, which is actually not surprising as Easter has passed a week ago.

This is an example of my enjoyment of the crafting process. We travel a lot and my house would be cluttered with bits and pieces of souvenirs had I long ago figured out that craft supplies such as yarn and fabric make great travel souvenirs. In fact, I enjoy them three times over.

Firstly, what fun is there to be had to find the sewing stores and yarn shops in various places. They generally are off the beaten tourist track and you find yourself in the shops and neighborhoods where people live and work. It is lovely to sample the local flavor of color and patterns. And finally, working out what you'd like to buy and make and wear. This hat is from Copenhagen, Denmark, remarkably the only European city which I would visit a second time...or third...or forth. Don't get me wrong here, I am just not a city girl. Once is enough for me for most cities, I prefer trees and flowers to signposts and sidewalks. This hat or the supplies for this hat were bought in Stoff & Stil in Copenhagen on the last weekend in October. We had just enjoyed walking past Tivoli gardens and watching the kids dressed in their Halloween costumes. Ducking in the door of Stoff & Stil immediately pushed us into Christmas or Jule. What fun! It was cheery and homey and comfortable and I found this hat and had to have it. So that is enjoying one of my Copenhagen souvenirs the first time.

Next, I got to make it. The pattern was in Danish and the process of sorting out the language and the wool together brought back more memories of Copenhagen. Yes, it took most of four months to make this hat, but crafting for me is no longer about piece production and a blog post every week. It is about the process and each step of the process from gathering the tools to weaving in the ends. This is the second enjoyment period. I tend to make this a long as possible and this is why I have a hoard in my sewing room.

Finally, I get to enjoy the hat by wearing it every winter and again remembering Copenhagen and the entire process of creating my own version of Julehue.

Land Girl's Sweater

I have finally finished another sweater project. That's two sweaters in one year! For me that's a lot of knitting. This is the Land Girl's Sweater by Rowan Yarns. It is one of their free patterns on their website. I purchased some Rowan Felted Tweed yarn in the Celandon (mossy green) color on a trip to London previous fall. I got to shop at Liberty of London for my birthday and this is what I chose as my present.

This pattern is actually called the Land Girl's Moving Cable Sweater and the two rows of double cables are suppose to wander away from the center panel and back again with the widest part of the wander just about at the bust line.

Because I am a larger lady, those wandering cables are not going to wander about my bust. I brought those cables straight up the front of the sweater. Also, I cannot just follow the directions, there is always a variation on the theme and this is my variation. I also lengthened the sleeves the original sleeves stopped at the elbow and mine stop below the elbow away from the bust.  Directions are general guidelines, right?

More Crocheting and Another Doily

This was a free pattern available on the Internet from the Antique Pattern Library.  Corticelli originally published the pattern in 1919 in a pamphlet entitled, “Lessons in Crochet: Book 5”.  It is a very large and beautiful table centerpiece doily, a true masterpiece.  The original pattern requires “Princess” Pearl Cotton and the finished doily measured 37 inches in diameter.  The original materials for this project are no longer available. I chose a popular cotton crochet thread and bought two spools, thus giving myself over 1000m of yarn.

This took awhile to complete. There were over 60 rows to this pattern and not all of the directions were entirely clear. Thank goodness for the internet and its many resources for photos of finished projects and other notes. My finished doily is 25 inches in diameter. It's now on a oak reading table in the library.

The Barnyard in the Bath

The chicken curtains are finished. They are most definately a statement.

The window is huge and sunny and directly overlooking the house next door. Curtains are a must in this bathroom. The mustard colored walls have to stay that way. So the second I saw this fabric, I knew I had to have it. There was only one and a half meters on the bolt at the fabric store. I had to have this fabric so bad, I learned how to order fabric in French in about three milliseconds. Fabric insanity must be the way forward for language acquisition.

Here it is up close.

After finishing these curtains, I still hadn't satisfied my need for all this chickeny goodness. I went back to the store and bought another two meters and made a table cloth. Now it's "cluck, cluck, cluck" in the bath as well as at the dinner table.

 I need to stop before they are everywhere. "Brawwwwk.....braww...brawww.....brawwwwk!"  "You cackle with uncanny realism. This scares me," says my dear husband.

Chickens in the Bath

Well, It has been awhile since the last posting.

It certainly has been a while since the the last post. Last September, my husband and I decided it was time to move from our rental house. There were many reasons, but the most important was that the house and garden was too large. We would spend all weekend in a frantic race to clean and maintain the garden and I spent most of the week cleaning and maintaining a house where we didn't use five or six of the rooms. We were both exhausted. We have downsized about 30% to a new rental and we've also been busy here setting up the new house and making it home.

Have I sewn anything? Miles of curtain remaking have occurred.

Have I knit anything? Yes, I've just about finished a sweater, I'm knitting the collar and I've slowed down with the prospect of all the seaming.

Have I embroidered or crocheted? No, not a thing.

What I have excelled at this month is cramming my sewing and hobby room down from a spacious studio to a modest bedroom at the top of the new house. This was good and bad.

Bad: Oh my goodness! I packed away so much stuff in that larger studio. I unpacked shocking amounts of stash fabric, yarn and unfinished projects.

Good: There is no storage in this new room except for open IKEA Ivar shelving.

Bad: I hate to see clutter any where. Do you know clutter makes noise? I can't think with all that "noise" going on.

Good: I'm going to have to confront my problem head on. There is no other solution that to clean up the mess.

Bad: Below is a photo of the mess as a confession to the depth and breadth of the problem. That's one side of the room. The other is just as bad.

Good: There is a goal. Pinned to the beam of the ceiling is a sweater pattern for the only next acquision.

Bad: I'm not going to allow myself that sweater until the shelving is neat and in order.

Good: A confession photo every month? Maybe? Maybe not? Maybe?

My French is Broken.

My French is broken. I have lived in a French speaking country for nearly a decade and my French is broken. I can read Balzac and Zola and I can ask for a novel by Jules Verne in the bookstore, but I cannot understand my plumber, the satellite guy, the post person, most shop keepers, and even the daily newsreader on the TV.  My French is broken or rather my French ear is broken. For ten years, I have heard nothing but one continuous noise emanating from any Belgian French speaker within five feet of me. Each and everyone sounds like the "adults" in an old Charlie Brown animated film, "Wawa wa wa wawa wa wa.." I cannot find the beginning or end of a single spoken word and I know the problem is mine, or rather my ears'.

I have tried to remedy the situation, with endless radio and TV. I've attended endless expensive lessons, purchased workbooks and CD's, and downloaded mp3 files to play while sleeping. My last French professor recommended hypnosis and I think he was being kind while truly thinking I needed more in depth therapy to release some deeply held psychosis against the Belgian culture. This may also be true, as at least a dozen Belgians attempted to murder me by car during the first four weeks in the country, but that story is for another time or perhaps never.

The problem is my ear and I have to be patient and so starts September and another round of lessons. As per my teacher's recommendations, I tune in the French satellite again. There are five stations. If I'm lucky, once a week there will be something interesting between the endless talking heads, game shows and singing contests. Tonight, I hit the jackpot, a movie. The title is in French, "Celui qu'on attendait" and it translates roughly to "The one we were waiting for". This sounds vaguely promising. I'm expecting some old villager sitting at a rough table in a dark room expounding about the lost good old days punctuated by scenes of rustic village life, food, wine, broken trucks, shoddy electricity, shady government officials and the like. This is roughly what I get, except that the old man in this film is constantly screaming "Je voudrais aller a l'aeroport!" Well, I get that one sentence. It's been repeated at least five times. I must be making progress right?

Yeah, I'm making progress alright. It took 45 minutes and half the film to figure out this story is about an old French actor who some how gets lost in Armenia and an impoverished village takes full advantage of his situation in scenes of rustic village life, food, wine, broken trucks, flaky electricity and shady government officials. And the vast majority of dialog, in the movie directed by Serge Avedikian and fillmed in Armenian, you guessed it ... it's Armenian. Well, I now know six slightly different ways to say "I want to go to the airport.", maybe the universe is telling me something.

Today's Whinge

Many of my posts on Facebook are in fact whining and whinging because frankly..Facebook is my virtual wall punching apparatus. It's cheaper than hand surgery. So take this for what it is...it is whinging. 

Today, full of optimism and energy, I hit the kitchen first thing. I cleaned out the frig, wiped the shelves, cleaned the stove top, cleaned the grease off the cabinets and finally, moved all the furniture out and scrubbed the floor by hand...with a scrub brush...and a bucket of rinse water. Oh man, did that room look good! Self-satisfied with the feeling that only comes with finishing off the endless boredom of daily household chore list, I went upstairs for my morning cleanup and since I had done all the hard and messy work of the day I was free to indulge in bon-bon eating and TV for the rest of the day because that's the lie all housewives tell the outside world. I put on some decent clothes and even pressed my blouse collar and then, I returned to the kitchen to rewarded myself with a large, milky, steaming cup of  hot coffee. 

With all that milk, I needed to warm my coffee up a bit more in the microwave. I stood at the kitchen window with my book in hand waiting for the microwave anticipating stealing about thirty minutes of a blissful reading in the sun on the terrace. "DING" I opened the vengeful white box, took out the cup and began my journey to the door. I failed to note the power setting on the microwave had been reset. 

Super heated coffee exploded out of the cup halfway through my journey to the door. Luckily and unluckily, I had set my newest cookbook on top of the giant coffee mug so as to have a free a hand for the doorknob. This move saved me from spending any time in A&E. I am so thankful for that. 

The book, however directed hot milky coffee laterally. The cabinets took a direct hit, my clothes, and then the floor. As a final punctuation, the book landed splat and directed the remaining liquid up my skirt, down my legs and into my shoes. I even put shoes on this morning, dammit, good leather ones, not the usual rinse and wear Crocs. Well, thinking, "no good deed...", I sighed deeply and in my damp clothes, I wiped up the puddle, tossed the book, wiped down the cabinets and the counter tops and finally, damp mopped the floor. Pleased I had, yet again, cleaned the room, I went upstairs to change my clothes.

Returning through the kitchen with a load of laundry ten minutes later and in some wool socks, I am now walking through cold coffee puddles. How can this be? Yep, the coffee had shot out laterally with enough force enter INTO the cabinets, taking a full thirty minutes to run though the pots and pans and cereal boxes, around the canned soup and through the dishwasher tabs to finally return to the place of lowest entropy, the floor, only to be taken up again by my wool socks and spread further through the garage into the laundry room. Well, here let me fix that for you...."no good deed goes unpunished, twice."  

It didn't end with the coffee in the kitchen...I'm now up to my neck with a broken over-engineered German heating system that has been taught to speak French. The manual is in German, the furnace heater's computer controlled programmable climate control system speaks French, my plumber speaks Walloon. I speak English and I still haven't had my coffee. 

The final irony to this day is that the ruined book was about Danish hygge.

Pattern Haul

Look what came in the mail today! More than I can ever sew. I'm deep into denial a to the level of sewing ambition disease I've contracted this summer. You should see the studio! I've got to make a priority list and stay out of my email box of promotions from pattern companies.

Daydream Doily

Doilies are very old fashioned.They are viewed as something belonging to the past when antimacassars were an essential part of each sitting room. Doilies protected tables from scratches from vases, lamps and brica-brac. We have little of this these days. And who has a sitting room reserved for only the best of guests? Not I. But I still like a good doily. I can't explain it. I can't justify it. I can't not have a new one.

This one was the third one I tried this summer. I had a bit of cotton thread left but I had no idea how many yards where left on the spool and I did know that the modern thread was thicker than the original called for in the antique pattern directions. So I guessed and I guessed wrong, not once but twice! The first two selected patterns are noted for future doily derangement. This is the third pattern chosen and it's called the Daydream Doily #7318. It's from a old book I own called "The Complete Book of Crochet" by Elizabeth L. Mathieson.

T

Daydream Doily #7318 - about 14inches in diameter.

Front hall table.

Small Repairs: How to Sew on a Button

This is the most frequent small repair that can be done very simply at home. All it takes is some knowledge and care.

Sewing on a button is easy, but it does require a few tricks to make the result professional. The inclination is to sew the button on very tightly and very thoroughly. I suppose, this is a response to make sure to never lose the button again. However, tightly sewn buttons do not allow the button hole to close snugly underneath the button, but rather the tightly sewn button spreads buttonhole causing puckers in the button placket. The end result is the sloppy appearance of misplaced buttons and no amount of readjusting the button placement will solve this problem.

Let's begin with your tool list. To sew a button, you will need some matching thread, an appropriate sized needle, and scissors. You will also need a "spacer" that are appropriate to the thickness of the fabric. I use pins for fine fabrics like blouses, a hat pin for fabric such as twills, and some round tooth picks for heavy denims or wool coat fabric. Beeswax and an iron are helpful to condition the thread, but not absolutely necessary.

To sew a button correctly, you must begin by marking the correct position. If you are replacing buttons, the holes from the previous sewing will still be visible. If the garment is new, make your buttonholes and then pin through the buttonhole marking the vertical position of the button. Remove the buttonhole side to the garment and measure from the garment edge to establish an even placement. This system works well for things like shirts where there are a long line of buttons which must line up. Single or short lines of buttons, such as on cuffs, can be marked by pinning the garment closed and pushing a marking pencil through the center of the buttonhole and marking the facing underneath where the button will be sewn.

 Use double thread or buttonhole twist. Double thread is easiest for most beginners to have at hand. Going out of your way to obtain buttonhole twist might be important if you are sewing buttons on which will encounter a great deal of strain and wear. Your heavy winter wool coat might be a situation where buttonhole twist might come in handy. Waxing the thread, by running over some tailor's beeswax and then ironing the thread to melt and set the wax will help with thread strength, but it is not necessary for a good job.

Now tie a knot in your thread and leave a three inch tail. You will need this tail later to tie off the button securely. You may not be able to see the knot in the thread in the photo but it is there, near the point of the needle.

Bring your needle up at the marked point on your garment and thread the button on to your needle. Settle the button into position with your thumb. Now use your spacer to add some slack in your stitches. Sew your button by placing the spacer between the fabric and the button in such a way so that the stitches will go around the pin or toothpick. Take three or four stitches for each pair of holes in the button. Use care to make sure the backside of your button fabric is neat also. Don't have a spider's web of misplaced stitches.

Now bring your need up to the front of the fabric but not through the button.

Remove the spacer and wind your thread underneath the button several times very tightly forming a thread shank which raises the button slightly from the fabric. This is the reason you want neat stitches. They need to close together in order to form a shank.

After winding the shank bring your needle to the back and tie a knot using that long tail you left on the thread when you started.

Finally, bury the thread. Instead of cutting the thread close to the knot and risking the knot eventually working loose, use your needle to run the thread into the garment between the front fabric and the facing exiting again from the back a little ways from the knot but for the most part still under the button. Cut the thread close to the fabric leaving a little bit of thread hidden inside the garment. Do the same for the long tail end.

The buttonhole will close around the shank allowing the button to rise above the hole loosely.

Blazer and coat button often have a shank on the back of the button. Sew these button on loosely also making a short thread shank in addition to the button's shank. The still assures the button to rise above the thickness of the garment fabric.

Follow these simple steps and you will lose fewer buttons.