Happy 2025! May it be a year filled with love, joy, inspiration and fulfilment.
Just popping in here briefly today. As of next week, I hope to be back with my usual longer posts (so much to write about!). See you then! xxx
Hello! With Christmas less than a fortnight away, there is something utterly un-Christmassy I’d like to share with you today – a butterfly story.
It all started with the scarf version of my Seventh Heaven pattern. For this version, I used two different colourways of Schoppel Zauberball Crazy. One of them was inspired by and named after a butterfly called Kleiner Fuchs in German (EN small tortoiseshell; NL kleine vos).
While I was photographing the rolled-up scarf, look who was coming for a visit:
A small tortoiseshell landed on our picnic table for a spot of sunbathing!
I love these beautiful creatures, and I know someone else who does, too. Her studio isn’t far from here. Would you like to join me for a visit? Following cycle tracks through the wood, country lanes through farmland, crossing a busy road, more country lanes… there we are.
Marianne dyes yarn in gorgeous glowing colours.
Her studio, called Lindelicht, is a Scandinavian-style wooden building with a welcoming atmosphere. Hello kitty-cat!
Tea, biscuits, bowls filled with mini-skeins – so very cosy.
Besides the yarn shelves, there is also a shelf filled with felt. I don’t know the English word for this type of felt. It is a mottled wool felt that is called sprookjesvilt (fairytale felt) in Dutch.
Marianne uses it to make figures for the seasonal table and her flower-inspired lamps.
She also uses it for her butterfly kits. To date, she has designed 16 different ones. I started with the fairly simple cabbage white before making the fiddlier small tortoiseshell. Instead of pins, I used Scotch tape for the smallest elements.
I made it over the course of a week – an hour here, 30 minutes there. It’s a lovely little project to sew, embroider and embellish with beads. With a wingspan of 11.5 cm/4.5” the felt small tortoiseshell is about twice the size of a real-life one, but otherwise I think it’s an excellent likeness.
What I love about this project is how it made me look at the small tortoiseshell more closely than I’ve ever done before. For the first time, I noticed the long hairs along the sides of its body, the stripes on it’s antennae and the blue spots all along the edges of the wings. I feel I’ve got to know this butterfly that I’ve known all my life even better.
Thinking that some of you outside the Netherlands might like to make a felt butterfly, too, I asked Marianne if she also sends her kits abroad. Her answer was, ‘Yes, no problem. But do tell them that the instructions are in Dutch!’
Links:
Hello! Just popping in here with a brief message today. A close family member of ours passed away suddenly last week. Sad and shaken, I feel unable to come up with anything inspiring to write about at the moment. On the one hand I don’t want to bother you with my personal affairs, but on the other I don’t want to stay away here for weeks on end leaving you wondering. Don’t worry, I’m basically all right and just need some time.
I missed the Dutch Knitting & Crochet Days this year. For a lovely impression do head over to my friend Froukje’s blog. She also writes about the embroidery-on-knitting workshop she took while she was there.
I hope all is well with you and hope to be back here soon with some woolly inspiration. Take care! xxx
We have been photographing lots of insects lately. Well, let’s be honest, ‘we’ mainly means my husband – he is much better at it. But sometimes I’m lucky and get a good shot, too.
Let’s zoom in – bzzzz – and wow, look at that huge eye!
Because of the size and shape of its eyes alone, it must see the world totally differently from us. Looking at insects through the lens of my camera made me stop and think. We share our world with so many creatures we don’t even know exist. Of course I know that there are bees and bugs, midges and mosquitoes, but when you begin looking at them properly a whole new universe opens up. These creatures also have (love) lives…
They are busy gathering food, caring for their offspring, developing and going through different stages in their lives.
Different life stages of a six-spot burnet (above)
I wonder, if I were and insect, what insect would I be? To find the answer, I took a test. Turns out I’m a bee. Hmmm, yes, I’m always busy as a bee. But living in a big colony? Everything in the service of the Queen Bee? That’s not really me.
But wait, not all bees are honey bees. There are also bumblebees. Me, bumbling around? Not really. No, come to think of it, I’m more like a wild solitary bee. And then my husband came up with the answer: I’m a wool carder bee! (Thank you for the wool carder bee photos and info, sweetheart.)
In our garden they visit the hairy lamb’s ear plants…
… to scrape ‘wool’ from the leaves, roll it up and use it for making their nests. Here is a close-up of a wool carder bee with a ball of ‘wool’:
A wool carder bee, that’s me to a tee. How about you? What insect are you? Are you a grasshopper?
Or a butterfly? (Are butterflies even insects? There is so much I don’t know yet.)
A bee like me, or a different insect altogether? The British Natural History Museum has developed a fun quiz to help you find out.
Well, I’m buzzing off to add some woolly things to our nest. I’d love to hear what insect you are!
Just a brief note from me today to wish you and yours a very happy 2024. Along with my general good wishes, I’m sending a Lüsterweibchen for you to personalize them. Make your own wish for the New Year while you rub her belly and it will come true. Shh, don’t tell or it won’t work.
The muscular Lüsterweibchen above, with antlers for wings and a mermaid’s tail, lives in Cochem Castle, Germany. Judging by the peeling red paint on her belly, many people have rubbed it to make a wish. I am quite sure it will work just as well via your screen.
I’m spending the rest of this week weaving in ends and planning new projects, and hope to be back with my regular posts as of next week. See you then!
Just popping in here to say hello and to tell you that I’ve been floored by flu. I didn’t want to just go off the radar for weeks on end. I’m on the mend and back to some knitting, but not up to much else yet. I hope you are healthy and well, and hope to be back with a real blog post next week. Bye for now!
Hello!
Good news! The stork has landed and brought our daughter and her husband a sweet little baby boy.
First and foremost, I’m immensely grateful that, apart from a few start-up problems, mother and baby are doing well. I’m also flooded with tenderness for this tiny human being, very happy for his mum and dad, looking forward to getting to know my grandson, worried about his future, hopeful that he’ll have a good life and determined to be the best grandmother I can.
Where do the storks get the babies from, I wonder. Fish them up?
Thanks to a reintroduction program, these graceful birds have become a common sight around here. And sometimes even a nuisance. It isn’t because they deliver too many babies, certainly not in our family. It’s to do with the places they choose to build their nests.
Last week I was at the library when suddenly the lights went out, together with the computer terminals, the electric doors and, as it turned out, electricity in the entire town and surrounding villages. After rummaging around in the dark for a while the librarian found the key to the emergency exit (!?!) and we were able to get out (phew!). What had caused this power cut? Storks building a nest on a power pylon and setting it on fire!
Photo: Steenwijker Courant
We’ve already had the privilege of paying the new earthling a brief visit, bearing gifts for his first 10 days (they didn’t all fit into this basket).
The first one will have been unwrapped by now, so I think I can safely show it here – a nice and warm coat knit with much love for our grandson…
… with buttons with the best ever message for a baby coat: Welkom kleine ukkepuk (welcome little one). (Excellent pattern here.)
It will come in handy in a month that is like spring one day…
…and like winter the next.
I feel a bit bad about the stork story above, because it isn’t doing our daughter justice. Supported by the baby’s father, she has done all the hard work. But I think they know how proud I am of them and will be able to appreciate a bit of folklore.
Well, that was my news for this week. Thanks for reading and lots of love!
First of all, Happy New Year! It’s a bit late, I know, but I still want to wish you all the best for 2022.
We’ve had an uneventful but nice and relaxing week, and I hope you’ve had a good time, too. My Christmas Break knitting project is almost finished. I’ll share that with you next week when it’s all done (I hope).
What I’d like to share with you today is the recipe for knieperties, paper-thin waffles that are traditionally served on New Year’s Eve and Day in this part of the Netherlands. They can be eaten flat or rolled up. Similar ones are also baked in Germany, which isn’t all that far away from here.
Baking knieperties (pronounced something like kneepertees, with an audible k and stress on the first syllable) is a tradition passed on to me by a neighbour across the street. She baked stacks of them on New Year’s Eve for her extensive family and always brought us and other neighbours some, too. After she died about a decade ago, I decided to continue the tradition.
Traditionally knieperties were baked using a cast-iron waffle iron held over a fire, but nowadays everyone I know uses an electrical waffle iron. Mine is from German manufacturer Cloer.
INGREDIENTS:
(makes about 100)
METHOD:
From start to finish, baking this quantity will take about 90 minutes to 2 hours.
Knieperties are deliciously crunchy and so thin that they are almost translucent.
This is my set-up, with from left to right: chopping board for cooling knieperties, wooden spoon for rolling them, waffle iron, plate for stacking cooled knieperties, small bowl of batter (works easier than big mixing bowl; refill from time to time), pancake turner (bottom right-hand corner) for flipping knieperties from iron to board.
And this is the whole batch, excluding the ones that got eaten during the process. Rolled-up knieperties can be filled with whipped cream if you like.
In the pouring rain (we’ve had quite a bit of that here lately) I took them around to several neighbours. A great opportunity for catching up on the latest news.
Knieperties are not just served around New Year’s, but also on other special occasions.
Instead of an ordinary Christmas card, dear friends sent us this:
A wonderful pop-up card of Villa Rams Woerthe, a historic house in a nearby town. The last time we visited it, we were served tea and knieperties in the drawing room. ‘Must enjoy baking knieperties’ is high on the list of requirements for anyone who wants to work there as a volunteer.
This is what it looks like from the back:
And this is what it looks like in real life (photo taken in spring):
I’d love to visit it again someday soon. Ah, so many plans and ideas for the New Year! I’ll try to share anything I think may be of interest and hope to ‘see’ you here often.
‘Oh, no!’ I thought while I was whizzing around the living room with the vacuum cleaner sometime this spring. (Or I may have thought something a little less polite.) I had just lifted the basket with spinning fibres beside my wheel…
… and discovered a kind of grit under it. I knew what that meant – moths!
I had stuffed the fibres into a plastic bag, put them in the freezer, removed the grit, and shaken out the basket before I thought, ‘this could be interesting for my blog.’ The only things left to photograph were 3 cocoons.
Moth problems are unavoidable in a house containing so much that is high on the moth’s Munchability Index. (Isn’t that a brilliant term? It was coined by Adrian Doyle, conservator at the Museum of London. There is a link to the article in which I found it at the bottom of this post.) Fortunately, I haven’t had moth problems very often, but often enough to recognize the signs.
I’ve taken a few photos of moths lately. It isn’t that I’m a moth geek or anything. It is just that with my camera in hand I’m becoming more and more aware of my surroundings. And when I see creatures I don’t know, I try to find out what they are.
This is the large yellow underwing on our kitchen floor. It is called grote huismoeder (literally: large stay-at-home-mum) in Dutch. Whoever thought of that name?
And this is a box tree moth.
Isn’t it beautiful, with its almost transparent veined wings in a dark frame? We don’t have any box in our garden, and its family has already destroyed our neighbours’ box hedge, so I can admire it without getting nervous.
Several moth caterpillars crossed my path while I was out cycling this summer. This hairy little monster is the caterpillar of the majestic white ermine (NL: witte tijger).
And this big fat beauty will later transform into a small emperor moth (NL: nachtpauwoog).
It isn’t any of these that munch on spinning fibres, knitting yarn and sweaters, though. It’s the clothes moth that does that. I have, (un)fortunately, not been able to photograph it and am borrowing someone else’s picture. Here it is – every knitter’s and spinner’s nightmare:
Photo: © Olaf Leillinger, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Doesn’t it look glorious in this picture, all shimmering gold? In real life it is only about 7 mm (0.25”) long – an unsightly beige-ish little fluttery thing.
So, what to do about them?
Moth balls and moth paper are one option, but they smell horrible and are carcinogenic. Another is cedar wood. There was a block of that in my spinning basket. Maybe it loses its moth-repellent quality over time? Something else moths hate is lavender.
This bush along our driveway established itself there years ago. It is a pale shade of, well, lavender.
This isn’t a moth, by the way, but a butterfly called painted lady (NL: distelvlinder).
Last year we planted some more lavender in our front garden.
It is smaller and a darker shade of purple.
Moths may hate lavender, but I love it. Its scent, the purple of its flowers, and the silvery grey of its leaves. When all the lavender in our garden had finished flowering, friends coming to spend a sunny afternoon chatting in our garden brought us a big pot of a different variety.
It has beautiful tufted flowers. I have placed it just so that we can see it every time we look out the kitchen window.
I don’t know what it is that makes moths hate lavender so much, but it is a well-known fact that lavender is an excellent repellent.
Over the summer, I’ve been knitting some lavender sachets from small remnants of sock and other fingering-weight yarn. Not the old-fashioned frilly kind, but more modern? simple? plain? ones. I don’t know exactly how to describe them, but if all goes according to plan, you’ll see what I mean next week.
Meanwhile, here are a few links to some interesting reading about moths, the problems they pose for textile-lovers and what to do about them.
Hello!
In Dutch, we have the expression achter de geraniums zitten (sitting behind the pelargoniums). It’s hard to explain exactly what it means, but on the whole it’s considered a Bad Thing. Not quite as bad as pushing up the daisies…
… but it comes very close. Sitting behind the pelargoniums, you’re a dull old stick-in-the-mud.
I never particularly liked pelargoniums. But since we came to live here, almost 20 years ago, we’ve bought them from our local brass band every year to sponsor their uniforms and instruments.
Ironically, last year – when we spent more time behind the pelargoniums than ever before, figuratively speaking – we had to go without them. Fortunately this year, the brass band players were able to go round the doors selling them again.
I don’t know if I’ll ever love pelargoniums, but I’ve come to like them over the years. They provide some nice splashes of colour around the house.
And how about sitting behind those pelargoniums?
According to our government, it is no longer necessary to do so. I don’t know what it’s like in your part of the world, but here almost all of the covid-measures have suddenly been dropped. As of last Saturday, we don’t have to wear face masks anymore, and almost everything is allowed (with 1.5 metres distance). It’s a BIG step, and I wonder where it is going to take us.
It is not going to take us (my husband and me) anywhere much in the foreseeable future. We don’t have big plans. I mean, it would be a shame if we weren’t here to enjoy our wonderfully fragrant miniature strawberries, wouldn’t it?
And who among our neighbours would be crazy enough to pamper my little woad seedlings the way I do? Yes, the seeds have germinated! Well, most of them anyway.
We will just continue living our lives, and doing the things we normally do this summer. But we are planning to take a day off now and then to venture away from behind our pelargoniums. I hope you’ll virtually join us on some of our outings.
One thing we have planned, is a visit to our niece. She left home last September to go to uni and I am really looking forward to finally see where she has been studying so diligently on her own this past year. Before that trip, I am crocheting her a pair of old-fashioned pot holders from blue and cream cotton.
On the knitting front, I don’t have any big plans either. I’ll focus on small projects from those yarn remnants I talked about last week. There is one big project I want to finish, though – the soft, light and relaxed cardi I started earlier this year. Only, I found out that I’ve made a mistake in one of the front bands. Oops.
I think I know how to fix it, but I need to pluck up the courage for that.
Some crochet is also on my list of things to do this summer. Not a big blanket or anything – I’ll keep it small, too.
For the rest, I’ll keep enjoying the small miracles surrounding us and sharing them with you.
The other day, when I was starting to lower our awning, I heard a dry, crackling sound. Like something dropping down from it. And this is what I found:
An emperor dragonfly. I couldn’t see it breathing, and after observing it for a while concluded that it was dead. A rare opportunity to study it more closely. Such a beautiful creature.
Another thing I found just outside our backdoor this past week is this:
I’ve zoomed in on it; in reality it is only about 3 cm long. At first I thought it was a bit of moss fallen from off the roof, but when I looked more closely, I saw ‘things’ in it and realized it was a pellet. Probably regurgitated by this sparrowhawk.
I may seem like a dull old stick-in-the-mud to others, spending so much time behind the pelargoniums. But life never feels dull to me. To close off, here is one of the young woodpeckers who visit our garden every day.
Wherever you are in the world, and whether you are staying behind the pelargoniums or not, I wish you a safe and enjoyable summer and hope you’ll pay me a visit here from time to time.
PS If you’d like to see a dragonfly breathing (they breathe through the lower part of their body), here is a lovely video I found on YouTube.