Linnea 'Ea' quilts...

Putting 10 mm big jersey-buttons on. I bought my overlock machine second hand as a Christmas present to myself in 2016. It didn't come with any type of bag or cover, and for a while I've been fine with that. But now I've been needing space on the desk more and more, and the machine moved to under the table. Queue dusty galore for it...poor thing. This spring, I enrolled myself in a short course on how to sew with an overlock. And since II will need to transport it, it needs a bag. Like pronto. So, I've been trying to design myself an overlock bag that has enough room for the pedal, cords and some threads. Yes, it's the rest of the fabric I used for backing on Pihla's babyquilt. The jersey buttons opens up the sides. I tried sewing mesh pockets. It went well, but next time I will do them a bit differently. This is how it opens up. The best thing about the design is that the entire bag opens up, and that makes it really easy ...

People organize themselves in lots of ways. I, for example, used to be a real Post-it and daily-calender-using girl. Now, as both a mom and a phone-user, I use my phone/various apps to help me with lots of planning/reminding stuff. But last year I just realized that it's both nice and smart to document your quilts, as well as UFO:s and WIP:s. I'll admit I got the idea from Quilt Planner, but I needed something more budget friendly and not really bound to a calendar form. I found Taryn Villarreal's  project planner on her page Pixels to Patchwork , and I've been printing out more pages as I need them. She has both individual project pages and a overview page to print out. I store these in a blue binder, and when/if I need a bigger one I'll just buy a bigger one. My own quilt planner. I store project into three categories: "Completed", "UFO:s" and "WIP:s". So far, the biggest category is the UFO:S, and that's becaus...

I've managed to clean a little in my studio. As I wrote previously, I'm making one of my goals for 2018 to get the floor in the studio empty of "stuff", because it will be easier to clean the studio then. Fabric and sewing creates a lot of dust, so it would be nice to be able to remove it by vacuuming. And it would be really nice to get some leg-room under the desk, too. So, last you saw, I had a bunch of Ikea "Samla"-boxes up on the shelf, filled with various fabrics etc. How it looked on January 8th. I had a lot of jersey, denim and denim scraps under the desk, and I wanted those gone. As I started to go through those boxes on the right, I found a lot of badly folded fabric to make clothes of and a lot of fabric I'd rather have cut up into usable pieces and strips. That took me about two afternoons on/off, with the kids trying to both "help and hinder". Since neither of them take regular naps anymore during the day, I just h...

Pihla's babyquilt is finally finished and in the mail! Because I got the kids' stomach flu after they both got better, the package just stood there on my desk, waiting. Well, today I managed (together with my family) to make a detour via the post automat in Prisma. So she'll get it two days. Feels good to have that package sent. Also, when I noticed, in the car, that I hadn't taken a "after wash and dry" photos in daylight of it...guess who stood outside the Prisma store and did some quilt modelling? A really exotic location, am I right? Finnish winter wind and light isn't the best setting, but I took what I could get. At least, I remembered to take a photo, so that's a plus.  Right? I So like the way I quilted her name and birth information. Outlined it looks really nice. And that backing fabric was a nice one. Really busy print that nearly "ate up" all the quilting, so not a lot is shown on the back....

Today, me and little boy took the car and went to get some errands done in town. It's so much easier to only have one child in tow when you want to get things done rather quickly. Among all the errands we did were two sewing related: we got a package for me from the post office, and we went via my favorite sewing store (Halonen) in town to buy a few things. Package from the post office contained quilting supplies - my first ever jelly roll and charm pack! - I had ordered before Christmas. Needless to say, Christmas got the package to not arrive as fast, but that didn't matter at all. The package contained: a jelly roll of Earthly Paradise by Barbara Brackman for Moda Fabrics a charm pack of Color Daze by Laundry Basket Quilts for Moda Fabrics a yard of 1 yard Color Daze (fabric nr 42233-16 ) a surprise! maybe a FQ's (fat quarter's) worth of lovely brown fabric :) Oh, and it was the first time - ever - that I've had to see to that the import tax go...

Little girl's facial expression when she saw her birthday cake, when we celebrated her with cake and presents in bed, was priceless. She also really liked her presents (Pippi Longstocking's plushie horse, a wooden animal puzzle and a Brio tool box that I had found second hand and made into "Tweak's Toolbox" (Kirras verktygsväska in Swedish) to fit the Octonaut theme. I had sewn two softie carrots for it, so that it "really is Tweak's toolbox!". The Octonaut mechanic's catchphrase in the series is "I can fix it faster than you can say 'buncha munchy crunchy carrots!'" Little boy didn't seem to understand the fuss at all, but he seemed to think that the weird breakfast was better than the normal baby gruel. So he ate cake, even if he normally hates sweets. Little girl also managed to open her birthday card from her maternal grandparents on her own. She saw the seahorses and fishes on the card and was happy - more Octonaut them...

It feels so typical that both kids have the stomach flu, just as we were planning how to celebrate little girl's 3rd birthday. We had to cancel the party. Can't have any other kids getting this stupid stomach flu. But, as Mikael said it, why but all those ingredients if there then won't be any cake. So, late late Friday night, the day before her cancelled party and after we had to clean up even more stomach flu mess, I baked little girl's cake. One of her favorite TV-shows is "the Octonauts", which basically tells about these small cute creatures that work on a mobile submerged sea station as marine biologists and  explorers. Her favorite characters seems to be the medic (a penguin) and the mechanic (a bunny). So, mommy here tried to make her an Octonaut cake. Since little boy is allergic to milk proteins, I had to try and make "margarine creme" (not butter cream) and milk free cake for it. Thanks to the Craftsy page's YouTube-star Joshua John Ru...

Between trying to get to the end of the mountain (kid you not!) of laundry little girl's and little boy's stomach flu has generated, I finally got to work on/off today on finishing quilting Pihla's color block baby quilt. It helped keep me sane today. Since I had mentally prepared myself for a child birthday party but got the stomach flu party instead. No, I'm not kidding about the sane part. But before I could start free motion quilting on it, I needed to get the recycled green and black fabrics, that I had washed and hung up to dry, cut into managable pieces. Just to free up space on the clothes drying rack. To console myself (because just cutting up fabric can become tedious, especially if you have to iron it as well...) I made myself a big cup of that white tea I had bought from Tehörnan in Umeå (in Sweden). I have no plan for the green fabrics, so I just cut up 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 and 5 inch strips. I also left three larger pieces intact. The black wa...

Because I had run out of thread as I was quilting on Pihla's baby quilt I needed to get myself to Halonen (my favorite sewist store here in Vaasa). At the same time, I thought I could buy the zippers I need to fix two of my dresses, as well as some bias tape in brown they happened to have. It might work (color-vise) for the overlock bag I'm sewing, but I doubt it. Me and the kids took the twin stroller and took the bus to the city center to do this. Little boy slept the entire bus ride, and little girl almost fell asleep sitting in my lap. After shopping, we went to the library to play for a while, and then Mikael came to pick us up with the car. 4,70  Gutermann Hand Quilting Thread 200m, color 618 4,70  Gutermann Hand Quilting Thread 200m, color 618 3,25 Scanfil All Purpose Polyester thread 200m, color 1059 3,25 Scanfil All Purpose Polyester thread 200m, color 1246 2,00 Zipper, green, 30cm 2,00 Zipper, pink, 30cm 0,75 Bias tape, brown, 1m 2,24 Ri...

When we moved into our house in November 2014, I was pregnant. In January of 2015, our little girl was born, and we finally had made some progress with getting all our stuff unpacked from the moving boxes. (She was born 3 weeks early, so I guess I was both stressing and was having nesting instinct but those boxes got unpacked -really- fast) I had also then already gotten a crafting room (a "she shed" I've heard it be called, to counter the word "'man cave"...) set up. It was in the room that now belongs to little girl. She moved in there when she got a bed of her own in April 2015. (Before that, she slept in the "mammalådan" or "mother's box" that every Finnish child gets from the state). Nowadays, my (oh so tiny she-shed) "studio" is located in the tiny walk-in-closet by the bathroom. It's about 1,5x2 m. Not a lot of room, so I've tried to get rid of a lot of crafting materials. And use up, make do or do without, as...

Do you ever "rescue orphan quilt blocks"? Weirdly enough, when I told people (at one of the sewing courses I attended last year) about me wishing to become a better free motion quilter, there were some orphan blocks that found their way to me. This lone fox (pattern by Elizabeth Hartman, and yeah, I'm a fan!), to which I've added an odd yellow/orange rest fabric as border. Not sure what will happen to this fox. And then, because of one quilt I saw at Rachel Houser's blog "Stiched in Color", I dug out  yellow crumbs from their folder box and some matching yellow solids, and made these. Not sure where I'm going with them either. But they at least made the yellow fabric scraps a little less over-flowing in their box.