Day-trip to the alpaca farm

Last week Sunday I made with my local knitting group a day trip to the alpaca farm. I had no idea that there are alpacas in Finland, but there are. It was all very exciting.

We started our day in the early morning with riding lessons on Norwegian Fjord horses. I didn't take any pictures myself, since I was to busy keeping myself up that horse.

After a few hours of riding we were all starving and headed to a restaurant for lunch. We skipped the dessert since there was coffee, tea and plenty of cake waiting for us at the alpaca farm.

The farm had a little shop and of course we bought plenty of alpaca wool for our next knitting projects. I bought two skeins of a beautiful grey-ish brown colour. I will use them for a pair of fingerless mittens.

Here is Drucilla sampling a skein of yarn. It is unbelievable how soft it is.

Beside the beautiful yarns, the shop also offered hand-knitted items like socks, hats, mittens, sweaters and blankets.  

And adorable decoration like this hand made alpaca.

Just to say a few words about my stitching progress. I finished three little projects during the week and I am working on three more little ones at the moment. Though I can't really share any pictures with you until December. All those projects are for Christmas exchanges and I don't want to spoil the surprise for my exchange partners. 
Also I am busy stitching the model of one of my own designs. Last year we run one of my designs as a SAL in my German stitching group Sticklounge and I have been asked if I have another small design that could be stitched in the group.

Yesterday's stitching meeting

Yesterday my Finnish stitching group had another meeting. This time it took place at Outi's home, which is about a two-hour-drive away from Helsinki. I was very lucky to catch a ride from my stitching friend Virpi who attended the same meeting. We had a lot of fun in the car, especially on the way back, since we rolled on our very last drops of gasoline to the next gas station. I was so worried that we get stuck on the highway.

I made some great progress on my Jane Austen sampler by "The Sampler Girl" and I got lots of compliments for it.

The only picture I have to show is from the early morning, when people where still gathering together. When the actually stitching madness started I completely forgot to take more pictures.

Outi's home is beautifully decorated with all her handmade items, including a lot of stitched pictures and goodies. All together there were about 14 stitchers with some leaving early and some more coming later that day.

For this meeting we decided to  have an Autumn themed exchange. As usual I forgot to take a picture of the package that I set together. And the recipient was the first one to leave. All I can say is that Sari really liked it and maybe you can see a picture of the whole set on her blog soon.

The set that I received was made by Kirsi. Isn't the wreath beautiful?

Here are some close ups.

Kirsi told me that she found the antique tread bobbin from the flea market. I think it is a perfect door wreath for any stitcher.

Hyvää Juhannusta!

Wishing everyone a Happy Midsummer! 

The Mr. and I will spend the day and night with beer and barbecue and the company of our good friends enjoying Finnish Summer.

Hyvää Juhannusta!

Just a little something

Hi everyone! No stitching progress from me today, just a little something I have wanted to share for a while now. But don't you worry, I am still stitching. I put in my first 2 hours into "On Travel with Jane Austen" and I love it.

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But here is now what I wanted to show.

Every now and then, milk cartons get a special designer look here in Finland. And in early spring Valio came out with this design. Ok, it is not exactly cross stitch, but anyway. I think it is pretty cool.

Have a wonderful day!

A crazy shopping Trip

First of all I'd like to apologize for falling behind on my posts.Things are really busy right now. The Mr. and I are moving back to Helsinki in just a couple of weeks and right now all I'm concerned about is getting all those boxes packed. And believe me there are plenty. 

Most troublesome is to box all my crafting supplies. It's almost as much as the regular household stuff. REALLY! It doesn't really help that just yesterday I went to Estonia to buy even more stash.

My knitting group organizes once a year a trip to Tallinn, Estonia to buy yarn, wool, lace, buttons and whatever else the crafter's heart desires. Since I only joined this knitting group last November it was my first shopping trip to Tallinn and I had been officially declared a "shopping virgin". I was kind of laughing about this title until I entered the first shop named Karnaluks. It was more like a use storage facility rather than a shop. Room after room full with shelves and boxes of wool, yarn and fabrics. They even had a separated room just for ribbons and lazy. After spending two hours in this shop we moved on to the next one and the next one and the next one. IT WAS CRAZY!

All together we were a group of 19 women, all armed with big bags and backpacks. Some even brought big empty suitcases to fill them up with goodies. After five hours of shopping and being back on the boat we all unpacked our treasures and counted how much yarn we bought. While I only bought 350 grams of beautiful pure merino wool the entire group made it to a total of more than 23kg of yarn.

Here are a few pictures of my shopping prey

I bough one meter of each of those beautiful fabrics

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I stocked up on missing DMC colours

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two meters each of this beautiful rickrack ribbon (the black one is velvet)

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this is the Merino wool I bought. It is sooooo soft

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of course I also bought some lace ribbons:

black, brown and green

cream and white

red, salmon and pink

and different shades of blue and violet 

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I can't wait to finish some of my stitching projects with these beautiful fabrics and laces. But that will have to wait after we moved and settled in into the new apartment.

It's winter!

I have been away from blogging for a while now. I simply don't have much new stitching progress to show. And to be honest, I have started knitting again. I found a wonderful group of talented knitters in my area, that I am meeting with once a month for chatting, knitting and eating sweet cake.

So for today the only thing to share is a picture of the beautiful snow we have right now here in Finland. I took this picture last week, on my way home from work. At that time it was freezing -20 degrees C

Winter Wonderland

I slightly remember that I promised you in one of my previous post that I will share pictures of all the snow here in Finland.

This morning I had some errants to run in the neighbour town and decided that instead of taking the train, I am going to walk the 3 miles home. The sky is fairly clear today and the sun is shining. With only -5 C it's the perfect winter walk weather.

 

For snow lovers...

If you like snow you will enjoy these pictures. I took them just a few days before Christmas. It was really cold, about -15 degrees C. The sky was crystal clear and the sunset provided a glowing light. Usually it is rather cloudy and dark during Finnish winters.

It's almost Christmas

It is almost Christmas! Yeah! The Mr. and I bought yesterday night our tree and today I set it up and decorated it. I love it! It is a huge one, almost touching the ceiling. The picture is just not giving justice about how nice it looks.
For decorating I used the old Christmas ornament I inherited from my grandma. They are really old and have quite a few ugly spot, but I find that makes them even more charming.

Unusual beautiful Autumn

Normally around this time of the year we are having a lot of rain already, but not this time. This year we are having an unusual beautiful and warm Autumn.
Those of you who are reading my blog for quite a while already, know my passion of taking pictures of nature. And around autumn it always turns out that I am shooting mushrooms. Yes mushroom! So I did also this year. Want to see also last years mushroom pics click here.



Most of the pictures are quite dark, because even the sun was shining very bright, it didn't reach much of the ground. At this part of the forest the trees are standing very close to each other. It gives the forest the feeling of enchantment. I think I love this the most about living in Finland.

Besides shooting mushroom pictures, I also got some cross stitching done. I finished finally the 3rd part of See the Stars.

Just while taking this pictures I recognized that I am stretching out my Autumn love even into my cross stitching projects. I never realized that I am using so many Autumn related colors like this year.

Here is also my progress on Special Delivery. I really love to use the GA threads.


Last but not least are here a few knitting updates and pictures of my new stash. YEAH! I haven't bought the black yarn for my Mr.'s scarf yet but I went shopping for some other yarn. The felting experiment the other day turned out great, so I went ahead and bought nothing less than 1 kg of felting wool. Wuhuu, the bag knitting can start now. I also purchased 6 balls of a very bright lime green Acrylic yarn. It is so super soft. I already started knitting with it. It is the first time that I am knitting a swirled pattern. I always thought it is so difficult, I could never do anything like that, but it turned out to be quite easy and I love the result.

Day trip to Tallinn, Estonia

Again I don't have much stitching progress to show to you. I made a little progress on my Mary Wigham, but by far not as much as I was hoping to make.
But I'd like to show you some pictures of our yesterday's Day Trip instead. At the moment we are having two friends from New York staying over and yesterday we went for a short visit to Tallinn in Estonia. It was also for me the first time to visit Tallinn and I was so amazed. We took the boat, which takes only 2 1/2 hours, in the morning and walked a little bit around in the Old Town area of Tallinn . We were about to go for lunch somewhere when we met a girl in medieval clothes offering home backed bread in the streets. The girl belonged to a Medieval Restaurant, so we went there to eat. We actually just wanted to have a quick lunch and then move on, but it was all so good that we spend our entire time in that restaurant.

Our boat and a picture of Helsinki while leaving the harbor.


The Old Town of Tallinn

Olde Hansa, The Medieval Restaurant of Tallinn

I had for lunch game pot with ginger turnip and my Mr. had lamb stew with lentils. On side dish we both also had pickled vegetables and white mashed beans backed in bread. For dessert Mr. had a very delicious apple pie with almond butter sauce and I had a rose pudding. But for some reason we forgot to make pictures of the desserts. Throughout lunch we had spiced red wine and many different kinds of homemade spiced liquors. It was all so delicious!


These pictures are showing the porch we had lunch at, our two American friends, my Mr. and me and as you can see we had a great time. Lots of happy faces.