Hopfaldera

Haus Sweet Haus

I made this stuffed house toy from a pattern from Wee Wonderfuls: 24 Dolls to Sew and Love by Hillary Lang. I made the front Friday afternoon, and just finished it with the backing, ribbon gusset and stuffing this morning. Not hard at all! It´s a little break from making Farmer´s Wife Quilt blocks. I have about 10 new ones finished eventhough the quiltalong is officially on a break. I´m just always afraid I´ll get behind eventually so I frantically am trying to make up for that in advance. I´m sure I´ll take a break from them in the future, but for now I have 3 new blocks planned out fabric-wise.

I wanted to say Happy New Year too. Happy Chinese New Year: Xinnian kuai le! May the dragon fire us up to do wonderful things this year!! I'm planning plenty of them, not only Farmer's Wife's blocks, I'll tell you later.

Happy New Year!!!

Happy 2012 everyone!

Here are some photos of our New Year's Eve. One before midnight and one after.

 

 

New music to knit to

[Today is the last day to enter the give-away; tomorrow I'll draw the winners!]

Wow, Friday night Jonathan Ross returned on TV (on BBC1). To find out why he suddenly wasn't on a couple of months ago, I had to do some google-ing (use 'Jonathan Ross' and 'Andrew Sachs' for your search if you want to know as well).
But now he is back, and, to please me I think, he asked Franz Ferdinand to play some music at the end.
New music to knit to, I say:
(I kept the related videos at the end so you can look at some of the jokes and interviews from last Friday's show)

Birds of change

Change! That is what's happening today! And as the world welcomes President Obama to the White House, I would like to give away two bird ornaments that have been aching to fly into the world.



I made these birds for the recent Holiday Ornament Swap and still have two extras. They are for two lucky commenters on my blog this week.
So, leave a comment anywhere on my blog, and in the morning (my time) of Tuesday January 27 I will draw the winners of the birds.

(The idea of Birds of Change came from Regina's blog Creative Kismet)

update: The give-away is now closed! The winners will be posted soon.

Spring!

Today spring came...

A peacock in De Leidse Hout was ruffling his feathers trying to impress a female. She appeared not that impressed; all the humans out and about in the wood were all the more...

Mister Peacock gave up for now. On the calendar it is not even spring yet; plenty of time left to impress that bird.

We enjoyed lunch in the tea pavilion at De Leidse Hout.

A previous visitor left a newspaper at the table.

Brave Damaris and Emil even took off their jackets. Actually it was still a bit cold (it's February after all), but the sun gave everybody a smile on their face and a little spring in their step.

Tosti's (Grilled cheese sandwiches), Vitello Tonato and Tomato soup. All with added sunshine, the best!!
Springtime is slowly coming to the wood. So great we could enjoy it with the four of us today!

Happy New Year!

It's Chinese New Year! We wish our family in Shanghai a very happy Year of the Rat! We say: Gelukkig nieuwjaar and Emil (who is studying Chinese) says: Xin nian hao!

We are planning to visit China in this ratty year. In May we will go to Shanghai to see how big Constantine and Amanda have become and to see how Piter and Dan are doing.
We are also planning to see some new places: Beijing and Xian. Now I hope they didn't send all their Terracotta warriors to Assen, here in the Netherlands, because we would like to see some of them there.

Mmm... judging from this picture, I'm sure it'll be fine!

( I borrowed both pictures in this post from Wikipedia)

 

Life on the farm

In the Netherlands the television show Boer zoekt Vrouw (Farmer want a Wife) is extremely popular. Last Sunday more people watched that show than there were football viewers. Some suggest, it is because people are longing for a simple life on the farm. One commenter on tv described it like this: "In the show they sit at breakfast with a packet of margarine on the table; hardly anybody lives like that anymore".
Well, most people I know live like that, but never mind...

I like the life portrayed in the video below. Without the hardship please.

Our own Emil doesn't get in this much trouble, I assure you. He was just named after this boy.