poinsettia

Happy new year!
For Christmas I made some handmade gifts and now that they've been given, I can share some pictures. This one was especially fun to make, since it was the first time I've designed a paper pieced quilt pattern. I've done paper pieced quilting before and love the possibility it gives for tiny precise lines. Inspired by our poinsettia I made this one. The machine quilting pulls it together and now that I've tried it I want to tweak the pattern a bit more (there are still too many tiny bits and pieces!) and maybe even write a tutorial for it. If you've paper pieced before, you'll know that the quilt is made up of bigger blocks. I think one of the challenges of designing the pattern is to make a few larger blocks rather than many smaller ones.

christmas tree

Our Christmas tree is making our living room a very enjoyable place to be these days. Gemütlich. Gezellig.

The red ball I knit from this pattern on ravelry. I kept it simple but would love to try some with a pattern. I changed the number of increases and decreases slightly to fit the ball I was using. 

I made the clay circle at the same time as I made these plates. 

And the little mushroom is just cute. 

Neuenheim fabric

The design I was working on of the Neuenheim shoreline is finished and I received the proofs of the fabric in the mail last week. I made two designs, one featuring the shoreline in a tea towel calendar:

and another coordinate fabric with stripes of the shoreline:

Both fabrics are available for sale in my shop. 

another box

Storage space is a bit limited in our new apartment. Since we have quite a few open shelves, and with many boxes left over from moving, I wanted to try to make a few storage boxes. I followed this tutorial.
I love how sturdy the box is (I used double layers of cardboard with the grain going in opposite directions) and also how easy it is to make it exactly the size I need. I have two more in the making but unfortunately no more of the forget-me-not wrapping paper!
The pictures show the step-by-step process.

boe zegt de koe

About a year ago my aunt blogged about this embroidery that she bought second hand and which she then gave me for my birthday.
I finally framed it today and wanted to share the final result:

Can you spot the difference since I got it? (Hint, it says roekoe).

Whoever embroidered this was amazingly neat, just look at the back! I learned a new technique of cross stitch trying to emulate the technique when I stitched the dove. The design is by Dick Bruna.

pumpkin postcard

This month I made pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup and today I enjoyed a bowl of home-made pumpkin ice cream. 

I used this recipe for the ice cream, omitted the raw eggs, and since I don't have an ice cream maker, froze it in the freezer. One small pumpkin is perfect for a good sized container of ice cream. It tastes creamy and delicious with the roasted pumpkin and coconut milk, and I love the crunchy roasted pumpkin seeds on top.

Heidelberg

I'm working on a last Heidelberg postcard. We moved from Heidelberg to London, UK at the beginning of August. A new country, new home, new job / work circumstances is not always easy.

I've been working on a design for quite a long time. Usually I don't take this long with one design, but I want to get this one right and make it the way I see it in my head. Its a postcard from Heidelberg in that the design features the houses along the river in Neuenheim. Kind of like these postcards from last October. In fact, that's one of the photos I used as inspiration.

Here's a progress update, since it isn't finished yet, and since I haven't written here for so long. Not quite ready to move on to postcards from London I suppose?

I want to use the design for making fabric, but I also want to use the design in an upcoming spoonflower contest for tea towel calendars. So this evening I'm working on watercolour letters for the month's names. Here's June.