Likka's first birthday - today

Today Likka turns one. Wow. Where did the year go. But I'm happy it did, toddlers are way more fun. We celebrated Likka's birthday with the family on Wednesday and with friends yesterday. We kept things simple, even the cake was decorated with just a pile of mini marshmallows and candy on the sides. Likka got to eat a few marshmallows and then those were all she wanted to eat.

Today we are leaving for the annual crayfish party at our friends' cabin, that is why we celebrated Likka's birthday couple days beforehand.

Midsummer magic

Today here is celebrated the Midsummer. It is Midsummer eve. In olden days, maybe still a bit, Midsummer has been considered magical. On Midsummer one can perform all sorts of spells to enhance your luck in marriage or to get magical powers. Maybe particularly Finnish but most of these spells should be done nude and most spells are for single women looking for a spouse. 

One of the spells says to collect seven flowers and place them under your pillow. When you sleep you will see your future husband in your dream. I once did this and oddly I saw a dream where there were only women in a shoe store that only sold those high heel shoes that have all coloured fur decoration over the toes. Hmm... I wonder what that says of my future husband...

Other spells say that on the Midsummer night if you look into a well you will see your future hubby in the reflection of the water. Preferably this should be done nude. Then if you run from a sauna, nude of course, through fields and after crossing the ninth ditch you will run into you future hubs.

Appears to me that it is the nudity that brings the future spouse in close contact with the women...

Happy Midsummer to all!

Happy Easter

Happy Easter and spring to all.

Spring is far here already and the coltsfoot has flowered here for a while, but that is about the only flower I've seen blooming so far. The leaves of the coltsfoot are not the prettiest but the flowers are cute, so petite.

I've been having bit of blog tiredness lately, perhaps you've noticed. It's mainly because I have not done anything DIY or similar lately. Those sort of things I normally would blog about and I'm not that great with lifestyle blogging in my opinion. I guess lack of projects results from Likka. She now needs more attention than she did before. She does not sleep as much as before and requires constant attention when she is awake. Also I find it easier to entertain Likka outside home. We go to family cafes, lunches with other mommies, to the open daycare center, free museum tours, or anything that does not cost a fortune and gives us something to do. That means that I'm not at home doing projects when ever Likka does sleep and on the evenings I feel worn out to start much anything. Well, this is the phase now. Maybe I regain my DIY energy after a while. But I wanted to let you know why the blog has been so uninspirational and why it might be so for some time.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year

Each year I have bought or made a Christmas tree decoration, last year I made himmeli inspired ones and the year before that I made a pearl garland. This year I bought one or actually three. Three glass mushroom shaped decorations, that do not hang but are clipped on to the tree. I think those are fun and sweet and I love that there is three of them, I feel that those represent that there are now three persons in this family.

Also to let you know, I will have a blog break for almost two weeks. We are off to celebrate Christmas with our relatives. I plan to let our relatives entertain Likka as much as possible so I can consentrate on crafts. I'm taking few knitting projects along and hope to finish them soon.

Hope you have really nice and enjoyable Christmas time and cheerful New Year! 

See you back here on the 3rd of January.

Anti winter depression lantern

These are NOT Christmas lights, this is a keeping-away-the-depressive-darkness lantern.

Had to mention that because for some people putting up Christmas lights in middle of November is just too early, but since these are not Christmas lights so this is ok. Do not pay attention that I've labeled this post to "holidays". Ignore that.

This lantern I used to have in the conservatory, but now since there are already the circus lights, I felt there would have been too many different lights if the lantern would be there too.

It's always tricky to run those cables for the decorational lights, there is no socket outside by the front door so the cord runs inside under the vestibule rug then behind the yellow metal cabinet to a socket by the toilet door. I think I did a good job hiding the cable this time.

The christening of Likka

 

We had Likka's christening at our home. After the ceremony my dad gave a short speech and we had toast of sparkling wine. Then some general mingling together with four different pies, salad, coffee and cakes. A's mom made all the pies, I made the cakes.

Likka behaved really nicely during the christening, momentarily she cried a bit, but mainly she was just looking around amazed of all the hazzle around her.

The rose cake is made with a recipe from Kinuskikissa (in Finnish), only with different decorations and the other cake is a velvet cake with a recipe from ET magazine (not available online). Both were yummy!

Preparing for the christening

Some stuff to do for tomorrows christening of Likka

The 8th annual crayfish party

It was time of the crayfish party again. Amazingly it was already the eighth crayfish party in a row. We have never skipped a year and it's been held every time at our friend's cabin. The menu is always the same, but why change something that works.

Happy Midsummer!

I wish everyone a super fun Midsummer!

I have two weeks of vacation from the Midsummer and will most likely have a blog break for that time. Take care and see you soon!

Nice Easter to everyone

My Easter grass this year are peas. Just regular dryed peas that I soaked over night, put to soil and now they are growing. Those are really nice on salads and on bread. Also bought daffodils for some Easter decoration. And that's about all the Easter decorations we have this year. 

I wish you all a very nice Easter holiday

Recap on the year 2012

This evening is New Years Eve. 2012 will end in a few hours and 2013 will start. I'm sure the year 2013 will be as fun and even more productive than the 2012. I do feel very proud of what I've achived on the year 2012. I made small collages of the main events from 2012. Looking at the pictures makes me both amazed of all the things I've finished and at the same time I feel so baffled that it's already been many months since these projects were done. To me it feels like I finished them just yesterday.

(1) Crocheted blanket
(2) Ice lantern
(3) Shoe rack
(4) Crocheted rag rug
(5) Stools
(6) Dining chair seat cushions

(7) Abaqus

(8) Renovating the toilet

(9) Yarn storage

(10) Summer vacation in Norway

(11) Office renovation

(12) Ugly soaps

(13) Visiting Stockholm with my sister

(14) Icelandic gardigan

(15) Apple cider and wine

(16) Dipped candles

(17) Himmeli

(18) Hacked night stands

Hope you have a sensational New Year 2013!

Halloween costumes

We were invited to a Halloween costume party. It was on Saturday, so not actually on the Halloween. We did not have any costumes ready so I made them for us. A wanted to be a reaper and I wanted to be a spider. We had an old black duvet cover home that we do not use so I made a cape for A and legs for me. I made them really quick with the serger. The legs are tubes that I filled with wadding. I made loops for the wrist and the elbow where the legs hung from. That way the legs moved when my arms moved. I think those were quite clever. Here is a bad picture to illustrate the movement of the legs.

Pumpkin carving

Halloween is not celebrated in Finland although some stores do sell Halloween junk for the kids. Also pumpkins are sold around this time. I, like most other Finns, am not that excited about Halloween, heck I don't even know what it's for. Well anyway... crafting is fun and when I saw the carved pumpkin on Santa's blog Homestilo I just had to carve one too.

Like said the Halloween isn't such a big thing here so I did not want to carve on the pumpkin anything scary but thought of carving something more related to fall. I searched a simple image from the web about a tree and did plan to print it out, but for some reason the printer would not work so I ended up copying the image to a paper from the screen using a pencil. Then just carved the pumpkin using the drawing as a guide.

I think it ended up looking really cool. I added a string of light inside it. I made a small hole in the back with an apple drill where I ran the wire through.

Because I scooped out most of the inside of the pumpkin before the carving I also had to figure how to consume all the pumpkin. So I made a pumpkin pie with this recipe (click). I know according to the recipe I should have used a sugar pumpkin and I don't know what is the pumpkin I had but I had to use it somewhere. I made the pumpkin into a puree and used half of it to the pie and placed the rest in the freezer, so I can make a new pie later if I want to. I hope the puree freezes well. Since A is in Shanghai again I took the whole pie to work and fed it to my co-workers. Anything taken to work is gone in a matter of minutes and so was the pie too. I had never made a pumpkin pie before and had actually tasted it only once before. That was last year when we were visiting in NY on Thanksgiving. The pie I made looked quite ugly, like you see there, but it was good, tasted like gingerbread dough.

Cooking crayfish

We have had crayfish parties for seven years in a row now, but never before had I cooked the crayfish myself. In the end it was really easy just as long as one has the heart to cook the crayfish, because those are cooked alive, like most crabs are. Check here for the recipe.

It is so odd how they change colour when cooked, first the crayfish is brown and immediately when they are sunk into boiling water they turn bright red. It's like magic. Sorry about the quality of the pictures, I used my cellphone to take these. Also I forgot to take any photos of the cooked crayfish so I had to use last years crayfish photos.

Excellent weather

I had been meaning to finish the spring cleaning by cleaning the cleaning cabinet itself, but the weather has been so nice that it would have been a sin to stay inside. So instead on saturday I sanded and jigsawed on the terrace, but nothing is finished yet. And on sunday I did some weeding in the garden and some reading in the conservatory where it was actually hot.

This evening and tomorrow we will be celebrating May Day, which is a big deal here in Finland. Tomorrow we have national holiday, yay! A made Sima this year and we've took a head start and have been drinking it on the terrace while enjoying the warmth of the sun.

Wish you a nice 1st of May!

Yarn ball tutorial - sort of

When I showed you the Snowball string of lights I did not have any tutorial on how to make the balls since I had made them pre-blogging. Now I made new ones, just not snowballs, but Easter eggs. I picked up from a local decorating magazine Avotakka a recipe for making the yarn balls. I had previously used wallpaper paste to make the balls but in the magazine there was new paste idea that I wanted to try, it was sugar paste.

I filled some water balloon with air and tryed to form them to seem more like eggs. In the Snowball version I tryed to form them to balls obviously.

The paste required equal amount of sugar and water in volume. I boiled the water first and mixed it with sugar like the instructions said, but the sugar didn't seem to dissolve totally so I microwaved it a bit too. Once the sugar had dissolved and I had made small bundles from wool yarn I dipped those indivually to the paste and then I rolled them over the water balloons.

That's when all the fun started, firstly the yarn got strangled many times, eventhough I tried to be carefull. Then the paste was so sticky that it was very hard to use. When I tried to take a piece of yarn to tie the balloon to dry I was stuck with all the pre-cut tie yarns. I hated that paste. In the end I had the paste all over the place. I wanted to take pictures of the process but my hands were so sticky.

Here are all of the balloons drying, which actually took some time. Even on the next day they were not fully dry. I cannot remember having that same problem with the wallpaper paste. I might remember all wrong but I think those were dry in a matter of hours.

Also when I did the Snowballs I first rolled the yarn over the balloon and afterwards dipped it into the paste, then I wiped the excess paste off. That way I got exactly the amount of yarn I wanted on the balloon and I did not have to quess how much is good. Also even when the yarn eggs were dry they look wet and I don't like that look. They still look icky to me.

Maybe this sugas paste thing is good if you want to make these with kids, since there is no harm eating some of the paste, but next time I will stick to the wallpaper paste. But in the end I did get some yarn eggs, which is cool.

Have a nice Easter and hope you have a Good Friday!

PS. We have national holiday on Friday and Monday. No work, Yay! How about you? And by the way in Finland the Good Friday is called Long Friday.