Holiday in the Netherlands 🇳🇱 Part 1

David and I have come back from 8 days in The Netherlands, firstly by taking a river cruise, then a few days stay in Amsterdam. Last Thursday we flew from Southampton Airport to Schipol in Amsterdam for transfer to our ship (in sailing terms the passenger carrying vessels are called ships, not boats). There were long queues at Schipol Airport to get through passport control, which apparently is nothing unusual, but having got through that we found our transfer to the ship. There’d also been problems with flights out of UK airports due to bad weather so sailing was a little late. View across Amsterdam from the ship.

Our first stop was Enkhuizen a town to the north which has an outdoor museum called the Zuider Zee Museum, to which you arrived by boat from the quay. 

The lime kilns near the entrance 

I took a photo of the map of the museum to guide us around

Looking over the water towards Enkhuizen town.  We didn’t get time to see the town itself.

A row of cottages

And inside one of them. Look at the different tiles around the hearth and chimney breast.

Of course there was a windmill, two photos taken (not two windmills).

We were there just for the morning as the ship sailed in the large lakes to get to Rotterdam for the next day. There we had a guided walk about part of the city.

The old harbour, with the White Huis based on buildings in America and the first high rise building in Europe. It was the first to have an elevator and electric light.  Below another innovation, the Cube houses, designed by Piet Blom and here’s a link about them.

Behind is block of apartments called The Pencil and you can guess why! Because the city was bombed severely during the Second World War a lot of the building are modern.  After the morning in Rotterdam it was off to Kinderdijk in the afternoon. This is a World Heritage site and it was very busy with visitors.

The windmills are for pumping water, not for grinding grain and each has a small reservoir for pumping out water. As you can see there’s a series of them, each was run by a family who lived in cramped conditions.  

This was a recreation of the living area and like most Dutch houses there are cupboards inbuilt for their precious objects.

I’m going to stop here to upload and there’ll be lots of tulip pictures from Keukenhof soon.

Beginning of April

 

Today is the 6th April. If I was working (I retired nearly 6 years ago) yesterday’s date and today’s would have meant the tax year end for 2023/24 and start of 2024/25.  I’m pleased I don’t have to work to that pressure any more but when these dates come around I still think it as a new year.  With spring here at last it’s good to think there are nice days ahead, even though it’s still very windy and rainy today, much like the winter!

Anyway I have a couple of finishes to report. The main one is a fox. Three weeks I purchased Florrie the Chicken Mad Fox from Lucy Locketland, when I saw a post on Instagram. I could not resist her, she is so pretty.  The kit came five days later and I immediately started working on her.

The kit came with all the yarn to make Florrie, her dress and cardigan, underneath the yarn is the woollen stuffing and a couple of chicken stitch markers, the little one of which I’ve used as a brooch on her cardigan. All the instructions including Lucy’s pattern for the dress and adaptations to the original pattern by Julie Williams, the designer behind Little Cotton Rabbits.  The kit was part of Lucy’s Year of Cotton Rabbits series. 

By the end of last month I had some foxy pieces and a dress knitted (see my monthly marker at the top,of this post for a close up).

I was also finishing off the clown ready for Cecily’s birthday (see my last post) so Florrie to a back seat for a few days but I was back on it as soon as I could. There was a cardigan, feet and legs (each leg and foot was worked in one piece), sewing the pieces together and stuffing.  I’m pleased to say that she’s finished.

She’s a lovely bit of frippery but I also learn a lot from making a little character, especially with the shaping - invisible increases and correct decreases to get the shapes just right. Making a 3D item to look like it should.  I would like to make a sheep one to join my other softie sheep and I’ll probably make that later in the year. 

My second make has been a succulent, a String of Pearls.  This is from a book by Emma Varnam called Crochet Succulents, which I’ve had for a few years.  I’ve got a plant display with owl plant pots which was a birthday present year before last and although I’ve bought little plants, they’ve not survived.  Last month I made a ball cactus with a little flower.  This time I’ve made the String of Pearls, which involves crochets bobbles. This is literally a quick make, which took a couple of evenings making the stands of bobbles, then the ‘soil’ cushion to stuff and sew the strands into.

Then it joined the other plants in the plant arrangement.

I then had a lovely little pot for Mothers Day last month but with just a ball of soil and a Viola but that dried out and died.  I should have planted in the garden straight away. So that will be another contender for a crochet succulent makeover, because the pot looks so cheery.

But that is going to wait until I come back from our holiday to Holland, where we go off to on Thursday for a week.

Blimey, It’s the End of March

 How did that happen? This year is whizzing by a break neck speed! It’s the Easter weekend already and tomorrow will be April.

So what has kept me busy this month.  First, a finish at the beginning, which was my second Sungold lap blanket in the Dahlia stitch, which I posted about here. The two blankets came in useful recently when we had a cold night the early last week without heating as we had the boiler replaced.  Here’s a pic of both blankets together (the first one was finished last month) and there was still some yarn left! 

I did a small crochet make to replace a cactus that I had neglected (I’m not good at keeping houseplants) and dug out my book of Crochet Succulents by Emma Varnam to make a small ball cactus with a little pink flower.  I had to make the crochet ‘soil’ to fit into the little planter with fewer rows to fit it, but it looks good and I will make two more to fit in the planter. There is a real plant next to it, hanging on for dear life! This was a quick make which only took an afternoon.

Another bit of knitting done is this clown, Mr Fortywinks, which I’ve mentioned on the blog in my last post just a few days ago.

Now on the needles is Florrie the Chicken Mad Fox. She just looked so cute. I’ve got as far as making the body parts other than the legs and am currently making Florrie’s Cardigan.

This was a kit from Lucy Locket Land, the pattern by Julie Williams of Little Cotton Rabbits. There is a lot of detail.   I would like to make a sheep one later.

So that yarny stuff, but there has been some stitching.  With the middle of the month being International Quilting Day I did some quilting of some blocks which will eventually be joined Quilt As You Go style.

Some of the blocks were made last year, some several years before and it was time to start making the blocks into a quilt,  but as yet not joined together, but getting there.

I made myself a big bag, just like the large red one I’ve made way back in 2008, but this time in blue. A good size to take to workshops. I made a large sew and flip quilted panel and cut off part of the panel to make gussets for the sides.  A good contrast for the inside of the bag helps to make things easier to find.

A joint effort this month was to recover the dining chairs and there are 6 of them.  They were recovered several years ago in vinyl fabric, which was crumbling.  It’s getting harder to find furnishing fabric by the metre, but found in Westbourne (between Bournemouth and Poole) this crushed velvet effect fabric. It’s smartened them up a treat. (That’s not a real dog, just our doorstop).

I have been doing some paper crafting this month with the Townswomen’s Guild i Group making a couple of cards using folded squares of double sided card, onto mirror card. I didn’t have plain 12” card for the base so used a patterned on which was white on one side.

My ATC for this month is ‘Alphabets’ and I made this using cut out letters from magazines (one crochet, one quilting) on a painted (not by me) background. I covered over with Modge Podge to make sure the letter ps were really stuck down. The border top and bottom were the stitch diagram from the crochet magazine.

I did make a doodle version, but decided not to send that. It may be something to have another go at sometime though.

No wonder this month went quickly.  Next month I hope to have a finished fox and the quilt blocks progressed further, but April we will be on holiday for 8 days in Holland.

Happy Easter 🐣

 And today a make was gifted!  I finished a clown for Cecily, my youngest granddaughter, for her 5th birthday. This was Mr Fortywinks, Mark 3 as I’ve already made one years back for my eldest granddaughter when she was young in 2016 (she’s 17 now) and for Flo a couple of years ago. In between I’ve made Godfrey Gadabout for the eldest’s sister in 2017. The patterns are quite old now and designed by the late Jean Greenhowe. All the links above relate to my posts about the individual clowns. I hope I’m done with clowns for a while. 

As my reward I treated myself to a kit from Lucy Locketland of Florrie the Chicken Mad Fox 🦊.  She did look really cute. This kit uses a patterns for fox and clothes by Julie Williams of Little Cotton Rabbits (do have a look at her blog, the latest post shows her making more animals and photos of nature too). The kit came within a few days and everything, yarn, patterns and woollen stuffing were all included along with a couple of chicken stitch markers.

So far as at today I’ve made a head, one ear, arms and a tail of the body and knitted (but not sewn up) the dress.  These pieces are quite intricate and there are some new to me things to learn, like the backwards and forwards cast on stitches to increase. 

So this will be my project over Easter.  I’ll go through my projects at the month end, coming up on Sunday.

A Wee Bit of Sewing

 Saturday 16 was (Inter)National Quilting Day and a long time ago my friend and myself arranged a Quilters’ Day.  But these days I’m on my own and this year I had a project to finish.  Back in 2008 I went on a quilt retreat in Devon (post about this here)and made a quilt and large project bag and I decided it was time to make another. I started the week before (it was raining again, perfect sewing weather) to make a large sew and flip panel, part of which was cut to form gusset pieces for side.

Above is the old bag.

This is the new bag in progress with strips around he side gusset panels

Now with the fabric strips, handles and top strips.

It even sports a pocket, look at all those elephants on the lining fabric. I look forward to using this next time I’m at the embroidery group.  While at the machine some strips turned into a quilted square for a pouch once I get some zips.

Sunday was spent quilting some quilt as you go blocks, some of which were sewn last year and had been layered up ready to machine quilt (very basic, just quilt in the ditch). Five were already done so I had seven more to do.  I’ve laid the blocks out on the spare bed so I have time to rearrange. As you can see the colour scheme is pink, red and purple with low volume white background.  The backs of the blocks are purple, lilac pink and red. Watch this space for more progress on this.

There will be some knitting coming up soon as a clown is making progress.

Tale of Two Blankets

 I’ve finished a second lap blanket today.  This was using the Sungold yarn pack from Wool Warehouse and patterns by Lucy of Attic 24. I started with the Crochet A Long (CAL) in January to make a lap sized version of the Sungold blanket pattern.  At the same time as I was crocheting the instalments of this blanket I also started on another one but using the Dahlia stitch pattern. Having gone onto the Attic24 and more Facebook group, there had been several people who were have previously made two lap blankets with a yarn pack (there are 15 assorted Stylecraft yarn colours in this pack).

The normal sized blanket would fit a single bed, which is quite large. Fortunately in the pattern Lucy gives the stitch count and number of stripes for different sizes of blankets, be it cot size or king size. 

Part 7 of the CAL were the instructions for the border rows, which I worked on the first blanket and the first time in this I played yarn chicken with the Lavender and Gold colours and won, with tiny bits left.  I consequently had to change the colour order of the border on the second blanket.

The Dahlia stitch is ever so slightly bigger than the Sungold, so I did less stripes but the same stitch count and are slightly different in size, but that is ok with me.  The Sungold is 54.5” long x 34.5” wide and the Dahlia is 52” long x 37” wide. Here they both are side by side.

They are fabulously colourful and cosy, I will miss working on them, but will love cosying under one of them when it’s a bit cool in the evenings. 

And there’s still a bit of the yarn pack left so that can be added to my yarn stash.

If you haven’t had a go at a crochet blanket then Lucy’s patterns are easy to follow with comprehensive instructions. I also love her use of colour, so these blankets were an enjoyable project. 

Furtling in February

 February has been a month of crochet and hexagons and not much else really.  There is a finish. Only the one, some others are nearly theres. 

I finished a lap sized blanket following the Attic24 Sungold Blanket CAL. I had enough yarn to make a second which is a nearly finish.  The pattern (free) is on Lucy’s blog and the Stylecraft yarn is from Wool Warehouse. 

This is blanket no. 1 (the finished one).  I made 67 stripes of the pattern and followed the colour order for the stripes in the blanket and border.  This measures 54.5” long x 34.5” wide, 138 x 88 cm.

I was also working on the same colour sequence but using the spike stitch pattern from the Dahlia blanket pattern. There was a slight deviation in the colour order as I got the purple-pinks mixed up and tried to get back on course.  This stitch is slightly taller than on the Sungold blanket so I worked 60 stripes. By this time some of the yarns are running low so I’m changing the colour order of the border stripes.

Another nearly finish is the pair of socks.  I’m at the toe of the second sock and should be finished in the next day or two. Having been away last weekend the foot was a good bit of car knitting, but I’ve not done anything to that since. The yarn is hand dyed by Kosy Kitchen Fibres.

Edit to this post - just finished the shops this evening - another finish!

A bit more work has been done to the clown and after the second blanket I will get cracking on that. No pics to show as I left some of the clown knitting at my daughter’s house! 

As for sewing, I’ve made more squares for hexie flowers, which I want to join in columns so I have got to match seams. So far I have 20 squares and 5 flowers waiting to be appliquéd onto squares. I keep finding the odd hexagon, so if I find enough there will be more to add to this number. This has been a lovely bit of hand sewing, either with joining the hexies together or putting them onto squares.

So getting there with those.  I’ve also machine sewn some L blocks, also called Simply Scrappy from Love Patchwork and Quilting magazine on Readly. This might make a smallish 36” Linus Quilt I think.

So that’s my Furtling for February.  There may be some finishes next month (I hope so!). At least the second blanket and socks. The clown should be done in time for a birthday. ‘March’-ing onwards! 

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