Songs I love

By Zee Avi, album coming out on 19th of May, a day after my birtday.

By bad boy Peter Doherty

...and by my favourite bad girl Amy.

Too much...

...to do this time of year: there's the garden, and the house that needs decorating.

My granny blanket is finished, but do you see all the threads? Hundreds of them!

When the threading bores me, I work on other projects, like this sweater for my daughter's doll (I'm decluttering her room, and I always end up doing fun things like this instead...sigh).

And I finally did another winter girl for a quilt I started almost two (!) years ago.

Two days in France

Our last weekend was spent in Lille, in the north of France. Lille is a charming little town, with lots of nice houses and beautiful shops. I took a few snapshots here and there, but to be honest, I was way too busy shopping and eating...




I bought books of course:
"Petunia" by Roger Duvoisin, a story about a very silly goose


"Paris", by Miroslav Sasek, a long time favourite of mine.


A book with patterns for cloth dolls and their wardrobe. My daughter is not playing with dolls anymore, but I couldn't resist...


And finally, a book with blue embroidery patterns.


The two craft books were published by Marabout, they have nice craft books and cookbooks too.

Happy Easter

This is the result of my work last week, I painted the wall of our dining room in my favourite shade of blue.

We have two brown and two black chickens. The brown ones always manage to escape, they just crawl underneath their gate, chicken run!

Nice easter embroidery, found in Marie Claire Idées, spring 2005 issue.

Topiary

Last week, we had a few really nice and sunny spring days, and I did one of my favourite garden chores: clipping the boxwood shrubs. I'm not exactly Edward Scissorhands, but after a few hours of work, I was rather pleased with the result.

Not quite like this:

...but this will do the job!

Besides gardening, I did a bit of crochet and I folded my laundry and sorted all the socks.

Messy studio

My old magazines and clippings and paper mess were starting to pile up, so I decided to clean up a bit in my studio.

And then I stumbled upon these books with paper dolls.
That's my problem when tidying up... discovering fun things and forgetting all about the mess around me!





Here are a few paper dolls you can download and print, and loads of other paper toys.

A splash of colour

I finally finished my striped sweater! It's a lot more colourful than the clothes I usually wear, but it's what I need after the bleak, long winter.


It was a long time ago, but I made another mosaic, and I think you can tell the theme: COLOURS!

1. Vintage Quilt, 2. tea for three, 3. For Now . . ., 4. NOEL fairytale dreamcatcher, 5. What My Daughter Sees When She First Wakes Up, 6. pink, 7. Storage, 8. PinkYarn, 9. Selina Lake -shelf, 10. strawberries, 11. ...in one kiss, you'll know all I haven't said, 12. Half Dresser, 13. Needled Color, 14. oct05 003, 15. Bonito...um projeto, 16. Cat among the cherry blossoms 2

A bit of spring

Today is a very, very gloomy day and I feel a bad cold coming up. Yugh...
But yesterday was a day full of promises.
I finished my yellow socks, it's still cold enough to wear woollen socks.

I discovered the first flowers of 2009 in my garden.

And this picture makes me happy, just by looking at it. You can almost feel the warmth of the sun!

Self binding

For my little cat's quilt, I decided not to use bias binding, but the system of self binding instead. Quilt back must be at least 2,5 cm/1 inch wider at each edge than quilt top to use this system. First of all, you have to trim quilt top and padding evenly.

On the wrong side of quilt back, mark a line 2,5cm/1 inch away from trimmed quilt top all around, then cut along line.

At each corner, fold quilt back so corner point of back touches corner point of quilt top and padding. Cut off corner as shown.

Fold trimmed corner onto quilt top diagonally.

Now fold raw edges of quilt back 6mm/o,25inch in to wrong side. Fold quilt back onto quilt top along one side, pin to secure. Fold adjacent corner onto quilt top, forming a diagonal mitre at the corner.
Now sew folded edge of binding to quilt top using a matching thread. Remove pins as you go along. Slipstitch mitred edges together at corners (2).



And this is the result: a happy cat. I took this photo a few minutes after I finished the quilt.

Tutorial was taken from this book.

A cat's quilt

February is the shortest month of the year, but it always feels like it is lasting for ever and ever and ever...
I am in desperate need of a bit of sunlight, spring flowers, singing birds, etc...
When I look in magazines at pictures like these (from the spring edition of Marie Claire Idées) , I want bright colours in my house and in my garden.


I know I haven't finished a lot of my projects lately, I have a deadline for a job on the 4th of March, but I did it anyway: I started a little quilt for my cats. I've never made a doll-sized quilt before, and it was quite fun, I finished it in only 2 evenings (hand-stitched).
And tonight I want to start quilting it in front of a good movie!

I hope this cute boy will like his quilt.

Blue mittens

Somehow I managed to finish these mittens, although I really had no time for fun things like knitting lately. I made them for my husband, he wears them at his desk. This winter has been so cold and dark and long... Can you tell how much I long for spring?

A working girl

Find me on Polyvore
I discovered this fun site on Trudi's blog, and I made myself this outfit. I seem to spend all my time working at the computer these last weeks (I have a deadline for the end of this month) and making this set was a good intermezzo.