Friday, October 30, 2015

A Long Time in Coming... Of Sweaters and Quilts

(This blog post is overdue by a good 4.5-10 months.)
Then again, some projects like to percolate for a while.  


Like when your mother sees a beautiful yarn and talks about it until your grandmother buys it from your aunt's hobby shop and sends it in the mail. There's no telling how long ago that was: +/- 20-30 years is a good guess. Then it gets handed to you after if has been discontinued, and ravelry.com has no ideas for you to work with. Not that you don't enjoy over-indulging in endless web surfing. But then when you find a remote pattern possibility that works with the yarn, it does not fit the taste of the recipient. Or then there was that pattern that was impossible to get sized right.


Well, let me introduce you to Trigere, which ended up as the winning combination of yarn and sweater. It still took me two years to finish this sweater. Wouldn't you know, the yarn is made of flax and cotton, which is oh-so-hard on the hands. But enough of the complaining. The smile on my mother's face when it was finally finished was worth every minute of indecision and discomfort. The compliments she receives from her friends and neighbors are heart-warming, and I am glad that I could take part in the creative process that made it possible.


I have enough yarn left over to make another smaller sweater with another pattern for me. I'll think it over for a few years maybe...

Another gift that took a while was a gift for me and The Farmer from my mother. It was discussed in 2002 after our wedding, at which point my mother and I went to the library to look at quilt patterns. I am super picky about quilts, but we settled on this tulip pattern:

The fabric squares also sat around many years for the perfect sets of inspiration to strike. I started joking that I might be finishing my own wedding quilt some day. Imagine our surprise when it materialized last Christmas as a gift!
 

It turned out way better than anything I could imagine. The quilting was all done by hand by a circle of ladies who gather to do such a thing once a week. The quilt is a true heirloom piece in its beauty and construction. I was speechless.



So worth the twelve-year wait!
And Happy 44th Anniversary to my own parents this day! Thank you!

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Greedy Gobblers


Watching turkeys grow up: can you think of anything more interesting? I'm having a great time watching them change and grow up. Maybe for the rest of you it's like watching paint dry?!


They are eating us out of house and home. We refill their food containers twice daily on occasion.


They're still adorable though. And still peeping instead of gobbling.