Little village in spring

Spring is getting stronger and the little village in front of our main door is developing too (have a look here and here). Strange enough, you never see someone working. Not in the early morning sun ...

... and not in the afternoon calm!

The lutins (french for dwarf) have now a fence around the village center. 

And it seams to be a very relaxed and harmonic life in this little village. 

I wish I could live there :-)

A bientôt,

Jane (absent pour une semaine)

Beanie bonnet

You will say: "why is she sewing a bonnet when there is spring in every corner and the sun is getting stronger every day?". You are so right and I didn't need it this week, but last week there have been some very windy days and I am getting very easily headache when getting cool wind against my forehead. Still I didn't want to go out with my winter bonnet. So I made myself a very light one from jersey and I used this free pattern from Hamburger-Liebe. Thanks a lot for the pattern and explanations!

I just made the beanie a little bit longer to turn over the brim. I choose a big size so it is fitting loosely. 

I like the look, the fit and it is fulfilling its purpose to protect my head from headache. And I am not the only one who likes it: a friend I met at school when dropping of the kids has been so enthusiastic, I made her a grey one with pink stars for her vacation. I forgot to take a photo though.

Also I hope that the very sunny, warm spring weather we have since a week will hold on (me and the kids have been chilling in the garden every free minute), this beanie will be the first thing I put in my suitcase for our vacation next week at my parents place that is near the Baltic-sea and where it is probably much fresher than here in the south.

A bientôt,

Jane 

linked at RUMS (only things you made for yourself!)

Apples

For a gift I wanted to have a special wrapping paper, therefor I had to make some stamps. Look how nice the paper turned out:

There is one stamp for a whole apple with two leaves. In my example I stamped it only in red. Then I made a pieced apple with one stamp for the apple outline, one for the stem with leave and one for an occasional worm that is looking out. Those three stamps let you vary the color of this apples. In this case I used only two different greens. 

And what do you think is inside the present?

An apple-peeler/cutter of course!

A bientôt,

Jane

Happy Easter 2015

My Easter bunch is this year from branches that I had to cut from the currant bushes (they are getting gigantic). I put them in a big vase and within a week they got nice green leaves and very pretty discrete little flowers. 

From all our Easter decoration my boys chose to put only the grumpy birds in it and some lovely daffodils my mom made for me. The instruction for those bells, I found years ago on patchwork-and-fun.de and made lots of them for the Christmas tree. My mom made them smaller and with little leaves for Easter. Unfortunately the instruction is not any more available online.

I hope you have a happy Easter weekend!

Bonne fête de Pâques!

A bientôt,

Jane 

Over-jeans-skirt

I actually made this skirt already 10 days ago, but when I tried it on for the first time it has been much too large :-( Only yesterday I had the motivation to do the changes to make it fitting. Today I wore it all day and had a wonderful warm feeling despite all the rain, hail and cold wind outside (the photos are from a dry moment this morning, my husband made them before going to work).

Seems like green is a new favorite color of mine.

I bought this light loden cloth already in autumn for making a skirt and it would have been more useful in winter as I hope that ugly days like today are not becoming habit in this spring.

I made the pattern for this skirt myself with instructions from this book. I don't think it is to blame on the book that my skirt didn't fit at first, I guess I measured false or got an error by calculating with cm instead of inches. 

I added some pockets to the front, as I am always missing pockets on all my other over-trouser-skirts (I love to wear those).

The skirt had been 8 cm too big (that's a lot). I am lazy and didn't feel like picking off the pockets again, so I added a middle seam at the backside, that meant that I just had to pick off parts of the belt-lining - much easier. It worked well and I don't mind, that the side seams are not really on the side any more. It is even still wide enough for moving without restrictions (also the fabric is slightly stretchy).

Even with the delayed start: I am very happy with my skirt and will wear it now as much as possible before putting it away during the warm seasons.

A bientôt,
Jane

linked at RUMS (only things made for yourself on a Thursday)