Winterwonderland

Some impressions from taking a Christmas walk through the snow:

A Guardian Angel for Christmas

I hope that Christmas was a splendid time for everyone.

This is what I sewed as a Christmas present for my mum. 

After these photos were taken my sister and me decorated the Christmas tree, of course.

Cookie baking

It has snowed in the little German village and snow decks the houses, trees and streets whilst everyone is cuddling up to their love or indulging in baking cookies.

Contrasting the beautiful white land outside these cookies bring some colour.

Before the Winter Comes...

...these birds still pick the last grains from the garden. 

It sounds strange but about half of my friends celebrate their birthday in October/November. Two of them even on the same day. Fortunately, these friends are sewn quickly. 

Now they tweet around in my friends' rooms.

A Scarf

Something I actually forgot to show you is this scarf. I found the fabric at the same shop in my home-town where you can also get the little blue strawberries.

I created the pompons by separating some parts of the fabric and filling them with balls of cotton wool. A strong thread fixed the pompon.  

Meeting the Chestnuts

Autumn Time arrived and the time (and free time) was perfect to finally do something I have not done for about 15 years - making the chestnut people come alive!

After having signed a peace agreement, I was allowed to document their way of life. 

They are now preparing their winter stock. What they love to eat are strawberries and apples, as you can see:

It's your Birthday! And I hope they fit you...

It's my best friend's birthday!!

So I tried out (really, tried out) these Tilda slippers.

...when you are into vodoo try on these slippers...

In my home-town we have a cute little shop where they sell these strawberry appliqués (yes, totally addicted to strawberries).

Tilda also encourages you to embroider roses but really, getting these slippers done, was fine art enough. ;-)

P.S.: Vivi, I hope they fit you! :-)

Strawberry Fields Forever

Strawberry Dreams...

is what you have on this pillow.

It's again a design of Tilda and definitely the object I wanted to sew right when I saw the book (Tilda's hus). 

However, it's taken some time. 

On this photo you can actually see how big the leaves are. 

Let's see how long it takes to grow real Strawberries of that size...yummie... *dream*

Sitting on roses...

Sitting on this pillow is comfortable, yet, where was the pea? 

The idea was a Tilda one, as well, even though she used a round pillow.

Remember: Making round pillows is not an easy thing to handle even with a sewing-machine. 

The rose-stitching was the part I most enjoyed. Simply drawing the rose onto fabric and filling it with matching

thread.

Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon...

...at home where the park turned bright green now and fruits start to ripen (see, we actually got strawberries!) I took the bike for a ride through the fields. My bunny also found a place to sit and enjoy the view onto my favourite field. There are real rabbits in the field, you know...

Sweden-Sara loves Music...

...so she gets some music for her birthday.

But not without any personal designs. 

Easy to do: get yourself a cool catalogue ("Impressionen" in this case) and cut out anything beautiful you won't ever be able to afford and buy anyway. 

Shake-shake-shake it into a more or less sense-making arrangement, and tadaa: 

Loving Strawberries!

What do you do when the strawberry-season has not started, yet?

When you love the colour and form and smell of them?

You sew your own strawberries!

Out of fabric in lovely patterns.

When I looked through the Tilda book the strawberries were the first thing that caught my eye.

So, here they are. I used green felt for the leaves. Makes them look more like leafage (apart from the reason that I did not want to buy green fabric only for those tiny leaves, of course).

Going on with Tilda, I discovered this little box. Making it was quite easy apart from handling and ironing repeatedly the thick vilene, volume vilene! It makes it quite stressy when you have to handle thick layers of fabric in the sewing-machine.

Starting Tilda

Having gotten a Tilda book for my birthday a few months ago I thought I might try these hearts for Mother's Day. I got the fabric at IKEA, though - the Tilda fabric prices let my heart ache a little bit. ;-)

I decorated the hearts with buttons and bows. 

My mum put them on the door-knobs of her wardrobe, so I had to sew some more. 

Thankfully, Tilda's ideas are easy to sew. 

Owl-timer (pimped "Old-Timer")

Long time no see.

After having sewn the swan-dress I found some old gift-wrapping from a friend of mine. It shows wonderful little owls in nice colours and patterns. 

I had this ordinarily looking timer which I found a bit boring. 

So, I thougt, sewing must work with paper on leather, too!

Hmm, actually, it was a bit strange and difficult but it worked out to be a special timer now:

They have great gift-wrapping in the UK...

Björk's Swan-Dress!

Well, many people have been asking me about this.

The Björk-swan dress. 

I made it for my sister for carnival because she looks a bit like Björk herself.

Total strangers come up to her and tell her that she looks like Björk. So I told her I would make her Björk's famous swan-dress for carnival. 

Here it is:

It took about a week to make (machine-sew, glue, hand-sew....).

The swan's beak is glued and the eyes are the same kind of eyes as the little white bunny at the bottom wears in his face. 

For the swan's neck I used white velvet to make it look more furry. 

The base-dress was made without any sample or drawing at all. I simply cut a hole into white fabric and pulled it over my sister's head. Then I stitched needles around her to find the dress's form. 

After that I pulled it off her and machine-sewed along the needles. THAT's really unprofessional but I just didn't want to look through the Burda magazines and then alter a complicated dress. I mean, I only needed a simple base-dress. Thus, I made one. 

Then I took about 9 metres of tulle and cut it into strips (I got this from "How to make Björn's swan dress" tutorials, yes, there really are many of them outside on the internet!!). I gathered it and, this was my sister's idea, sew the gathered stripes directly with the machine. 

The complicated part was following. It seemed to be impossible to machine-sew the gathered tulle stripes onto the base-dress.

Thus, I discovered a funny position in which to hand-sew the stripes onto the base-dress sitting on my sofa. xD Looked funny a bit like the so called "tailor position" (in Germany) and I looked like the brave tailor, haha.

So, here it is again:

Doesn't she look cute and a bit like Björk? :-)

Baby-Shoes!

When it is cold outside I noticed that when you do knitting you feel a bit warmer. 

When I was on my way from work going by train I wanted to have something to do. Thus I started crocheting these little baby girl shoes.

An old man on the train started joking when he wanted to see what I was knitting: "can I take a look?" he asked,  "I won't try them on I promise!"

Well, I was lucky that he didn't try them on, they would have been too small...

I want to mention that my mum always did the first few rows and that she actually taught me how to crochet these baby-shoes.

In order to make my shoes recognisable as girl shoes I chose a pink ribbon...

...and formed a bow at the front of the shoe.

 

Voilá!

However, I was told that the baby-shoes were not only too small for the elderly man but also for the baby itself. xD

Snowbunny

It snowed a lot in December and so my bunny made friends with him:

He had a cold the following day...

A bunny that has been on a long journey...

 

No, this has not been made by me. My mum made it for my birthday that I had to spend at uni in Liverpool. Due to the mistake of a Liverpudlian post-officer it was on a long journey, though and I got to see it three months later - back at home. 

This photo taken in the probably only forest on Sylt shows the bunny enjoying the nature, looking for it maybe like wonderland.

Furthermore, my mum always used to sew and knit my sister and me clothes. After she hadn't done needlework for a long time she surprised me with this bunny. So, I thought after some inspirations, I might try this as well.