29 November 2011

Advent Doodlendar

I’ve been thinking about getting an Advent calendar. I’m childish enough to enjoy that sort of thing. “But what type?” I ask myself. I have been assuming that it should be one that contains chocolate, but I haven’t been able to make my mind up what to buy. The chocolate in the kiddy calendars isn’t very good, and I felt that an ordinary box of chocolates was a bit boring. I’ll get enough of those anyway before Christmas is over. And then I had an idea: I’ll make a Doodlendar, i.e. a calendar with a doodle a day until Christmas. Next I remembered one of the exercises that Melanie Testa suggests in her book Inspired to Quilt. In the exercise you draw a grid on fabric and fill the squares with quilting patterns. Some of the areas are left blank, and those areas form a figure (in the book a flower stem). I’m going to apply this exercise with paper and ink, and fill a square a day until Christmas. By 24 December I’ll have a completed page with patterns and an image formed by blank spaces. I haven’t drawn much since July and this will be a simple and fun exercise for me to get accustomed to holding a pen again. I will upload the Doodlendar to my Flickr account daily, where you can follow my progress day by day if you wish. That’s my Advent calendar to you, my reader. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Here’s the Doodlendar waiting for its first square to be filled with pattern:


 And now, to offer you something more to look at than an empty paper with a grid, I also offer you these crocheted cuffs that I recently finished. They’ve been living in my UFO-basket for quite a while, until I took pity on them and finally completed them. The pattern is from the book Virka muddar! by Maria Gullberg - a book filled with cuffs inspired by the crocheted wrist warmers that were used by both women and men in 19th century Scandinavia.


Thanks for visiting and see you again on 1 December!

3 comments:

  1. Your cuffs are wonderful! They remind me of my Norwegian Great Grandmothers mittens. I love advent calendars. I have mine from 50 some years ago minus the chocolate, of course!

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  2. Love the idea of the calendar too! And! I have been wearing the cuffs you made almost daily, I love them.

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  3. Thanks Jeannie! Yes, the star is a very common motif in Norway, I believe. The cuffs with crocheted frills that I made last winter (click wrist warmers to the right and they'll pop up) are from a book by a Norwegian knitter, Solveig Hisdal. The book is gorgeous!

    Melly: I'm glad the cuffs are in frequent use, so are mine! I have a whole arsenal of wrist warmers in different shapes and colours nowadays. They're quite addictive when you start making and wearing them.

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