My Christmas present...



Yes, I know this is a little late...

There are parts of my personality that is not concidered paticularly normal feminine features... one is : I don't know how to multitask... Once in a while I am incountered with a male person saying "you can do that you are a woman and multitasking is just your thing..." But no, I can't... I stick to one thing at a time, I focus and concentrate... Another is : I like gadgets. Not mobile phones ( They bore me crazy, and normally I have a hard time to remember to bring it with me, which is kind of the idea with a MOBILE phone ). But give some specific tool for the kitchen, my studio or even plain woodworking tools and I am thrilled.

This christmas I got an e-book reader... The kindle... And I was one happy girl. I spend hours reading the manual and testing and trying all kind of things. Now half a year later The things I partivularly like about this kindle is, that it has not a light screen. It uses the rather new technology called digital ink, which makes it possible to read outside in bright sunshine and also makes it very little powerconsuming ( It only uses pover when "turning pages" ). The result is this thin, cool to the touch 280 gram book, that can contain up to 1500 books. The digital ink, It is not (yet) in colour and therefor not particularly good to use for beautiful artbooks and other graphic heavy books, but for reading it is eminent and leaves you with a nice relaxed feeling of reading, that a computer just doesn't provide. But if you want to read about all its features, go check out Amazons Kindle website




I wanted to make a soft cover to protect my kindle, so I can have it in my bag and bring it with me everywhere. Some years ago I made a big piece of felted wool by knitting a big loose piece in Shetland wool on my knitting mashine. I washed it in the washing machine, and voila, I had the nicest thick piece of felt. I thouht that it would be great for this project. It was very easy and quick to make and I like the way the edges of the felt will soften over time. It has allready rounded the buttonhole to a nice teardrop shape. The big button is one I found secondhand and I sewed it to the cover with a thich warm yellow piece of cotton thread. I like the combination grey- yellow a lot. I made a tiny little bag for holding the cords and headphones ( I also use my Kindle for listening to podcasts...) I have made quite a few of these little bags, but seems never to have have eneough... I always make them with dobble fabrics, since it give it a not so floppy feeling. I always make the inner fabric white, since it just makes it a lot easyer so find the things inside than if the lining was dark. It has a dobble string system so opening and closing it is really easy.




These small, practical, pretty and nice-feeling solutions really make me happy and I am so glad, I finally got the time to treat my kindle with respect...

Late Christmas gifts...

My parents Christmas gift this year was two sturdy pillows for using when reading in bed. Well, that's not the hole truth... On Christmas evening I gave them their gifts. Inside their package was a book ( for my mother a biography and for my father a book about growing and eating tomatoes ) and a little plasticbag filled with foam chips and a little card with an explanation...




That's not how it should have been. No, of course there should have been two finished pillows size 90 cm by 50 cm and two white sheets for each of them. But you see, I am always surpriced, Christmas month is not really a month, it is just 3 weeks... did you know that... so, I guess I was late and the pillows was finished today not more than 4 hours ago... so this is really breaking news, and not just the historic crafts journal that you have tuned into.




I am not that crazy about soft floppy bedlinen. I like the stiff hotel kind of bedlinen, all shiny and cool with the folding marks still showing. Maybe I am just getting old... It seems I have never really payd that much attention to mattresses pillows and stuff like that... I am also very konservative since I really only like white bedlinen, maybe even with initials but that would probably crash severely with the rest of our lifestyle.




The rest of the day was used helping my mother mending some of her clothes, a bit of altering and putting new elastic in her overalls. The ones she practically lives in during the summer, when she gets up at 6 am and goes straight to the garden. You see she doesn't do any sewing, she can't knit, but she makes the best puff pastry in the world.

I started making my own clothes when I was 13. I basically learned it by following the same principle as reading a manual. I bougth Burda patterns. They had this great magazine for petites. I am 163 cm and the patterns were for 160 cm but they had very small sizes and I was rather skinny. I just blindly followed every single instruktion without having any clue about the big picture. Sometimes it ended happily and other times, well...

My grandmother was very good on sewing and helped me a bit, but I wasn't really keen about getting help. I thougt it slowed down the process way too much. I wasn't so patient back then. My father also helped me a bit. I especially remember that time when I had just cut all the pieces for a pair of pastel yellow pants with big pockets, only to realize that I had cut the pocket out from the one of the pieces for the legs. I could get very hysteric and even cry. my mother was rather frustrated not knowing how she could help me and usually asked my father to try help. I don't quite remember how he solved the particular situation, but he did and he was always very good in trying to make me calm down and find the solution myself. Writing this I see that is in fact a pattern I have seen in my adult life... Not that I am proud of it. But what the heck, we all stay as kids to our parents, no matter how old we get.

I hate plastic bags...

And I know I am not the only one. There seems to be today a movement going on, everyone seems to be using reusable cotton bags for shopping. Just some years ago it used to be only the elderly stingy bitter citizens who looked angry at you in the grocery line and took all the time in the world to find their little bag ( Often a old dingy thing, gotten as a promo-freebie from a bank ). That's not the way anymore. Now the hip kids use them as fancy accessories (just as people in Soviet Block used plastic bags in 70's - as fancy accessories...) Weird... I am not particularly young or fancy but I still hate plastic bags ( And has always done ).




All this going on and the fact that I finished the portfolio and had a lot of fabric leftovers kind of forced me to do something about it: I made 4 of these bags ( pose is he danish word for bag ). They are great. They can hold a lot more than the plastic bags and they are softer to hold, and you don't have to be worried that the handles will break on the way up the stairs leaving you with potatoes rolling down tree stairs, eggs all broken and a two year old who thinks this is all a lot of fun and quite interesting ( Oh yes we've been there... ). The bags are hanging in the hallway easy to grab on the way out.




Now I have to go on and pack for our little Easter holiday. We are taking three days in a nice country hotel surrounded by great nature... We are just going to relax and make others do the hard work... Happy Easter to everyone out there.

For a long time I have really needed to do something about the mess my sketching stuff is in. I could never find a pencil, or that particularly pen that I like. Just before going on vacation to Greece I made this little bag for it all. So now my world is just a little more organised. It is made from some vintage fabric and my own Crochet closure...Would like to make other thing with that type of closure