New Blog - welcome to tag along

Dear friends!
As you may have read a few posts back I am experiencing problems with my blog since Blogger upgraded the interface. Somewhere in my html-code is a fault causing all my links, labels and archives to “glue themselves” to the bottom of my blog. Blood, sweat, tears and a heck of work hours later I am no closer to the solution of what went wrong.

So now I give up and start on a new blog instead. I call it My creative everyday life! I am still on blogger and here is the link to the new one MY CREATIVE EVERYDAY LIFE

This is not an easy thing for me to do. I have written this blog since 2007 and the posts are an important part of my life. And I am afraid of losing you – all my dear blog friends!

I know I have followers from all corners of the globe and some of you also kindly have a link to my blog on yours. I would be so very happy if you would change the link to the new one. I will try and send a personal message to all my followers but if I miss out on anyone it is not intentional.

I hope you will tag along to the new one. I will be looking forward to seeing you all there.

Take care
Jeanette


PS Hurry over and you can win a photo of your choise in my first post. Just leave a comment on which photo you like best and I will pick a winner on September the 15th.

Sheep-shearing

I love wool and all the amazing stuff you can create with it but most of all I love the actual producer. No I am not going to elope with a sheep farmer I meant the sheep of course. I have promised myself that one day I will have sheep of my very own. Maybe when we move to the country house permanently and not just use it for weekends and vacations. Unfortunately my husband doesn’t share my fascination and love of sheep so I just might have to find myself that sheep farmer anyway….

Today I went to watch sheep-shearing at Katrinetorps gård. It was great fun. One sheep took approximately 2-3 minutes to shear. Unbelievable! At first I thought it looked a bit brutal but then you saw that the sheep didn`t seem to mind. They loved getting rid of the warm fleece.
This is Torgil and his primadonna Lisa.

"Hey Torgil, had I known there would be such a turn out I would have brushed my fleece"



"Could I have some privacy please! My butt is showing for crying out loud!"



Am I cute or what! Please buy my CD after the show!

Mmmmm that felt nice. Scratch me some more....

Katrinetorp has a beautiful garden as well and I stayed there for hours taking photos. will show you some tomorrow. And after today I am even more convinced! I want a sheep....or two!


Take care
Jeanette

PS I bought the fleece from Torgil. Such beautiful, curly and bouncy raw fleece. I just couldn`t resist.

Frustration

Today I have been very, very angry – with Blogger. When they upgraded their interface all my labels, links and contact information suddenly appeared at the bottom of the page. I have tried everything and they are still like glued to the bottom. My dear blogfriend Anna tried to help me just now and we ended up chatting on facebook. That made me feel so much better. It is so nice to have someone that really understands not only your frustration but also understands how important this blog is for me. I have written since 2007 and through my blog I have shared my happiness, been comforted in my sorrows and ventilated some anger too and now, when everything is upside down I feel like weeping.

When everything was feeling really hopeless my husband came and gave me a package. A brown paper package tied up with strings. ( Like that song in Sound of Music you know!) He had collected it at the post office. Woohoo I thought, it must be my green raincoat that I ordered a week ago.

But it wasn’t. It was 7 tiny little jars with dye for my raw wool that I had forgotten that I ordered. Red, yellow and blue.

Oh joy! Can’t wait to try them out, but not tonight though. Tonight I have to finish the shawl that I am making to match my new raincoat and tomorrow I am off to the country house for some serious gardening.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

Take care
Jeanette

PS Do you know what? When I looked at the preview of my post - suddenly everything looked OK again. All labels and links was where they were supposed to be and then when I published it everything was all wrong again. Crap!

Embroidery against FGM/C

This is by far the most “strange” embroidery I have ever made but also the most important. It is a portrait of a female vulva. If you find this repulsive or provocative please, please read on anyway because it is made for a very important cause and even better - all can join in.

I read this post at Craftgossip.com and that is what got it all started…

“The Embroideries Campaign is not about shock value or sexuality, per se. It is about bringing an end to female genital mutilation. The practice of altering female genitals to protect a girl’s marriage ability is still widespread in some parts of the world. This surgery not only robs women of sexual joy, but also can complicate childbirth, affect general health, or even result in death from infection or hemorrhage.

To raise awareness and combat this tradition, the Embroideries Campaign invites women worldwide to create 7″ x 7″ works on fabric depicting healthy vulvas “as abstract or accurate as you like.” Needlework has been chosen as the medium for these works because it is usually the traditional domain of women and because the Persian word for genital alteration is “embroidery.” The works submitted by contributors will be joined into a patchwork wall hanging and displayed in public to invite media coverage of this issue. “

I decided at once that I wanted to participate. I made my embroidery with a “flower theme”, the flowers representing the freedom of sexuality that I think every woman is entitled to. If you like to join in and support the cause you can get more information on the Embroideries Campaign website.

You can send your embroidery to:

EMBROIDERIES
5a Gransden Ave
London E8 3QA
United Kingdom

Do join in!

Jeanette

My wardrobe got me thinking..

I have a varied wardrobe. Variation is a good thing right? Well, no. In my case varied is just a polite word for not having anything that actually fits together. Oh I envy those who have a style, people who seem to follow a path clothes-wise and never wander astray….they stick to a certain type of clothes and buy stuff that fits right in there with the rest. Writing this, it sounds a bit boring but this is most often not the case. They can wear outrageous outfits but they sort of stick to the outrageous category if you know what I mean. . They are not office lady one day and punk rocker the next… Me, I seem not to be able to stay on the path…..

I love the Meg Ryan You’ve got mail kind of clothes as well as Madonnas crazy outfits in Who`s that girl. I also love hippie/grunge/skater kind of stuff minus showing your butt in a low waistline. I like suits for the office and I like colourful clothes. Heeelp! Is there such a thing as an wardrobe split personality disorder? ´Then I`ve got it!

Inspired by Eleanor I am planning a few posts on clothes. A “todays outfit” now an then, maybe once a week. At the end of the year I can look back and see where I went wrong that day, ha, ha!

This is todays outfit.

Yep, you saw right. Today Jeanette goes Pippi Longstocking. I always wanted a sweater like Pippi when I was a kid.



My Mum said she could knit me one but I didn`t want that. Handmade wasn’t really high fashion in those days but I would gladly knit one today though….

So today I am Pippi but tomorrow? Who knows!


Take care
Jeanette

I need flowers in the rain

Today I bought a winter jacket and a cap! The terrible thing isn’t the fact that I bought it now even if it’s not even September yet, the terrible thing is that I want to start using it at once.

The weather is so cold, rainy and grey right now that all I can think about is my new warm jacket !

I need autumn flowers to brighten up my day!



Take care
Jeanette

Fashion statements from the commentbox

One of my blogfriends has a newly found interest in fashion blogs…..and glasses. I have read her blog over the years and I absolutely love her posts which are usually spot on and almost always very funny. Can’t wait to read her posts on glasses and see the photos…..being a person forced to use glasses myself, inspiration and pep talk are always welcome!

Inspired by her I did a little embroidery. Of what? A pair of glasses of course.

I made sort of a collage with it and now I am of to the letterbox sending it to her.



Take care
Jeanette

PS I need reading glasses too. I have a lot of them. Mostly the kind you buy at the gas station.... My favorite pair are light blue with dark blue dots on them. My daughters say I look like Fairy God mother in Shrek. You know, the mother of Prince Charming.....ugh!

Short cuts

My head is constantly spinning with new ideas for all kind of creative stuff but my problem is that I want to try everything out at once. So I usually end up with a lot of unfinished projects. I seem to constantly find something that is even more fun to try out all the time… My shelves in the work room are not only filled to the brim with objects that might come in handy some day ( like jumble sale findings, tin cans, wire, wood, scraps of fabric, buttons, yarn, lace, paper….) it’s also pretty crammed with stuff that are almost finished. The fact that I am a woman in lack of patience tends to add to the piles too.

Today I decided it was high time to get rid of some of the shelf warmers. I`ve been meaning to do some pillows for my country house bedroom for ages and even started out on some but never getting round to finishing them. No surprise there eh ? The truth is that I find it dead boring to make the actual pillow case, it’s just so much more fun with the pimping part. So what could I do for a short cut? I remembered that I had a lot of old pillow cases that I inherited from my parents in law. Beautiful old pillow cases with lace and embroidery but since I had a lot of them maybe I could use some of them for my new pillows? Said and done.

Two hours later I had four new pillows, two of them made from the vintage pillow cases and one from an old velvet pillow case I found in my fabric pile. The last one I made from an old t-shirt. I simply took different kind of finished objects that I had lying about and added them to the pillow cases. Dead easy and fast!

Oh I love short cuts.

This one is the quilt that I made out of my husbands shirts but never made a pillow of. ...



....and this is the embroidery I made meaning to add it to a pillow some day....The text is kind of a pun in Swedish and hard to translate but goes something like this "the one you make the bed for, gets to sleep with you"




This one is I pimped with flower fabric and an old kettle-holder…



….and this is made from an old t-shirt I bought at a jumble sale. I love the buttons, don’t you? Yep,it’s Boy George in case you were wondering…



Take care
Jeanette

Patches

Last year I found this tiny little white patch on my right hand and when I visited my doctor I got diagnosed with Vitiligo. I had never heard about it before but the doctor explained to me that Vitiligo is a pigmentation disorder in which melanocytes (the cells that make pigment) in the skin are destroyed. As a result, white patches appear on the skin in different parts of the body. The cause of vitiligo is not known, but the most widely accepted view is that the depigmentation occurs because vitiligo is an autoimmune disease -- a disease in which a person's immune system reacts against the body's own organs or tissues. He also said that unfortunately there was no cure against the disorder and you could never tell how fast it would spread.

He went on telling me that there is an association between vitiligo and the most aggressive form of skin cancer, melanoma. Individuals with vitiligo and with fair skin in general should therefore exercise extra precautions when it comes to sun protection. Daily application of a moisturizer with a broad spectrum sunscreen of SPF 30 or greater to sun exposed areas was recommended. Use of hats, sunscreen and covering up while outdoors, avoiding sun exposure between 10 AM-3 PM would be a good idea. Yeah! I got this picture in my head of me sitting in a sunchair with an ugly sunhat and all covered up in a blanket. I felt like weeping! I went out of the doctor’s office feeling sort of numb. I looked at the tiny little patch and could almost hear the pigment cells chewing off on each other.

For six month or so nothing much happened. The patch didn’t get any bigger and I kept a brave face telling myself that I most certainly didn’t have the aggressive version and as long as it didn’t spread to my face I was OK with it…. That was a big fat lie of course. I wasn’t OK with it, well the white patch didn’t bother me as much as the skin cancer thing. That had me trembling…

Four months ago or so it started spreading really fast. I went back to the doctor but he had no answer to why it was spreading so fast but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. I still tried to keep the bravery up. It hadn’t spread to my face, I didn’t have skin cancer so it wasn’t lethal ( yet….) and although it was the same disease that Michael Jackson had I was almost certain that it wasn’t what caused his nose to fall of…. I worked really hard on convincing myself that this was no big deal. Hey, there is always make up….

Last week as I was in a shop buying a pair of jeans ( hate, hate, double hate) and was standing in this really, really tiny dressing room with it’s non flattering bright light trying to see whether my ass looked big in these ( which it always does) and that’s when I saw it – a pink patch on my chin. It had finally spread to my face.

I wept in the dressing room
I wept in the car back home
I wept for the rest of the evening.

Feeling sorry for myself and feeling that life was unfair. Why me I sobbed! The next morning I told myself to get a grip. So many people in the world were far worse off. So I might soon be looking like Yogi the Bear and so I would have to take extra precautions in the sun for the rest of my life but I still didn’t have skin cancer. I told myself that I had to focus on all the good things in life – my wonderful husband, lovely daughters and all my great friends. The country house, my creative work, my garden, my photography…. and it works. Most of the time.

But then there is the lonely hours at night when fear of cancer hits me big time but maybe there is a meaning to that too. Because otherwise I might get careless, not using sun protection, pretending that it will never happen to me...

…and come to think of it – Yogi the Bear is kind of cute!


Take care
Jeanette

Bird with yellow beak

Hand carving is fun but the most fun part is to look for branches and pieces of wood that resemble something. That speaks to you…Today I made a bird of sorts.. …

Take care
Jeanette

Carving

I have a busy period at work right now and do long hours. When I get home I am too tired to start any big crafting projects but try to do little tiny ones. I feel good when I create, it helps me relax. Yesterday I was tired of my knitting and went into my workroom instead.



My eyes fell on the pretty little heart that my friend Anna hand carved for me. That got me inspired and in search for a piece of wood but I had to make do with a cut of branch from my compost heap.




So bibidi



Bobidi


Boo




Done!

I am happy, relaxed and ready for another day at work.

Take care
Jeanette

It is all about dreaming

I planted a new border this weekend. It lies next to the fields and is actually a homage to my beloved cat Nasse who is buried there. I planted clematis ( from my friend B:s garden) surrounded by roses (Summerwind) and lavender and also a little “wild corner” with Lupines and Foxglove. I tucked all the plants in for the autumn in nice fluffy raw wool to keep the rabbits and deer away.

It doesn’t look like much now but gardening is very much about dreaming I think. About how it’s going to be later on….. when the lupines and foxglove start blooming in June followed by cascades of tiny pink roses surrounded by bright blue lavender and in the middle of it all the clematis proudly reaching for the sky.

Doesn`t sound so bad eh? So what that it will take a couple of years – it’s worth waiting for. OMG I can’t believe that I am writing this – me – the woman in total lack of patience! Could it be the same woman that would spend fortunes in plant shops every year just to have the border ready at once…and then dig it up again next year because it didn’t turn out the way she wanted fast enough? The woman who now grow almost all her plants from seeds and save all the little tiny infant lavender plants she finds while weeding…..

Wow, gardening haven’t just got me dreaming it teaches me patience too!

Take care
Jeanette

Pillows

I wanted pillows for my kitchen sofa and finally got round to using some of my jumble sale findings. I used scrap fabric and added an old embroidery, a crocheted doily and a kettle-holder from my kettle-holder collection.



The needlepoint field rabbit seemed to be the perfect choice for a pillow since I am surrounded by them at the country house. We have a sort of love & hate relationship, the rabbits and I, the amount of love I feel depending on how much of my flower buds they eat.

I am especially proud over the round crocheted pillow since I don’t actually crochet. I used a round kettle-holder from my collection and sort of just continued on it using different cotton yarn for a striped effect.



When I was finished I had to pinch my arm to see that I wasn’t dreaming – Wow, it was still round. Maybe not a giant step for mankind but certainly a great step for me. I can almost hear my wicked old craft teacher from school saying “are you sure no one helped you out with that”. She was one mean old lady and if there is any justice in the world she is sitting in a very warm place right now surrounded with tons of yarn that is all tangled up….

Sorry got carried away abit there....here is the finished result.



Speaking of school. The picture hanging over the sofa is an old school placard used in science classes in the 1940:ies. Needless to say it`s another jumble sale finding….



I love looking at it. The colours always makes me happy.

Take care
Jeanette

Berry picking

Today I went in search for berries, black berries to be presice. I decided to try the little nature reserve not far from my house. It’s a beautiful mixture of oak trees, shrubbery and meadows. The only disadvantage is cows. I am not afraid of cows, although in flock they tend to be very nosy, easily scared and therefore running about in an uncontrolled manner all of the time…. No it`s their boss that I am afraid of. I have run into him a couple of times and he never looks like he is going to sit under a tree and smell the flowers any time soon.



But I am a courageous kind of girl ( Yep, Batgirl thats me! Bet you didn`t know that....) so off I went anyway, walking through the woods, humming a little tune, picking a berry here and a berry there feeling happy. The grass was full of little baby toads so I had to keep one eye on the ground and one eye on the berry bushes and while I was at it I kept a look out for the cows too. My superhero costume being at the cleaners you see....But afraid? Oh no not me!

Just as I stood pondering over the fact that the biggest and yummiest berries always are the ones that are out of reach I saw a green Tree frog.The green Tree frog is rare and I have wanted to see one in the wild ever since we bought the country house. So when the frog disappeared into the bushes that’s when I started to get sloppy….

I eagerly followed trying to spot him again. Walking around with my head closer and closer to the ground muttering to myself “come on you little bugger, I am not going to eat you". I went round a big bush, looked up and….. yikes....



...Cows.....and the mean guy ? I bet he was lurking in the bushes just waiting for his prey. I was frantic!

I stepped round a tree in order to avoid them, sunk to my knees in mud and fell headlong landing on the berry basket. I think it was right then and there as I was feeling the smashed berries slowly trickling through my sweater that I decided to call it a day.

This Berry picking thing is nothing for us superwomen anyway!

And by the way – I am not afraid of cows!

Take care
Jeanette

Ösregn/ Hard rain

Sweden is a country where it rains a lot and this summer really sucks weather wise at least in the south of Sweden. I like bright colours and my firm belief is that rain would be so much more fun if you could wear a colourful raincoat. Still most of the raincoats that are sold here are black, dark blue or army green. I have red wellingtons so how hard can it be to make colourful raincoats as well? Hard apparently!

Today my heart made a leap of joy. I was surfing around in webb land and suddenly stumbled over the most beautiful rain coat. In turquoise with green lining. Cravings, cravings! After I had stopped drooling I read on and found out that the company was Swedish and called Ösregn. Which is a very funny and appropriate name if you are a Swede since it means “hard rain”.

All the coats had beautiful names like; Persian Turquoise, milk, strawberry cream, liquorice, Pompeian red and moss green. Makes your mouth water eh?
And even though I am not all that fond of black and green these looked great because they where made with a twist!

All photos from Ösregn

A raincoat to die for don`t you think? I cant wait to buy one!

Rainy days here I come!

Take care
Jeanette