A summer project

Tomorrow will be the last day of this school year and I am so extraordinarily happy about it. The last weeks have been filled with a lot of school work - not only for the kids, appointments and events. Life has been hectic, busy and demanding. We all are in desperate need of a break. But I am sure that from next week on we will slow down, take it a little more easy and hopefully we'll be able to enjoy summer. Summer?

This summer is a 'to be or not to be' summer here in North Germany. One day we have lots of rain and it is cold, next day the sun is shining and you throw off the jeans and the jacket you have worn the day before. We have a big rain barrel in our garden that can save 1000 litres of  rainwater and it is loaded to the gunwales! Usually we don't have any rainwater anymore in July and our lawn looks like a beginning steppe. But this year everything is different.

Nonetheless I still feel summery. I want it to be summery. I long for summery days. And if the weather doesn't cooperate, I have to make my surroundings summery. That why I started a small little summery crochet project, using cotton yarn from my stash. 

I had a loooong look into my cotton yarn basket to decide which colours to choose. Which ones are my summer colours? Finally I chose these ones:

Turquoise, light blue, mimosa, citron, jade, sky, forest and royal. 

All the colours of the ocean and the beach - summer for me.  

I wanted to make a mandala for the kitchen table with matching coasters which we use daily for our teacups.

Have you seen the mandalas by Ayda Algin in Mollie Makes issue 54? I totally fell in love with her design and this was the perfect pattern for my summer project.

This is my version of her design:

 It's so pretty, isn't it? I immediately went into the garden to pick some wonderful white hydrangeas to brighten up my kitchen table. They match so nicely, don't they?

 Here is a bunch of photos, sorry, I just can't help it:

 And here are my coasters. I made 6 of them, because the children often bring some friends home who will need a coaster as well when joining us for lunch or dinner. 

 I didn't follow any pattern making them, I was to lazy to search for a nice pattern in the net. I just made some granny clusters, not forgetting to increase each round so that they lie flat on the table. The edge is simple picots.

 And as I am writing this post, the sun is coming out. I will make use of these rare sunny moments to work a bit in the garden, my raised bed need a thorough weeding. 

I hope that you are able to savour the sun, as well. If not today, maybe tomorrow. 

Happy summer for all of you!

Viola

Back with sanguinity!

I haven't written a post for a long time now. Life didn't run smoothly in the first month of this year. Most of the time I felt ill, drained and exhausted. I didn't get rid of the aftermaths of the flue. I got a couple of other inflammations, had to go to the doctors several times and I couldn't find any strength. I felt like a sick rabbit who wants to creep in his burrow to be not seen or heard until ... yes until when? Until better times come maybe.

I hate to complain partly because I know there are so many people who are having a much rougher ride. And I hate to complain because 

I HATE BEING SICK!!! 

It's driving me cuckoo. 

That's why I stopped blogging, I just couldn't  find any words worth writing. There was nothing for me to say. I had a hard time to cope with daily life. But it didn't stop me from crocheting though. To grab a needle and some nice, colourful yarn felt like a relief and while working up my stitches I temporarily forgot about all sorrow. I did some nice little things in candy colours, something springlike that really soothed my mind.

 

And then after Easter our holiday began. And it's been a wonderful, gorgeous, phantasmagorical holiday! We went to the small Canarian island of La Gomera for almost 2 weeks and within a few days I felt so much better. The weather was gorgeous, about 20 to 24 degrees, the sun was almost always shining and the air felt light and warm. We soon forgot what day or time it was, we went swimming and hiking and strolling around small villages.

Here are a full load of pictures, sorry for that but every time I look at them I feel so happy and thankful that I would love to show you all of our more than 500 pictures we have taken!

To get to La Gomera you have to take the plane to Tenerife and from there you take the ferry to San Sebastian de La Gomera. On the above picture you see Tenerife with the highest mountain, Pico de Teide.

 This is the small town of San Sebastian where all the ferries land. But we had to continue our travel by bus to the wonderful steep valley on the other side of the island - Valle Gran Rey.

 

The Atlantic ocean there is wild and rough, the waves are strong and the play of colours is magical. If you look over the ocean you may see all different shades of blue, I wish that I could be able to dye yarn in this wonderful seawater.

 My children loved to go swimming in these powerful, head-high waves.

 

 One day we took part in a whale watching tour and we saw lots of pilot whales. But it is so difficult to get a good picture! The boat is rocking and the whales are really fast.

 We had lovely food, I especially loved the ripe avocados there. They taste so much better than the ones you can buy here. We even saw avocados hanging on a tree!

 

And the Canarian bananas are delicious, as well. They are much smaller than our usual ones and the taste is better. 

 

There is a speciality that is merely produced on La Gomera, the Miel de Palma, palm tree honey. It is a liquid brown honey that is sweet and really, really nice on pancakes. One day we accidentally saw a palm tree that produced the honey. The interesting thing about this honey is that you can only harvest it when it is dark. The palm liquid is spoiled when touching light. 

 And we went hiking, as well. La Gomera is a paradise for hikers. There are so many well signposted trails that it is difficult to decide which trail to choose. The children loved the trail following a brook bed through trees, palms and bamboo. It included quite a bit of climbing, as well.

 I especially loved the trails through the Laurissilva forest, a thick green leaf forest. This forest is not green from rain, instead, it catches the moist carried with the trade winds, which blow from the humid north. The funny thing is that it can often be quite cold and humid, even rainy in this forest and on the Northern part of La Gomera and when you get back (and down!) to the Southern coastline the weather is sunny, dry and warm. 

This is the Pico de Teide of Tenerife again. When the skies are clear and blue you have a fantastic view to the other Canarian islands Tenerife, La Palma and El Hierro.

  

 

La Gomera has been a place for us to relax, to enjoy nature, to find silence and to dance with the Atlantic waves on beaches with black volcanic sand. We spent a most blissful and happy time there and we surely will come back one day.

That's it for today, I hope you are not too exhausted by this overload of pictures. I don't know when I will come back here, I have to go to hospital again next week but as soon as possible I will write the next blog entry about my finished rainbow ripple blanket. I' m so happy, happy, happy with it!

I hope you are well and happy and have lots of nice things going on.

Big hugs,

Viola

  

Back home

Where has the summer gone?

It is our first weekend home again and it starts with raining. The sky is full of clouds and it hasn't stopped raining since I opened my eyes this morning. It would have been so nice taking the first cup of tea to the garden, sitting outside, feeling the sun in the face... But everything is wet, wet, wet.

So what to do? I went to the kitchen, checked my supplies and decided to bake plum muffins and an apple cake. Now the house is filled with the delicious smell of baked goods. All of a sudden the day feels much better.

While I write this post I will have a cup of tea with a warm and fluffy muffin. Who cares if it's raining?
The cup I just use is a souvenIr from Concarneau. I just love, love, love it.. It has the ideal size for my morning tea and sets a smile on my face every time I look at it.

For the queen of mothers!



First I wanted to write a little bit about all my crochet projects I started, finished or continued during my holidays but now I decided to write this post about mandalas.

Who can escape the mandala hype? It seems that everybody is in love with mandalas this summer and I have to confess that I have fallen in love with them, as well. Everywhere you go you come across the most gorgeous mandalas and meanwhile I have stored more patterns that I will ever be able to try. Yesterday evening when I was reading some blogs I like, I saw so many beautiful mandalas that I was itching to start a new mandala by myself. But I decided to finish one other project first.

The fist time I came across them was when I found the wonderful blog of Alice from Crochet with Raymond. Her mandalas are just fabulous, her combination of colours and her neat fine work just grabbed me. I had to try her pattern immediately and this is what I did first. A rainbow mandala that is still in use on our small cabinet. One day I will make a second one but in a different colour scheme.

And of course I just could not stick to one single mandala, instead I went a little overboard. I started using Lucy's pattern (Attic24) for small mandalas and experimented with them. I told myself that I was doing a real useful job producing all of these little addictive mandalas because I discovered how helpful they are as coasters. Every time I drink a cup of tea I use one of these little mandalas and even my kids love them. They lie on our kitchen table and are in daily use.

I'll stop now. My family wants to try the muffins and the cake, as well. And the cream of the crop is that my husband just came back from shopping and bought me some flowers. Actually the day's not that bad...

Hope your day will show some rays of sunshine, as well.
Viola