Blue Wonder

Those pictures are back from June, when I spent a weekend in Dresden.
One famous landmark in Dresden is the Blue Wonder (the commonly used name for the Loschwitz Bridge, which is the first bridge up river from the Waldschlösschen Bridge)

The bridge was open in 1893 and is a pretty impressive piece of engineering for it's time. I particularly like the steelwork construction.

 Close to the bridge are two small railways - one a funicular railway going up to the Weisse Hirch (one of Dresden's many districts). The second one is a suspension monorail (one of the oldest in the world)

I took a trip on both and it was great fun.

Five Countries in Seven Days

Sorry, it's been a while. I've been away on vacation, cruising through the Baltic Sea on the Serenade of the Seas with my sister and my nephew.

We started out in Stockholm (Sweden) after staying there for two nights on a ship / hostel located smack in the center of the city. This is pretty much what we saw first thing in the morning when we got off the ship.

 We went onboard of the Serenade on a Sunday, and already got to Helsinki (Finland) by the next morning.

 We stayed for two days in Saint Petersburg (Russia), where we had a privat guide for our trip to the Cathrin Palace with the famous Amber Room.

 Next we travelled to Tallinn (Estonia), a lovely town with a great medieval flair (the old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site)

 And the final stop before returning to Stockholm was Riga (Latvia). I wasn't sure what to expect of this town, but I was very pleasently surprised and I liked it a lot (thunderstorm and hail nonewithstanding)

So, that's a quick summary of my vacation and the five countries I visited within seven days.

Merry Christmas (in July)

Yes, I know, I'm a little bit ahead with the whole Christmas thing.
But I just finished this xmasy tablerunner, and I wanted to share.

I saw a very similar table runner on the Quiltmanufaktur blog and fell in love, only to discover that the store is in fact in Frankfurt and thus not far away. At the next opertunity I went to visit (love the place) and snatched up a set of the red xmas fabrics used. I used only two squares of each fabric (I had three) and added a couple of my own fabrics to the mix, then I started sewing.

Very easy, very fast, very fun project.

Macro

One thing I was missing for my photo equipment was a good lens for macro photography.
One way to go is to simple buy a special lens for that, but this will limit you in your options. Or you buy a good fixed focal length lens with a set of addapter rings for different focal lens ratios.
I decided on a 60mm/2.8G ED lens and set of three distant rings.

To get a feeling for the new toys I shot this quick series.

First picture is the lens without any of the distant rings.

 Second picture with the lens and the 12mm ring.

 Third picture the lens and the 20mm ring.

 And the last picture is the lens with the 36mm ring.

 All pictures were taken with the smallest possible aperture using a tripod to get the most depth of focus possible.

Avengers Assemble - A Quilt

To those who know me it's not a big surprice that I'm a big Avengers fan. I love the movies to pieces, Iron Man being my favorite, but I'm also quite fond of Captain America, the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo version), Hawkeye, Black Widow and, not to forget, Thor.
I'm not alone with this.
So, when I got that crazy idea into my head to make an Avengers Quilt, I immediately knew where it would go to. And last Wednesday I finally could hand the quilt over.

 The quilt consists of 145 blue 4 inch patches in various shades of blues. They frame the symbols for the six Avengers (as of the first Avengers movie), plus the Avengers logo itself.

 I worked each of the Avengers as a seperate unit with a different blue background. For the symbols I used different techniques. Some applique (Averngers logo), some paper piecing (Thor's hammer), some reverse applique (Ironman and Hulk), ...

 I quilted the units by first tracing the symbols, then writing the names and the 'secret' identities of each of the characters (i.e. Captain America aka Steve Rogers). I then quited the background with a free motion swirly pattern

 On this background pic of Thor's hammer you can see the tracing I did and the names (though in reverse) and the rest of the quilting.

I had a lot of fun designing this quilt, working out the hows and whats, and sewing it.
It is an unique quilt, and I learned quite a bit making it.
I know it's now at its new home where it will  be loved and appreciated (and hopefully been ued to snuggle up in to watch an Avengers marathon once in a while ...)

Round

Currently, a couple of larger project are coming to fruitation. After the scrappy sockyarn blanket from last week, here's a table cloth I've made for my mom.

The diameter is roughly 180cm and about 3000m of cotton were used to knit it (Magic No. 8 by Zettl). In the end I had 2345 stitches on the needle, which made for very long rows.

I really enjoy knitting lace, but normally don't have much use for it. Luckily my mom has a nice round bistro table and with a neutral table cloth unterneath, I think it will look great.

I did steam press the edges. It didn't go perfect, a few of the wedges got a bit brown spots (I don't think I singed it, but I'm not sure what else it could be), Maybe turn that side to the wall ...

Scrappy Knitting

After about half a year I finally finished my scrappy ZigZag sockyarn blanket/afghan.It ended up 180 x 150 cm and it extremely warm and heavy.

I knitted it with leftover and recycled sock yarn, holding two strands together and every couple of rows I switched out one of the two colors.

 After knitting eight stripes I crocheted them together and then made a border all around.

Primary colors were blue and green, with the occasional other color thrown in.I haven't weighted it yet, but I'd guess 2,5 kilos may have ended in there. 

Flower Power

We went to the Bavarian State Garden Show in Alzenau (which is only about 20min away)
We saw flowers.

Lots and lots of flowers.

 Also some decorations for the garden.

 And, to top it of, an old Beetle, all agreened.

On the way home, we also so the most perculiar insect.

It flew like a hummingbird, but in the end it turned out to be a kind of butterfly/moth. The German name is 'Taubenschwänzchen', though I think the English name is far more fitting: 'Hummingbird hawk-moth'

And It's Done

I think that has been the fastest from start to finish for me. I started less than three weeks ago with this quilt, without having a clear idea where I was going, and yesterday it was done. Okay, it's a rather small quilt (only about 110 x 135 cm), but, hey, it's still a quilt!

(Thank you to M for modeling it)

As you can maybe see from the picture, the white portion of the quilt is quilted in straight zigzag lines. For this, a walking foot is worth it's weight in gold, as I had next to no puckering and practically no issues with directional quilting (you know, when the fabric is distorted in one direction or the other, depending in which direction you're sewing)

For the color section I free motion quilted a different pattern for each color (some are better to see in the pictures bellow, some no to good).
- yellow: loop de loop and flowers
- blue: loop de loop and stars
- red: spirals
- black/white: pepples
- green: shells

 I have reused and repurposed maybe 80% of the materials for this quilt (even the batting is put together from bits I had left from other projects). I did buy the white fabric and for the back I used one side of a duvet cover (there was a sale at the Swedish furniture store - one duvet cover is certainly enough for two smallish quilts without any piecing and certainly enough for a full quilt if you don't mind a single seam). So in terms of materials it's probably one of the cheapest I've ever made.
I even remembered to add a label.

Zigzag Quilt Top

The top for the scrappy zigzag lapquilt is done.

I'm loving it!
Now for the back.
I've got eight blocks left over, which didn't fit with the color scheme on the front. If I'd make one more, I could lay them out 3 x 3, frame them in white and then do the rest in black (hmm, need to check how much black I still have in my stash).
Or I just sprinkle the left over blocks all over the back more or less randomly.
Or, hm, I have a pretty good idea on how I'm going the quilt this quilt, any pattern on the background would just be distracting there. So maybe just an uni back? Do I have a piece big enough?
I need to think on this.

Shades of Gray

Last week I showed some scrap patches I've made. There are now quite a few more of those patches (48 to be precise).
I have eight each of five different base colors plus some extras, which won't end up in the little quilt I've decided to make. Aren't they pretty (those are obviously only the black/white and the yellows)?

After some deliberation, sketching and throwing out of other ideas, I've decided on this layout below. I've been wanting to do a quilt like this for some time, and as I was looking for ideas I've thought this would work well with the scrap patches.

 This meant I had to do a few more patches in certain colors, and also that I had to cast out a couple patches which were not fitting in with the rest. This also meant I had to do a quick trip to the fabric store for enough white fabric to make 40 6.5inch squares (the white I had here was juuuuuuust not enough - quick note to myself: buy more white!).

 So far I have made HSTs for the black and white stripe and put it together.
Looks like it might be working.

This won't be a large quilt. Just 44" by 55". Depending on were I'm looking this should work out as a lap quilt. All my quilts (except the babies) have been larger than this.
I'll see.

Fabric Scraps

I have a lot of scraps. Some of them are from projects I've done, another part is because I cannot walk past a scrap basket in a fabric store without diving in and pulling stuff out. And then there are the scrap bags. They seem to simply follow me to the checkout, Don't know how they do it.

At home I have a full drawer dedicated to my scraps (by my definition, everything smaller than 5 x 5 inches is a scrap). I've sorted them by color and normally keep them in zip locked plastic bags.

Yesterday I've pulled out some of the bags and started making patches. The patches are 6.5 x 6.5 inches.

I'm not 100% sure yet what I'm going to do with the patches and how far I'm going to go, but I think those are a pretty good start for something bright and colorful.

1080

1080 is the number of stitches I currently have on my needle. Eventually, this is going to be a table cloth (pattern is the Sun Ray Design aka. Heirloom shawl and knitted in an off-white cotton)

London Shopping Bag

Yeah! Another bag.
This shopping bag is about 50cm wide (20'') and 36cm tall (14''). I added a red lining incl. a nice inside pocket for the money.

And if I evey take the bag to London for some shopping, I won't be lost.

Yeah again!

I also made some potholders for a friend with cat's paw prints.

Hundertwasser

The 'Waldspirale' is a building in Darmstadt designed by the famous Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Built in 2000 there are no straight lines and the roof is green (as in green stuff grows on the roof)

  According to the internet, none of the over 1000 windows look alike. I'm personally quite fond of the one down here.

Sea Turtle and the Stormlight Archive

It's been a while I did any mayor cross stitching. But currently I'm listening the the two first books in the Stormlight Archive Sage by Brandon Sanderson, and they both are very good, and very long, and excellent to do cross stitching to.

The pattern I'm doing is called 'Honour Diversity' (the link I have in the side bar is not working any longer - sorry about this, but I can't find any place right now that carries the pattern). I've got one of the dolphins done and the two sea turtles and now I am working on the big fish. No back stitching done yet, and there are also a ton of french knots, which will have to wait until the end.