basting and baking

This quilt will probably take me months to complete, so I might as well document every step along the way!

The backing is a thrifted vintage bed sheet. I’ve still got half of it left after cutting it apart and I love it so much, I might just hem the rest and use it as a table cloth.

A little side note on that: we use only environmentally friendly washing powder that leaves little to no scent on our laundry…it smells clean but not much else. I found that makes me very sensitive to strong scents in other people’s laundry, they give me headaches. This bedsheet was clean when I bought it but I washed it again of course and had it lying around a couple of weeks. It still smells strongly of perfumed washing powder and I hope to get rid of that eventually when washing the finished quilt. It only reminds me how long those chemical perfumes linger and lets face it, we wear those clothes and get that stuff on our skin!
Ok, enough moralizing for one morning 🙂
We also finally baked some fresh bread again from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.

Baking bread on a weekly basis is part of our plan to eat healthier and with such an easy method about there really is no excuse not to! Lynda did a great post on that book and its successor, Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.
On weekdays we are often too tired to cook in the evenings so we made a white sandwich bread for breakfast and the european peasant bread (with whole wheat and rye flour) to eat with cheese and salads in the evening. I find that when using whole wheat and rye flour I need to use more yeast than the recipe calls for or the crumb will be too dense. Either the yeast is weaker or the flour is heavier over here!

The bread is only flour, yeast, water and salt, no sugar, no additives to make it last longer or taste better.
We don’t eat masses of bread between the two of us, so what we do is we let the loaves cool down completely, cut them up and freeze them. That way we can toast only as many slices as we’ll actually eat at a time and this amount of bread will last us anywhere between 1 and 2 weeks.

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scandinavia quilt

My dad’s birthday was on Sunday, so I can finally blog the quilt I made him. Last year I wasn’t home for his birthday and then my sewing machine got broken and he only got something small for christmas, so really this quilt covers two birthdays and one christmas 😉
While I love bright, sunshiny colors and the look of patchwork I know my dad definitely likes a more subdued look and scandinavian colours. So when I found this red pinstriped linen blend I knew it was perfect. The backing is a plain dark blue and the plaid binding connects the two colours and livens it all up a bit (I think).

I had originally planned to machine quilt it but it just didn’t work at all with my treadle…no chance without a walking foot. So I sat down to cried a bit and then I picked myself back up and started handquilting. Inspired by Anna Maria Horners new post I did big stitches with embroidery floss (3 strands if anyone wants to know the particulars).
And then I looked at it and the bold, rough quilting looked just perfect for the overall look I wanted to achieve. I think I will do handquilting with embroidery floss from now on on all of my quilts…I love the look of it and it is nice and quick work.

Not that quick though…so when I found out I only had two and a half days to complete it (due to my dad being away on business the whole week until his birthday) I went into panic mode and spend those days quilting and sewing. I never would have believed it but in those two days I got it basted, quilted, bound, washed and dried (though I had to drive over to my mom’s to use her dryer).

Except for sewing the binding on on one side the whole quilt is entirely handsewn and I am pretty darn proud of it. Thankfully my dad loves it so it was definitely worth it.

Want to know one of my guilty sewing-secrets? I never use a hoop for embroidery or quilting…when I learned it I didn’t have one and when I finally bought one it drove me crazy and didn’t work for me at all. So I just stretch the fabric tight with my hands while quilting.
This picture actually has the truest colours for the lovely red fabric (and it was at the beginning of the handquilting…a few hours on my fingers looked considerably more covered in band aid).

patterndrafting adventures

Wow, has the weekend flown by! Can’t believe it’s already over again. I had planned to finally tackle Cal Patch’s wonderful book “Design-it-yourself-clothes” and make a top pattern for a dress. For one I am totally in love with the gorgeous dress Anna did based on that book and also I need a paririe dress for a charity event which is planned at the barn in June (1880’s country fair). I haven’t got any fabric for it yet but figured I could already draft the pattern and make a muslin on Saturday morning.

Two days and three handbasted muslins later (thank goodness for all of those old Ikea pillow cases, or I wouldn’t have had enough cheap fabric!) I was getting pretty frustrated because it just wouldn’t fit and the armhole was making me cry. My boyfriend said ‘Well, you didn’t think it was going to be easy, did you? Why did you think nobody does it anymore these days?’ to which I stammered ‘I thought people were just being lazy’.
Fast forward to a fourth draft and muslin and things are looking a whole lot better. Still not super duper perfect but good enough to be a satisfying finish to the weekend.

Totally unrelated but we’ve also been having a terrible storm today and all the way to the barn the streets were littered with branches and leaves. I took the highway on the way back but even there it was pretty scary with the sudden strong gusts of wind…I was glad to be home again and watch the rest of the storm from my cozy living room!