Frisian Frillies

Following the theme of 'RecyKLEREN' which is doing the rounds on Dutch and Belgian blogs, I've started to do some deconstruction and reconstruction work. Two of my garments faced the chop. My warm, red wintercoat, which has served its purpose for me and had more rips in the lining and pilling on the outside than I wanted, and a summery top, which is too big. The red coat was going to be turned into a red coat - for Mermaid. So after some cutting, drawing out patterns and cutting paper, I had a pile of fabric and a pile of paper... And the two did not match. The horror... There just wasn't enough fabric to make a coat out of it. And even the pattern for a coat for Batman required more fabric than I have :( The plan now is to turn it into a nice woollen skirt for the little lady. The coat before... And now: a pile of wool fabric, lining, buttons and labels The top actually fared better, but then, that was much easier! I only had to take in the sides a bit, turn the ...

Yesterday, we celebrated the 5th anniversary of our local Stitch 'n Bitch group. The preparations started a few months ago with an inventory of ideas, and the organizing committee got to work with all that input, planning the big surprise for all of us. We were first invited to knit, crochet or otherwise craft cool head gear. No party without hats! This is our Frisian geisha Marijke, who unfortunately did not win the prize for best head dress. That went to blogless Gretha with a beautiful summery hat with butterflies on it. I have no good pictures, hopefully I can put up a link to better ones soon! We started the party with some Prosecco, of course in suitable glasses... There were pictures to look at (and take home) of our yarnbombing event earlier this year... And then after depositing our swap yarn for later on that evening in the big box, and writing down our estimates for the 'Guess the weight' competition, we got stuck into the food. Café Wouters had put up a gre...

Yes, the final day of the Summer holiday has arrived! We've thoroughly enjoyed it this year, even though the weather was abysmal at times! We spent a week on the Dutch west coast in the forest, close to the beach (which we didn't see at all, due to a massive sand storm when we went, rain and low temperatures which meant we did mostly city-related day trips) and a week in the east of the country, on a great campsite which we are definitely going to again. I did some knitting, but I read a lot. I really missed doing that at home, so it was great to be able to just sit down, let the children run wild and just read... Read... The knitting isn't finished yet (socks, of course, the perfect bring-along for camping knitting), but I do have to show you some other stuff. During the holidays, I also did some sniffing on eBay, and because I am such a bad loser, I bid hard (not too hard, by the way...) and won two lots from Colourmart. The first one was three cones of DK 2/6 merino i...