Hopfaldera

Still busy at the farm

I'm still plowing along at my Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt blocks. I have made 53 blocks so far. There are 111 in total, so I only need three more to pass the half way point, pretty good! It's still fun to pick and choose fabric combinations for these blocks. And making the blocks: some are hard, some are easy, some are fun, some are boring. It's great to have that goal of 111 to work towards, and I'm learning a lot.

Here is #48, Homeward Bound. For the most part made with fabric from a tunic that Damaris put on the recycle pile because it was too small.

And these three are partly made with fabric I got as a gift from my friend Monique.

And here is the whole pile of 53 blocks. See them up close on Flickr.

Blackberries

Last week when they took the boat out after dinner, Frederik and Emil found a blackberry bush. The bush can only be reached by boat so it was still full of berries!! Frederik and Emil ate a large dessert of them, but the next day they went back with containers and brought home more than a kilo of super sweet dark blackberries.

This is what we did with them:

eat them just like that

make dark purple ice cream

make two pots of jam (the only thing I photographed)

make syrup for lemonade (we googled for recipes, found only vague ones, then made something up ourselves)

bake blackberry muffins (using a blueberry muffin recipe by Nigella Lawson)

We had the greatest time!!

This week

Now, what did I do? I mainly worked on assembling the quilt top with the blocks I made in the Block-a-palooza Quilt Along. I have done a bit more than you can see in this photo, but here you can see what it is going to look like. The sashing will be light gray with light pink dots.

 

The other main activity this week was helping Emil make a project report about the Mustela Erminea (ermine or stoat in English). It was fun, but also hard work, for Emil, and for me too.

This is what I did in my ceramics class:

 

  

 

And also this week I was so (soooo) jealous! Jealous of American quilters who can just go to a Jo-ann store and get the new fabric by Denyse Schmidt (see some of it here). I love her older Hope Valley fabric line (I made a quilt from it for Damaris), and also loved her Katie Jump Rope, but I only ever owned two FQ's from that line. This week I saw her new fabric popping up on Flickr and blogs, and wanted it!!! Unfortunately Jo-ann doesn't ship internationally! Luckily some people understood us Europeans and others who can't go to Jo-ann, and listed the fabric in their Etsy shops. I was lucky enough to snatch up a fat quarter bundle of the complete line from a shop of one of my Flickr contacts! I can't wait.....

 

 

World Wide Christmas Toy Drop 2010

I participated in the World Wide Christmas Toy Drop by the Toy Society this weekend. This is the toy I dropped.

 

I made this little snowman by using the Sleepover Pals template from Hillary Lang's book Wee Wonderfuls: 24 Dolls to Sew and Love and leaving the arms and hairdo off.

 

My drop is documented here on the Toy Society blog.

If you want, you can still participate, because the Christmas Drop will continue all this week before christmas. Again go to the Toy Society blog for information. Also if you want to be a toydropper another time of year!

 

Liberty

A couple of weeks ago we visited London! It was Damaris's and Emil's first visit so we went to all the touristic highlights (or drove past them on the Hop on Hop off bus). Of course we also went to the big department stores, Selfridges, Harrods. The best shop though was Liberty!!

 

Of course I got myself some fabric. But mainly I drooled on all the fabric that I couldn't take home, the wonderful Christmas displays, and the decor all around the store. It reminded us of the wonderful shops in Diagon Alley in Harry Potter. Especially the carved wooden owl that we saw. Sorry, taking photos did seem like a good idea... We did take a quick snapshot in the elevator. Can you some of the woodwork?

 

 

Binding

Tying Emil's quilt is going well! 169 of the 325 knots have been tied... I made binding for the quilt when I needed a little break from the orange knots. I decided against the orange binding idea, because it was a bit too much, and because the orange fabric that I had was not very nice. So I made mossy green binding!

I love how it looks all rolled up!

 

Now I'm motivated to tie the other 156 knots!!

Starting finishing

I finished all my bee commitments for this month (I'll show the blocks soon), so now it's time to start with the last lap of making the pinwheel sampler quilt for Emil.

First of all, basting the three layers of the quilt together with safety pins.

 

That step is done. Next is the process of quilting. I decided to tie this quilt with knots of orange embroidery thread.

 
 

In the meantime I'm working on a label for the back of the quilt, and after that I'll make orange binding. A lot of orange, I know, but Emil loves orange, good thing for a Dutch boy!!

 

 

My creative space 26

Today I'm working on two different quilty projects:

I'm adding sashing around the quilt top I made for Emil, to make the quilt just a little bit bigger.

 

And I'm quilting along with Aneela in her Pickledish Quilt Along (you can see a pickledish quilt block in the button in my side bar). I decided to make the mini quilt version (just one block) to learn this technique which includes sewing curved lines, scary...!!

I have picked out different prints from the City Weekends layer cake I got a while back. These prints are so pretty, I love them! And I bought a very light colored denim for the background.

 
 

Somehow this is my very favorite print, although I love them all.

 

More creative spaces filled with eye candy at Kootoyoo!

Fresh September

The new school year already started a couple of weeks ago with Damaris in the first year of secondary school (very exciting for her, and for us all) and Emil in 4th grade at the school we know inside out, with the same trusted teacher as last year. Today, on the first day of September, I am starting to feel the effect of the new routine. This means some fresh new activities!

* My yoga and ceramics classes will start in about a week.

 

* I'm excited to check out some new things that are planned for September in quilty blog land: Project Modern by the Modern Quilt Guild, a new round of the Quilt-As-You-Go Quilt-Along, a quilt-along with Fat Quarterly. Do you know of any other new projects, tell me!!

* I got myself lots of wonderful new fabric:

 
a charm pack cut out of vintage sheets, by JeniB on Etsy

 
Christmas half-yards, I got from Sew Mama Sew

 
a Christmas layer cake, I got from the Fat Quarter Shop

* I have some fresh new craft books:

and I'm even quoted in one of them, Craft Hope: Handmade Crafts for a Cause. Pretty cool!

 

The others are by bloggers I've been following for a long time: Alicia's Embroidery Companion: Classic Designs for Modern Living, and Hillary's Wee Wonderfuls: 24 Dolls to Sew and Love.

* New months, and new assignments, in my virtual quilting bees: stars for Anita in Bee Europa, flying geese for Melinda in Sew Buzzy, square-in-square blocks suitable for a boy in do. Good Stitches (I already made those).

 

 

I'm glad the sun is coming out today, and will be in the next few days. I'm not ready for a new season yet! Let us enjoy just a little bit more of the summer season before it gets really fresh!!

Finally

I finally finished the Ollalieberry Ice Cream Quilt for Damaris (excellent pattern by Alicia Paulson). Yayyyy!

(Thanks Frederik, for holding up the quilt) 

I made the twin size, nice and big! I did two things different from the pattern: I wasn't able to machine quilt with my machine, so I tied the quilt with a knot of purple embroidery floss at ever intersection (that took a while...), and I attached the binding completely by machine. After tying all those knots I was not motivated to hand sew the binding on the back. So I stitched in the ditch next to where the binding was attached to the front while folding the binding around to the back. It worked great, on the front you can't tell I cheated this way, and on the back, well, that is the back... it certainly doesn't look bad, just not the same as the front. This was the best solution for me! 

The label was made with freezer paper stenciling. And I did hand stitch that on!

I even dared to wash the quilt after finishing it. That was really scary, though... I added fabric softener (which I normally never use) and two color catcher cloths (I read about these somewhere on Flickr, and I thought I could use all the safety precautions I could find). After about two turns in the washing machine (I was sitting and watching in front of it almost the whole time...) the quilt spat out the first color catcher and tucked it in the place under the door where it can never get back in the wash cycle. About 5 minutes later the other one ended up there as well. I was getting a bit scared, but the water didn't look colored or anything like that so I took a deep breath, hoped for the best and let go...

It looked fine after washing and I put it in the dryer after that too, and that gave the desired effect: a bit of a wrinkle in the binding, and a very soft quilt!

I'm very proud of finishing this quilt. And Damaris loves it, which is the most important thing!

 

Our clematis started flowering one day after I took the quilt photos!