The sun is shining, it’s 8 degrees celsius in the garden, and the signs of spring are more than welcome.
The girls are playing outside, and I’m about to clear the table after lunch.
Everything is quite peaceful here, except for the occasional fight between the girls, and tomorrow Mads is returning from a business trip to Norway.
Maybe I should sew a little…
Warning: This will be a long post – but don’t worry, it will be pictures mostly. 
When you look at my blog, it does indeed look like nothing much is happening. However, going through my recent calendar, and my recent pictures you would be getting an entirely different impression. I was just checking to see what should be included in a much needed update, and from that, I can totally see why I haven’t had time for blogging.
I miss my blog, my blog reading, and all of you guys out there (if anyone’s left), let me just say that first. However, these past few months work has been terribly busy and quite energy comsuming, which is good because I love what I’m doing – it just takes a few sacrifices. And as if business at work wasn’t enough, we also took on a project in our family – more about that further down.
I’ll give you a picture wrap up – so let’s see what we’ve been doing the last few months.
So – briefly:
Mallorca in July
Canoe trip to lake Immeln in Sweden in July
Ronja starting school in August
Ronja’s 6 years birthday in August
I made these adorable goodie bags from Minimega’s printable pdf for the occasion when the class was visiting – just had to show you!
And now in this look-back we’re approaching September, and of course, in our family we just always need 2-300 things keeping us busy, so we started looking for a sail boat (this is the project I mentioned at the beginning). Our new love will be a separate post (or several, of course), now that I hope I will keep up the posts just a little more than I have the past 3-4 months.
We spent all of our spare time for a month driving around the country (and southern Sweden as well), dragging the children onto all kinds of sail boats that were more or less fit for a family of 4 – in all kinds of weather. Which is a lie, actually, ’cause it was raining almost all the time. We finally found the boat model Shipman 28, which is a good Swedish design by Olle Enderlein from 1969. It seems to live up to the things we were looking for in a sail boat, that is meant to host future summer vacations, and numerous sails during the sailing season – within the price limit we were willing to spend. So check this out:
We named the boat ANNA after my amazing grandmother who died 4 years ago. She was a woman who radiated warmth, wit, interest, and just a presence that anyone around her felt and was struck by – she always had a strong ability to gather the family. So those are the qualities we humbly want our new love to possess – or perhaps rather the name stands for a lot of positive things that we want to carry with us when we are sailing and spending time on the boat.
We have spent quite a few weekends with her by now, and we all love it. The girls are getting used to saling step-by-step, and we cannot wait to spend a summer vacation with Anna.
On to the next thing:
Frida’s 3 years birthday in September
All these things have put quite a strain on the calendar, and remember, this is without the stuff that has been going on in our work lives, which at least in my case has been quite a bit. And did I mention we started renovating the bedroom?
This post reflects very much my need to do a wrap-up before I can move on to the next blogpost. It may seem like nothing, but this is just not really what you want to be doing when you have a blog – you want to write whatever enters your mind at the moment, right? Not much crafty stuff here, and the time-issue is in part an explanation for that, but I have been doing minor things. I’ll let you know more soon.
Here I am – in the Bed & Breakfast 100 m from our house. We moved in one day early, because it would be much easier for us to move today, on a Sunday, than it would be tomorrow when I’m going to work. Now we’re all going to be living in this one, reasonably sized, though not at all big room for 2 weeks. Ronja fell asleep almost instantly – Frida was singing and moving around until about 9 pm when she finally surrendered.
The camera has been left back in our little yellow house – which is just as well, I guess, since the pictures in it portray a “once-was-a-kitchen” in serious decay. Mads is tearing down the kitchen ceiling this evening, which is not a funny task – he finished removing the many layers of old wall paper earlier, so he’s moving towards the more interesting challenges, like getting rid of the floor. The picture below shows one of the wallpapers that popped out of the walls during the process – isn’t it just gorgeous? Not sure we’ll keep it though… 
Ronja is making grunting noises and turning over in bed, and I’m thinking of making myself a cup of tea. I’m not even going to explain to you why there’s no sewing going on here – I’ll just let you know, that I had this wild idea about how I could bring my sewing machine and sew when the children were asleep. Well – I just don’t think it’s going to happen, so sorry about that sewing-blog readers. Hope you’ll hang in there.
Last weekend we all went to the beach. It was really windy, and frankly not very warm, so the girls were wrapped up in towels most of the time. I went for a wonderful swim in the waves, though – and when Mads brought out a kite, Ronja couldn’t resist unwrapping herself a bit as well. Just thought I would share, now that I don’t have many new pictures to show you.
We have now been living in this old house for a little more than 5 years. When we first moved in I was 5 months pregnant with Ronja, and our primary focus back then was to get the house in a nice shape without doing anything too drastic. This task alone was big enough at the time.
Later, when Ronja had been born, and we were getting used to our new life as a family, Mads spent some time fixing the roof, doing wood work on the outside of the house, and changing most of the windows downstairs. I have just been tracking down old pictures of the house, but you get this one to the left to begin with – Ronja was about 2 months old, and Mads was putting up new barge boards on the house.
After that the 2nd floor in the house had first priority. The 2nd floor was a huge task, that involved demolishing everything and building it back up from scratch – installing roof windows, making new rooms for the children, and building a new bathroom among other stuff. That all took nearly a year, and Mads pretty much did all the work himself – we are SO happy with it.
Last year we moved on to work on the facade, and the house was sand blasted, plastered, and white washed yellow. It came to look just the way we had imagined, back when we bought the place.
The pictures above show the kichen the way it looked 5½ years ago – when we had just bought the place and started fixing it up. The pictures below show the kitchen and the adjacent rooms the way they all looked a few days ago – these are to be regarded as pictures from the before-category as well.
Yesterday we packed the last stuff from the kitchen into moving boxes, and today Mads has been tearing everything apart. Our renovating process has reached the kitchen. Mads spent the day at home today to get started, and when I came home from work the view was already quite different.
Phew – here we go. It’s going to be another big project – from Monday we’re all moving to a Bed&Breakfast 100 m from our house, because we’re going to have a big hole in the ground until the new floor has been established. The water will be shut off to establish new pipes, and the power is going to be shut down as well.
A bit earlier I sent off Mads and Ronja to the cinema. It’s Ronja’s very first trip to the cinema, and they’re going to see the new Curious George movie – Ronja loves Curious George, and she was so excited! Frida has just been tucked in for her nap, and I wanted to show you something.
Part of my prize in the Spring Top Week was a beautiful bag designed by Rae herself, and she was kind enough as to send me the pattern as well – what I believe to be an early version of it. I love the bag, so I thought I’d give the pattern a go as well, and after making the Birdie Sling, I wanted a bag that was not quite as big, and with a different fabric combo, since I wasn’t so happy with what I did with that one. So this is my result.
For the exterior of the bag I chose Amy Butler’s Happy Dots design, and decided to go with Sandi Henderson’s Petal Party for pockets and lining – both purchased from Fabric.com, but you would be able to get them in many well-assorted fabric shops online, I believe. I wanted to add a little bit of body to this bag, and I decided to add some sew-in interfacing (Vilene Heavy Sew-In in this case). You add sew-in interfacing by cutting matching pieces, and then pretending that the interfacing is the back side of the exterior fabric (or the lining fabric) at all times. It does give you a little extra work, because you need to match up three layers when sewing everything together instead of too, but it’s really not bad, and it gives a nice slightly padded effect when you’re done. I learned working with it when I made the oilcloth backpack a while ago, and I really like the way it behaves.
I made the bag with exterior pockets going by my own measurements, as I didn’t have the measurements that Rae has used for hers. I’m not sure I will be using them all that much, because they are kind of open to anyone, but I still like them as part of the design – I think they add a nice detail to the bag. My pockets – exterior and interior – are interfaced as well. For interior pockets I chose to make a rather large one at one side of the bag (below), and a pocket for my mobile phone at the other side. Note to self: Add pockets before you close the bottom of the bag – I didn’t, and I believe Mads overheard me swearing a few times… I considered adding magnetic closure to this bag as well, but decided not to.
Conclusively, I’m so fond of my Lickety Split, and it has a perfect size for a handbag. The pattern is easy, instructions great, and the final result still looks nice and fresh. If there are any beginner sewers out there, who thought the Birdie Sling looked a bit too much (and too big perhaps), I would say they should go ahead and make this – it really is fun and easy to make with a wonderful result that you will certainly find use for. You can buy the pattern ($6) for immediate download here.
Finally, this is me with my new bag – it came shopping with me yesterday, and it did a great job!
We got back home from Greece Monday, and we had a very nice time, even though Frida wasn’t feeling too well the first couple of days. She reacted to a vaccination she had received two weeks prior to our trip, and Mads and I just hadn’t thought about it until it was too late (duh…). This meant that she was quite beside herself the first few days – like completely beside herself, which was rather tough.
However, those days passed, and the rest of the time was wonderful. Also, I think Ronja enjoyed pretty much every day there, she spent as much time as possible in the swimming pool, and she was having great fun with two 8-year old girls.
We did all we could to relax, had delicious Greek dinners served by friendly waiters, went for a few walks to see the area, and took the bus when we wanted to go away a little further. Mads and I sat on the balcony in the evenings, drinking wine, talking, and reading – now how often does something like that happen? We didn’t rent a car this year as we have done previous years, but we did go on a guided one-day excursion to see “the Hidden Crete”, which took us to several beautiful places in the area around Chania.
All in all we had a wonderful time there with warm weather, great food, lots of bathing and relaxation – and then a few of those factors that you should really learn to take into account, especially when you have children.
Oh, and by the way – Frida is not a good flyer. Has nothing to do with her ears – she’s just really not a ½-a-square-meter-in-4-hours kind of child. Nope. 4 hours…
I promised you a modeled shot from Greece of Ronja wearing her summer fairy dress – and here she is. More pictures from our vacation are found here.
