Gammaldags torg 2013

This is an announcement mainly for my Finnish readers, but if you scroll down I'll provide an explanation in English too.

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Mamma och jag kommer att delta i Jakobs dagar i Jakobstad genom att vara med på Gammaldags torg lördagen den 27.7 mellan 9 och 16. Observera att platsen har ändrats och att torget i år hålls mellan Stadskyrkan och Skolparken. Även om du inte ska handla av oss, så får du gärna komma förbi vårt bord och hälsa på! Vi kommer bland annat att sälja

Hemstickade pulsvärmare

(se mammas blogg för flera modeller)

t.ex. med pärlor och paljetter

eller volanger

Börsar i linne 

med mina egna färgade och trycka tyger som accent

 

Mobilfodral i linne

med mina egna färgade och trycka tyger som accent

Påsar för smarttelefoner

i linne och med mina egna färgade och trycka tyger som accent

Välkommen förbi!

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Mum and I are participating in a fair ("Olde Time Fair") during a yearly festival in Jakobstad called Jacob's Days. We'll mainly be selling beaded wrist warmers and the purses, pouches and cases I've made this summer. The last ones are all in linen and with my own dyed and printed fabrics as accents. It'll be fun, and I wish you could all come and meet us there!

Here's a link to Mum's blog, where you can see what she's been up to in front of the telly.

- Annika

From Cuffs to Colour

After my second intense dyecation it's been rather quiet in the dyeing department. True, today I did some dyeing, but it was just overdyeing a pair of sun-bleached cargo shorts. Nothing much to blog about there. Last Sunday was Mother's Day, so I spent the weekend with my folks up north. On the train journey there and back I knitted and crocheted a pair of cuffs. I bought a kit with patterns and materials for a scarf, cuffs and a brooch from a local craft shop, Taito shop Helsky. Everything apart from the brooch is finished and ready to wear:

 

This is what the scarf looked like when I started. It didn't look very promising at that stage, but it turned out fine.

A couple of days ago artist Melanie Testa's new book Dreaming from the Journal Page. Transforming the sketchbook to art lay on my doorstep when I got home from work.

It's been a long and impatient wait, and now I'm eager to immerse myself in her wisdom. I started today by jumping straight into a couple of the colour exercises in the book.

First I did a colour chart of the watercolours in my palette. I use Royal Talens's van Gogh watercolours, for no other reason than that they suited my budget at the time I wanted to invest in watercolours.

The other exercise I did was to grab a pile of magazines and select a colour. I then flicked through the magazines and cut out swatches of that colour in different values and leanings. I didn't analyse too much, just cut out colours that suited my mood and that I felt were related. I was quite surprised by how much colour I found in these magazines. It wasn't difficult at all to fill a page, but perhaps it was because I chose pink. Pink is pretty hot this spring, it seems. We'll see what happens when I do the next colour.

Next, I glued the swatches onto a sketchbook page in an arrangement that was pleasing to me, and then I studied the different values and leanings and tried to mix them with my watercolours. This will be a really useful reference in the future, and I wonder why on earth I haven't done this before. I guess I needed someone to point it out to me.

For a good reason Melanie calls herself 'agent provocateur' on her webpage. She's very generous with her knowledge, and through her blog and video challenges on YouTube she has done much to help me along on my own creative journey. Anyone who wants to learn some really cool things to do with their sketchbook or visual journal, and who wants to learn how to use what they have in their sketchbook as a starting point for textile work should check out Melanie's new book, as well as her first book Inspired to Quilt, which I have mentioned many times before on this blog.

Thanks for visiting, and stay tuned for more of my explorations into colour and cloth. - Annika

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!

From Uruguay with Love

It’s still pretty quiet in Lundaland. We’re having a very busy period at the office, and I’ve felt quite drained for the last couple of weeks. Therefore I haven’t had the energy to be particularly creative. As usual, when my energy levels are low, I’ve regressed into knitting. I find knitting and the handling of soft wool very soothing and meditative when my brains need a time out.

Last weekend my mum came over for a visit, and we went to a crafts fair together. I found some interesting things, but my best catch was a couple of skeins of hand-painted 100% merino wool from Uruguay. I couldn’t believe it that this amazing and exotic yarn had found its way into my hands.

Hand-painted 100 % merino wool from Uruguay (!)

I decided that I was going to make the yarn into a shawl or scarf, and back home I started searching the Internet for inspiration. I soon found a fun scarf pattern in the pattern library of the Drops Design site. I was amazed at the amount of free patterns that they so generously offer on their site. Do head over there and have a look. There are 14 different languages to choose from, so it’s very user-friendly! I salute that web site. Excellent stuff.

The scarf pattern I chose is this one. It’s nothing like your average knitted scarf, and I really like the tapered ends and the fun bobbles along the lower edge. Isn’t the yarn delicious too? I’ve been lusting after it since I first laid eyes on it. But I didn’t let it distract me from my Uruguayan wool, though.

Knitting in progress. Some rows were only worked halfway before turning back, and that created a curved edge (as there were more rows squeezed in on the lower edge than on the upper edge). Pretty clever, eh?

It didn’t take me even a week to finish the scarf, and I enjoyed making the bobbles and the curved shape, as it provided enough variation to keep it all interesting. Below is an image of the finished scarf. There was some wool left over, so I’ve started on a pair of matching wrist warmers too. This set will keep me snug and warm when winter comes.

Something Finished, Something New

I love to learn new things and to try different techniques, and my head is spilling over with ideas and future projects, which means that I’m pretty easily distracted, although I prefer to think that I have an inquiring mind. I always have a number of different projects going on all at once, and an even greater number of UFOs that may or may not become finished products. Every now and then, though, I do finish a project, which gives me great satisfaction. Last weekend I finished two projects. Firstly, a hand embroidered piece that was shipped off to an amazing person overseas (I will publish an image later), and secondly, the knitted and crocheted wrist warmers that I started working on in January. Now I’m off to work on an art doll and the Franka wall quilt. – Or so I thought.

This week I’ve continued decluttering my home – a Herculean task – and found a bag of gorgeous yarn that I’ve been saving. So, there I went again, off in another direction, and I started knitting a slipover for myself. Well, my excuse is that it’s all part of the decluttering process. I need to find a good place to store the yarn, and what storage is better than actually finishing and wearing it?

Another thing I unearthed in my decluttering frenzy was an apron pattern by Meg McElwee of Sew Liberated, which I bought a couple of years ago. This project has been on and off my mind since then, while my old apron has slowly deteriorated. I also found the fabrics that I’d put aside for the apron and figured that the best storage for them would be the place where I store my apron. So I started cutting out the pattern pieces.

In conclusion, the situation now is that I finished two projects and started four new. It’s pretty normal for me, I guess. It will take some time to finish them, but I have faith in these projects. I don’t think they’ll end up in the UFO-bin. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

 Finished wrist warmers. Knitted base, crocheted flounces. 

Based on a pattern in Solveig Hisdal’s Dikt i maskor.

 

 Doll in progress. The fabric has been dyed and the pattern pieces are ready for sewing.

 Slipover in progress. Yarn: Freedom Spirit by Twilleys of Stamford

 Apron in progress. Fabric: my granddad’s old table cloth. 

The apron is reversible, so the other side will be something less Christmasy.

 Franka in progress. I started defining the pattern elements on the printout. 

This project will be a challenge, but I like that.

Tjuvtitt

Mamma och jag ska delta i Kvinnornas julmässa (2-6.12) här i Helsingfors i år igen. Det är nu tredje året som vi är där och säljer våra alster. Mamma säljer pulsvärmare (hon intervjuades av ÖT nyligen; klicka på de små pilarna för fler bilder) och andra stickade accessoarer och jag har lite av varje, både stickat och sytt. Hoppas jag. Som vanligt är jag ute i sista minuten. Det är två veckor sedan mitt senaste blogginlägg och under den tiden har jag försökt färdigställa mina julmässa-UFO:n (pulsvärmare med pärlor) och komma lite längre på en konstdocka som jag hoppas kunna sälja. I går målade jag dockans ansikte (ett av de moment jag fruktar mest och gillar bäst) och sydde hennes korsettliv. I dag har jag tillverkat sandaler och pulsvärmare. Bara limmet torkar på sandalerna kan jag börja plocka ihop de olika delarna. Just nu ligger armar, ben, kropp och huvud utspridda på olika ställen på mitt skrivbord...

Skrålla ner för en tjuvtitt på några av de saker jag kommer att erbjuda på julmässan.



Sneak peek

My mum and I will be at the Women's Christmas Fair (2-6 December) in Helsinki again this year. This is the third year we go there to sell our handmade stuff. Mum sells wrist warmers (she was interviewed by a local newspaper recently; click on the little arrows to see more images) and other knitted accessories, and I have a little of this and that, both knitted and sewn. I hope. As usual I started at the very last minute. It's been two weeks since my last blog post, and during that time I've tried to finish some of my Christmas fair-UFOs (beaded wrist warmers) and make some progress on an art doll that I'm hoping to sell. Yesterday I painted her face (one of the stages that I fear most and like best) and constructed her bodice. Today I've constructed her shoes and wrist warmers. As soon as the glue dries on the shoes, I will be able to put together the different parts. At the moment her arms, legs, body and head are scattered all over my desk...

Below is a sneak peek of some of the things I will offer at the fair.

 Dockans pulsvärmare och sandaler - Dolly's wrist warmers and shoes

Pulsvärmare med pärlor - Beaded wrist warmers