Linnea 'Ea' quilts...

Because we've had both the stomach flu and normal flu in the family here the last week, I've been sewing to keep up my sanity. It isn't easy, when you can't leave the house because you don't want one child's flu getting any worse, and you're stuck indoors for a whole week. There' only so much that doing laundry, cleaning and cooking can do to make you feel better. Letting the kids watch movies is one way to make them sit still and try to relax and not think about how bad it feels when mommy has to wipe any their snot every 5ish minute. So, the kids have asked to see "Pippi pirater!" (1) and "Pippi Ville Villekulla brinner!" (2) and "Bilar!" (3) a lot. And I mean A LOT. (1) Pippi Långstrump på de sju haven (2) På rymmen med Pippi Långstrump (3) Cars (the Pixar movie) Like, we've seen Cars once now nearly every day. Talk about indoctrination, and mommy tiredness! But, in the middle of it all, I remem...

So, I'm still feeling shaky after the stomach flu, and our daughter has it now. Our son, on the other hand, seems to have caught the flu instead. Little boy's nose is runny, he's running a temperature and he is really tired. My poor little ones! But I managed, with a slightly aching stomach and an overall tired body, to sew a little last evening. This was before little girl started throwing up. So, how far am I on this project? The "Odd blocks color quilt nr 2" or "Violet and Orange Sawtooth Stars", like I'd rather call it.  I have 9 violet stars done, and I have 11 blocks kitted and ready to sew. Those "wonder clip"-type of clips sure are handy for this; just clip together all pieces needed for one block and it's just grab and go. And I still have just 16 of the orange 16-patch centers sewn. The one in the lower right hand corner is the first one I made, and it's points are gonna disappear when it's sewed t...

I've got the stomach flu. I'm guessing Norovirus. It started today at 5 a.m. Yeah, just the time to get up and atom/at'em, am I right? They've written on the  Finnish  National Institute for Health and Welfare  that "a small child is sick or ill about 100 days a year, in average". That's nearly 1/3 of the whole year. (!) And while writing this, I can't find the proper web-page, since I'm writing this on my phone. What they don't mention is how many parents to these small children ALSO get sick with the same thing, or predict the Ro-values for how many people get the same disease because those same parents still have to visit OTHER parents and get/bring them the same disease. Anyway, I'm hoping I can get over this stomach flu tomorrow and please-please-please don't let the kids get it. (Chance of that is low :/ ) Because of this disease, I missed (yet another) of the lessons on the knitting machine cour...

Again, a photo heavy post. Just bear with me; I wanted to document what I've done and how far I am at with this quilt. I wrote about this quilt in when I wrote the post about my WIP:s and UFO:s . The pattern for it is from Missouri Star Quilt Company, and I first saw it on their YouTube-tutorial and then printed the layout from their page . Unless you buy the pattern, you have to listen to the tutorial to find out the sizes for how to cut the fabrics and sew the pieces together. It is also the first quilt I've started to make that has inches for a measuring unit, and not centimeters. (Yeah, because of the pattern). I had found, during the summer of 2017, a very stiff fabric (in my opinion) from a ruffled mattress cover I had found second hand (while -also- in Kirkkonummi). That fabric might be some kind of flax/cotton mix, but I'm not sure. Washed, ironed and prepped, it's the one I'm using for the background. It was huge. So there was enough, once I...

(Again, a photo heavy post. Bear with me, please.) I checked in my Facebook quilting photo album for 2017 , and the first photos I had posted of making the first two color block quilts (for when Mikael's cousin's first child Luca was born, and when Maria and Kristoffer's second child Leonore was christened) the were posted on the 20th of March that year. So, I've been working on making these type of blocks for little more than a year. And I have Elisabeth Hartman to thank for making the tutorial I read about how to make them . She calls them "stamp collection blocks", because of the whole "postage stamp quilt"-idea you get from them. After making Luca's and Leonore's quilts, I had this epiphany about sewing 12 identical color block quilts and then free motion quilt them all a bit differently. For practicing my free motion quilting skills. And also with the motivation that it took as long to cut out TWELVE 5x5 cm piec...

I inherited my maternal aunt's knitting machine when she passed away due to breast cancer a few years ago. Yes, breast cancer - and yeah, cancer in general - sucks as a disease.  But the knitting machine, it came to live here with us. And I've wanted to learn how to use it ever since, but it's been just sitting on a shelf here at home, just waiting for me to get to it. And this year, Vaasa Opisto is holding a short course in how to use knitting machines. I missed the first out of the three 5 h lessons, but this Saturday I could attend. Machine in tow and all. This photo shows how far I got in those 5 hours. I learned how to clean it out, put is together, and learned what some of the major parts are called. Typical of women in my family, this Singer Memo 2 machine is the most advanced of all the machine is the class. When we buy things, we want the best...and thus my aunt's machine is one advanced machine with LOTS of features. I also tried makin...

It's only March yet, and I think I might make it this year too... So.... I put 25 because, and I quote myself " I'm thinking of putting my reading challenge for this year [to] be 25. And not change that, just to be on the safe side. ". Now that I'm at 19, I think I might consider changing it to 50, just like last year. And yes, as you can see, I still only/mostly read books in the genre Paranormal/Fantasy, and that won't change. But I must say, seeing the covers of all of them shown like this, it looks like half of them just took a hunk of a photo model and photo-shopped his torso into another color to make it more alien. Well, if you read about alien warriors in different setting, I guess body armor doesn't get a lot of feature? (Yes, I'm more than slightly sarcastic here :P )

(another photo heavy post, but again, I don't think you'll mind) I read a lot of blogs. And by a lot, I mean I follow about 300+ blogs (via Bloglovin) and read blog posts mostly at night when I can't fall asleep again if the kids have woken me up. Or when I'm trying to fall asleep. Or when I desperately want to read something and I don't have enough money to buy another book on Amazon Kindle... If it's one thing - reading about other peoples quilting projects - that I've learned, it's that creative people usually start a lot of project. And some projects get finished, and some don't, and thus the dividing line of WIP:s and UFO:s (works-in-progress and unfinished objects). I keep track of mine via my own quilt planner , and I move the project pages from UFO:s to WIP:s as they stall or I feel I have too many projects going on. But I thought, maybe it would be nice to see a summary of them all. These are my WIP:s 1. the Blue Roses an...