Graduation Day

Like many families right now we also had a graduation in our family last week …. Whopper graduated from his puppy course!

One week after arriving in The Netherlands we started the course and he has been working so hard to get to grips with the things he had to learn.

Sometimes things became a little too much for him and in his enthusiasm and to the delight of the other dog owners on the course he became the only one of all the dogs we encountered during the 10-lesson course to jump into the water next to the training ground one evening!

I had to call him from a distance when he was off the leash, he immediately responded, raced towards me and in his enthusiasm couldn’t stop in time anymore and ran past me straight into the ditch next to the training ground!

But never mind, at the end of the course he did receive his certificate.

And as a graduate he was suitably rewarded!

Now he moves on to the advanced course!

Have a nice week!

Phyllis

A crafty weekend

Nice busy weekend… I finished the little bag we started during the Featherweight Day at Bep’s, I showed it before on Facebook but not here yet. This weekend I decided to make a second one, it is such a cute project. Of course, after practising on the first one, the second one turned out a bit better.

One thing the second one does not have is the sweet Featherweight button Bep gave us with this project.

I also finished the cross stitch part of my first cross stitch project, a pincushion from Atelier Soed Idee. A “thank you” to Irma from my bee, who helped me get started on this project, I had not cross stitched since I was a teenager, a looooong time ago, so forgot about the ins and outs of this craft. I did change two things in the pattern: I did not leave a loose thread hanging from the spool and I did not stitch the little boot next to my initials. I stitched a little star pattern instead, if you look closely you’ll see I took the star pattern from the centre of the pair of scissors and stitched it in reverse.

Most of the above was done on Sunday, on Saturday I visited the Summer Market at The Stitch Cottage in The Hague.

The weather gods were benevolent, even though we once again woke up to the sound of heavy rain, after that it turned out to be a dry day, even the sun came out in the afternoon.

The market stalls outside …. yesss…. in the sunshine!

Bobbin by Els Feteris, always lovely!

Nice and busy inside.

That was my weekend, well, some of it.
Hope you had a nice weekend too,

Phyllis

A disappointing evening ...

We were ready for it…. an evening of football, the first game of our national soccer team in the European Championships.

Appropriate food was called for! We usually do not fry food at home, so yesterday we dug out our frying pan from the garage, cleaned it (big job after about 2 years in the garage!) and bought new fat to put in it.

And earlier today we went to our favourite butcher to buy some of their famous croquettes and ‘bitterballen’ .

So we got everything ready, the pan in place, the croquettes and bitterballen defrosted, the telly on. We heard the national anthems being played and saw the players walk on the field.

So I plugged in the frying pan at the moment of kick-off….. it short circuited switching of all the electricity in our house and the telly turned black!

Electricity was frantically restored and I was off to the Chinese for a take away! One positive point: I was never back so quickly with our food, I was the only customer there!

It was a disappointing evening in more ways than one…. this is the mood after the game .....

Hopefully things will work out better next Wednesday, both for our national soccer team and a new frying pan!

Phyllis

Whopper settling in ..

After a number of posts about quilting I thought I’d let you know how our Whopper is doing after his arrival in The Netherlands April 10.

Well, he is doing just fine. The first few weeks were a little hectic, we all had to get used to each other, but things have settled down now and we seem to have found a daily routine that suits us all.

Whopper loves his bench, he sleeps in it at night and loves to sleep away a large part of the morning there as well.

Now and then he is naughty, he is not allowed on our couch, but when you leave the room and return sometimes you see this…

He loves his toys, is not a great ball player, but loves to chew on  bones.

And loves ‘ducks’ and ‘chickens’…. dissecting them, that is!

And he passed his ‘inburgeringsexamen’(civic integration exam) , look!

Ready for the game on Saturday!

Phyllis

Featherweight Day

Of course it was a great day. After much buzz on various blogs finally it was Featherweight Day at Atelier Bep in Hall. Organised by Bep and Jeannet a lot of Featherweight lovers arrived at Bep’s for a day of Featherweight fun.
An impression:

When Hubertine and I arrived we were welcomed by a rather wet crowd…

There was a small project Bep had prepared for us

Ladies with Featherweights everywhere, in the kitchen:

in the living room:

Mr De Bruijn told how us how to take care of our Featherweights

Lunch: very tasty homemade lentil soup

The Duchess at work

Jeannet gave a show & tell of her wonderful quilts

As did some other quilters. Josephine’s colourful quilts:

Hubertine’s warm colours:

Janny is working on a great ‘huisjes’quilt:

The best seat in the house!

We were in Featherweight heaven!

I really have to thank a lot of people for this great day:

Thank you Caro for supplying us with your lovely Featherweight X-stitch pattern, thank you Bep and Jeannet for organising this day, it was soooo much fun & thank you Bep & family for your wonderful hospitality!

Until next time!

Phyllis

Tadaaaaah!!!

As we Feathergirls promised in our previous blogposts, today we will show the blocks each of us has chosen for our Featherweight quilt. As I am writing this post, I still do not know the choice of my fellow Feathergirl Hubertine, but here is mine….. tadaaaah!

Jacob’s Ladder!

I will be making light and dark variations of the block, my blocks will be 9” finished. I do not know yet how big my quilt will become, how many blocks I will make, I will get an idea of that further into this project.

Dark variation:

Light variation:

I love this block, I like looking at quilts made from this block, I like making it. It makes for a really nice varied and colourful quilt,  I can use a lot of fabrics! Also, it is perfect for our purpose, to do a lot of sewing on our Featherweights, getting to know our Featherweights and in the process make a nice quilt top.

This is what I mean:  there are quite a number of points in the block alone (let’s not even begin thinking of putting the blocks together into a quilt top) where the seams have to come together. Well, this is what happened to me:

And this is what I am aiming for…

My first try at making this block was at the first workshop I took that involved using a sewing machine, so this block was really my initiation into machine patching. After returning to quilting late 2009 and working by hand for over a year, I was curious about patching with a sewing machine, and with  a newly bought sewing machine enrolled in a workshop by Lucy Kramer at the De Sampler in Haarlem. I loved her quilts, having seen them on her blog, so was really happy to get a place, even more so after I found out during the workshop that it was her last season of teaching. Apart from learning some great techniques and getting some good tips, there were more things I took home with me from the workshop that day.

Lucy follows her own path in making her quilts, she is true to her own style, not letting trends etc. get in the way of this. Her quilts are traditional (I can just picture them in a log cabin in the woods somewhere in the US), colourful, cozy, friendly, feminine and inviting, I love them.

I have to admit that in my new found enthusiasm for quilting I have too often let myself be carried away and subscribing to BOM’s etc. They were not around during my first period of quilting, you see. I still find each and every one of these projects beautiful, and enjoy making them, but mostly they are someone else’s choice and I subscribed to so many of them that they are somewhat keeping me from ‘doing my own thing’. My own fault, but there are only so many (quilting) hours in a day and I was spending too many of those hours  executing other people’s ideas, beautiful as they may be. So for me, there is another goal in making this quilt: going back to making my own choices and executing my own ideas.

Thanks Lucy, you showed me a lot more than just making a good quarter inch seam allowance on January 28, 2011!

And now quickly to Hubertine’s blog, Quiltwel,  to look at her choice and then back to my stash to find more combinations for more blocks!

Enjoy your day!

Phyllis

The Feathergirls!

Being in the same bee, interested in the same kind of quilts and both loving and owning Singer Featherweight sewing machines, we (Hubertine from the Quiltwel blog and I) decided to join forces and each work on a project in honour of our beloved Featherweights. Talking about this we quickly came up with the following: we will each start a quilt on our Featherweights in the style we love so much: civil war/antique quilts.

Furthermore we also came up with a name to call ourselves for this purpose:

The Feathergirls!! J!!

Our idea is to have a quilt top finished a year’s time, a top which will have an antique look. The idea is just to have a lot of fun sewing on our Featherweights, working with lovely, antique looking fabrics and to have a nice quilt to show for it in the end, the idea is not to make a very complicated kind of quilt (we both have wip’s that already challenge us in that way).

Next week will we show you on our blogs what we  each have come up with as a project, it will also be a mystery for us, because we will not tell each other what we have chosen, we will find out from each other’s blog post that day!!

Every month we will each show you the progress we made on our individual projects on our blogs, so watch out for it!

Enjoy your day!

The Feathergirls