Colors...

Seth started school introductory course the first of April. Real school starts next week...

Most kids in Denmark go to public schools that has, or at least had a good reputation, but lately the smaller schools are being  merged into very big schools. Luckily we have a system in this country that also supports private schools that use a different way of teaching or have a special agenda  . Seth's school is a small private one. The whole school work on the same subject for a longer time. In my opinion it gives a feeling of being together working on something like in a family or even a workplace. When I go to the school I see older children taking care of the small ones and even being like a sister or brother. The school has 20 student pr class and 1 class pr age.

It was a big day and off course he got some new crayons and markers.

I made a bag for his new markers, and bought some real good crayons from Mercurius (Stockmar ). This place sells them in either packages of 12 or 24 and you can even just buy one in the color you like or if one got lost. I made an elastic band of an old belt to keep it all well together. Everything has his name on it. For the wooden crayons I used a burner to write his name with. I think it is quite important to teach children to care for their things and learn that its their responsibility....off course... 

One of the things that shows quality of different type of paint, crayons and markers is of course their intensity but also their color range. For me it is important that they are true to the color wheel. If they are not the colors will act strange and the red and the blue mixed together will suddenly have a brown tone to it...just not nice. All of Mercurius stuff seems to have this quality.

For watercolors to little children I have a little different approach and that is buy cheap and in tubes. The ones I got have strange colors. Some are opaque others aren't. The yellow is opaque and very weak which makes it a little strange when mixing. But with children I just find it better to give them a clean new fresh palette very often. I have a bunch of plastic palettes and When Seth is done with one he get a new one. I wash the palettes, put new paint on and they get into the everlasting circle of colors in our house.

It is no secret that I have a hard time to just sit down with my children, and (In my opinion... ) do nothing. I like to be productive, and I find it so much easier for me to do things with Seth that I also like. Making color wheels and building stuff is much more my thing than being killed (10 times...)  in a Star Wars fight ( While making dinner...)

These color wheels are so much fun to make, and we have made them with Seth's watercolors and with his Stochmar big giants. He also has some fine pointed crayons and I guess we should try it on those as well.

So much fun and so much learning...

Dinner tonight: pasta salad from yesterday. Added some celeriac and salad for crunch and some chopped olives to balance the sweetness of the roasted pepper.

Making dinner simple...

I have a tendency to overdo things... Dinner is the same.

I cook to many different things and I cook to much..

I don't like to throw food out ( Who does ... ) So what happens is that dinner often is something from yesterday combined with something new.

Today's scenario was pasta salad with roasted red peppers, salted and toasted almonds, shallots, garlic, pesto and basil. Some leftover pizza from yesterday and some hummus from two days ago... Strange combination.

So whats left after dinner is half of the pasta salad, still some pizza and hummus left.

Got to change this... do I..

The future "dogma" rules is

Keep it simple...

Don't cook more than:

Rise and dried pasta 80 g per person.
Fresh pasta 125 g per person.
Potatoes 250 g per person. if its the main thing, otherwise use less.
Soups 2½ dl. per person and combine with a side dish.

Use mostly vegetables from the garden, and remember crunchy stuff...

4 days with meat 100 g per person, 2 green days, and one with fish.

Don't be stingy with oil, cheese, nuts

My kids ( If they eat... ) don't eat more than a quarter portion.

Don't experiment to much, get the basic stuff right... ( This I probably will have a hard time with but i will try...)

Hope you had a good dinner for me it is coffee time...

Small polkadots for me...

I have been working on a simple pattern with just the amount of ease that's needed for a garment that involves no button or zipper closures.

With jeans and boots they are just fine for that everyday casualness that's my life...

Its just long enough to be worn with sandals on a hot day. Some accessories, a bag and of I go...

I made  a wide boat neck and a little white inset at the shoulder. The sleeve is 3/4 length in blouse style and I have made a little fold at the edge.

I like the detail at the neck, but I can still take a bit of the ease. Also a fitted sleeve would add to a slimmer overall look of the upper body.

Elderflower lemonade, rhubarb lemonade and family...

We don't have a lot of freezer space but we have access to cold storage in a basement, so canning is the right way for us to stock up on summer goodies.

We made rhubarb lemonade and elderflower lemonade. Rhubarb can be picked in spring and after giving the plant a break, once more in fall. Elderflower is really a thing where you have to pick all you plan for when its there. I made 6 liters which is not enough for us, and had plans for making one more batch.... Never happened ... something came in the way...i guess life. So next year pick it all at once...

My parents have this huge garden with an abundance of produce... It is really a waste to not use it all. So this year it is my plan to cherish and get to most of it.

My mother is the hardworking gardener who loves her hand tools and hates being in charge of anything machine driven. My dad is the one in charge of the machinery and all the technical stuff. For many years he was the one in charge of the workers in their nursery and he still likes to walk around inspecting and spreading good vibes.

In the middle of it all is John thinking...How the hell did I end up here?... He is the reflective one putting everything into perspective, and reminding us, that it is alright to take a break... Oh yes and he is in charge of the new device that puts caps on the bottles after the lemonade have been cooked in it for 10 minutes. Very safe storage.

Being The owner of a very good ice cream machine I always make my lemonade in the same water sugar  ratio that is required for a good sorbet. That way I just drop a couple of bottles In the machine and voila!...

Dairy...

W have very close access to organic farm milk.

Good organic dairy products can be rather expensive ( which is understandable... ) So I have decided to start making our own...

We normally buy 10-20 liters of milk

What we make so far:

• Yogurt Greek style
• Skimmed milk
• Cream
• Cream cheese
• Feta cheese
• Farmers cheese
• icecream

Feta cheese waiting for the saltwater

Yogurt  dripping...out of 5 liters of milk we get 2½ liter and 2½ liter whey for breadmaking...

Knitting for Dea...

I do like knitting in fine wool on small needles...but...it takes a looong time, so It was time to make some changes. This piece is knitted partly by hand and partly by my very old machine

The pattern is my own designed, using this method and the yarn is knoll supersoft from Holst Garn. For the garter stitch I used needle size 2, for stocking stitch I used size 3 and on the machine yarn tension 6 and loop size 6,3

The colours are aquamarine and almond. I like the combination of the bright colour of the aquamarine and the neutral colour of  almond. It was a very pleasant knit made in just one day...

Meet Molly...

This little lady had her 1st birthday September 28.  The weather was unusually  sunny for that time of the year. We had a garden party, which I don't think we will be able to have on many of her birthdays.

It was a very girlish party with lots of flowers and a pale pink cake.



The gift from her grandparents were a little wooden pram

From my sisters family she got a little silver bracelet with flowers. It is still a little to big but i think it will fit in a couple of months...

We gave her a doll that have a wonderful hairdo... from Sebra

... and an old dolls bed that I fixed with new paint and bedlinen. The blanket is a knitted towel from a secondhand shop. It was all new and have never been washed. Probably somebody thought it was way to fine to be used...

While I was making the bedlinen out of some vintage fabric i gave some thought to what this little doll should be named... And there at the border was the answer: Molly Aase Charlotte Lundquist. It was just the right name... And of course a quick decision was made to put her name on her duvet covers... IRL Veitex is an old textile design company and Aase Charlotte Lundqvist is a danish graphic designer

The last word is as always.. Deas! She certainly is very determined and stubborn ...

First came a boy and then a girl...

One of the best thing about making your own stuff is the ability to make that single piece missing.

Off course we have saved some  of Seth's clothes, and all I had to do was make 3 pair of baggy trousers to go with it.

The pattern is simple with elastic in the waist and at the ankle. I constructed it myself, and it has a good amount of ease in the back to make sure the pants stays nicely in place even under a great deal of moving around....The kind of pattern any sewing mum should always have in the repertoire

Once in a while the job is not to create something new and exciting, but just sit down by the sewing mashine and just make that something missing...

The 2 patterned ones is vintage fabrics and the mustard yellow ones are made of new fabrics...

Pattern construction and knitting a vest for Seth…

So here is what I have been up to:

I like knitting in the same yarn . Knoll super soft from Holst garn is my favorite thin yarn.

One of the advantages of this is off course that you really get to know it very well. I use to knit this yarn on a needle size 2½ mm but have gone up to size 3 mm for normal stocking stitch.

I have made a lot of measurements on different pieces of knitting and it seems my knitting tension is very much the same. Stitches versus rows proportions are 1 row equals 1,4 stitches.

I have made a big sheet of graph paper with the exact proportions. The orange line is there to help me always keep the middle of the design aligned. I keep it all rolled up in a cardboard roll.

When I want to make a design, I first construct the pattern on see through pattern paper, and then place it on top of the graph paper with a couple of paperclips to keep it in place. I then simply draw all the decreases and increases and whatever I need to know to start the actual knitting.

For this design I just used my normal children T-shirt slope in size 110 cl. and made the armskye a little deeper.

When constructing a pattern I use a percentage system, much in the way Elisabeth Zimmermann does. I have just extended it to be used in both sewing and knitting. Normally when constructing pattern you work with increments, but I find this way more intuitive and simple. I don’t know if anyone does it like this, but it seems to function for me… The beauty of it is that everything stands in some kind of relationship to one another, and can be used on all different kind of designs. There is off course some details you have to pay extra attention to like the size off children’s heads, and so. But all in all I find it a good approach…

Basics in the fridge...

I was rather tired of all these little glasses in the fridge. All different sizes and shapes which made it absolutely impossible to stack them in our small fridge and to get some kind of idea of what was really in there.

• Solution: Buy 30 beautifull glasses from here  and make a system that will last. Sylteglas.dk is a rather new site with a good service ( when I came to the bottom of the box they had included "free of charge" some labels...nice) So everything was put in the new glasses and now it looks better and makes it so much easier to find what I need.

•  Something about labelling:  I have tried different things and have found out that my best labelling would be something that is low key and involves no mashines ( thats often low on batteries or missing labels... ), Also it should be easy to remove without using any chemicals. The labels that came with the glasses, should be watersoluble so one trip in the dishwasher should do it, but it doesn´t. So I guess I have to try soaking it for a little while. If soaking it evernight will not do the trick, this is not the solution. I have also tested normal labels for the printer and they actually go of in the dishwasher, but that doest´n meen it will be same after a longer period of time ( I tested it after one day... ). I have a waterproof pen that I use for labelling, and ideally the best system would be a glas of labels and the pen...so I still have to be sure about what labels to use... 

  

• What we always have in the fridge: pickled gurkins, mangochutney hot, curry paste, limepickle, anchovies, maille dijon mustard fine, maille mustard with the seeds visible, sourdough for making ruebread ( I have a reserve in the freezer if it takes to long time between breadmaking...), strawberryjam, Chipotlechili in adobo, Ajvar ( turkish pepperpaste...), mayonnaise ( preferable homemade otherwise hellmanns...) piccadilly pickles.

 The glasses came with a glaslidd and little clips. This solution it pretty, but if it will be to difficult for the children to open and close I also bought some plastic lids the ones they use often ( If you are in doubt its the jams we are talking about... ) 

• Things we occasionally have: Pesto, sundried tomatoes, other jams, different kinds of currie paste, different kind of dressings and sauces. different kind of pickles. Hommus or other type of spreadings.