May your days be blessed

Weekending in the rain

Today I am joing Amanda from "the habit of being" for weekending

Somewhere I read today is the 15th of July. I had to read it twice and still can't believe it. It is raining and raining and raining and the temperatures stay around 15°C/ 60°F. So coats, wellies and the like are in daily use. Aaron has not complained about it yet, he doesn't mind if he plays in a puddle or a pool. So I guess I am the only one being unflexible here...

I adjusted by starting to crochet. Little blossoms agains the disaster in my little outside garden (even the mint has drowned!) Finally I know how to use up all my bits and pieces of handspun yarn. Both yarns are made from the fibre I dyed at the workshop the other weekend (yellow with onion skin, red with madder). If you like I can send you a handfull, just let me know in the comment which color you'd like or if you want a mix of both. (I will choose a winner randomly if more of you are interested ;-) )

One of the blossoms I used for another project of this rainy weekend, the birthday crown of my friends daughter Lola (the one you see playing with Aaron in the first picture) Aarons crown is also in the making, his birthday is coming up end of August... My idea is, to keep the crowns rather simple this year and add a little extra detail to it each birthday so by the time they are grown up they have a fully decorated crown with lots of memories of every single birthday. That should be a lovely family tradition I hope.

Besides the usual playground outing we did a little extra trip yesterday and went for a visit to Cologne Airport. A great activity on rainy days! Some half hour train ride, long indoor corridors to run in freely, lots of cafés and a terrace to watch the planes landing and starting. I can really recommend this outing!

I already mentioned the playground visits, but did you ever see a playground with kids paintings pinned to the trees? Isn't that a wonderful thing! How generous and creative, just what I needed to complete this wet but somehow perfect weekend.

I hope your weekend was less rainy and equally fun! I would love to hear about it!

That spirit!

Women, yarn, fiber, herbs, kettles, wheels, needles, food, a very old farm and summer, the recipe for a truely magical afternoon like my sister and me spent it on Sunday. Such a special day. We had signed up for a class on how to dye with natural colors at a fiber-festival at an old farm house an hours drive from Cologne run by a family who reminded me a lot of the Soule family. If you speak German you can find out more about them and there wonderful lifestyle here. (For example they have a basket weaving weekend coming up in November!)

Here you see some wool we dyed with onion skin and walnut. Vibrant, honest colors. 

Our teachers have dyed the whole palette in years of experiementing. Isn't it just amazing! 

Of course there was lots and lots of spinning too and good food and, yes there was this spirit. The spirit of wonderful women (and a few men) who know and tender the old crafts of their anchestors. It is hard to describe but maybe you have had the chance to feel that spirit somewhere before. It is pure!

Celebrating Fiber

First, of course, I want to wish all of you mums a wonderful and happy Mothers Day! 

Since I gave birth to my son I realize how I have started to find a deeper and more intense connection to the rhythm of the seasons. In nature and our home. I really want to show him all there is, this earth is offering us in plenty and I love to watch him while he discovers his world step by step.

There seem to be so many beautiful things happening around us every day if we just find the time to stop and appreciate them. Having started writing this blog and especially reading how you fellow bloggers live the seasons has added to this feeling even more. In the last weeks I have read some blog entries about sheep festivals and I was filled with excitement just by the thought of such a great event. 

A festival for fiber... I so wanted a tradition like that to be a part of our seasons too, just like I read this morning on Rhythm of the home. But I was sure, I would not find anything like a sheep festival anywhere near Cologne. Until my lovely sister, Aarons Tante Auto, a great spinner, asked me yesterday if we wanted to join her today to go, exactly, to a sheep festival. Did we want to go? You can imagine my joy...

The festival toke place in a very pretty open air museum, a small village that showes how people have lived in that area in the last centuries. You can watch all the old crafts, the farming, the living and today, plenty of sheep and other farm animals. Let me take you on a tour if you don't mind:

Here they are, the sweeties, still sweating with all that wool on there bodies...

... here they get undressed. It was a hilarious sight to watch this big ram sitting on a small stage, very patiently in a position like this, getting warped very naked. A wee bit like a peep show...

They had very many different breeds to show, this is a black German Heath, with very impressive horns.

A very smalll German Heath, a fully grown up dwarf version, so cute but very serious...

I just wanted to sit down and join in if I had only brought my wheel.

So much yummy stuff. I really had to hold close to my wallet.

The older kids could join in all sorts of activities, like felting, spinning and other crafts.

Hey, watch out for Lotta. She is a very cute Llama, everyone totally loved her.

And are those little fellows not extremly cute with their colorful knitted hats?

Even at times when there is no sheep festival this museum is definately worth a visit but today was just perfect, the weather was mild and sunny, everything was so very, very fresh and green, exploding with life.

Oh yeah, this little man enjoyed our outing too, very much indeed.

Did you know the very uncommon chameleon sheep ;-) very hard to find some...

My tour has ended now, but of course I didn't come home empty handed. What I toke home is plenty: a happy, very tired child, many images on camera and in my head, wonderful memories, lots of new information and, well, some wool for spinning:

The grey wool is from a Gotland Sheep, the very white is Wensleydale and the stuff with the dreadlocks is freshly warped today from some unknow (it came from a huge bag with different fleeces) but very soft sheep. That stuff is fanstastic it contains so much lanolin you can cream your hands just by holding it.

One last things I got, for free as a sample, is a garden fertilizer made from sheep wool. What an interesting product, I will have to find out more about that soon. If you speak German and are interested too, you can find out more here.

After this beautiful day I am sure, joining the festival of fiber will definatly become part of our anual way to celebrate the seasons. Oh yes!

Now, if you please excuse me, I have to get back to my wheel for a few more minutes ;-)

I hope you all spent a wonderful Mothers Day, just the way you needed it. 

Yarn Along - Family strings

Knittin and reading. My favourite things to complete a perfect day. So I am joining Ginny on Wednesdays for Yarn Along to share my passions with you. Come and join in if you like!

Sitting here at at my mums dining table, overlooking her garden while the sun sets into a rather romantic evening sky I feel calm, peaceful, like I came home. Which I did indeed. To keep it real, there are not only the good feelings, our family is not all about happiness and laughter. There have been tears too, today and in the past. Today at my grandmothers "grave" which is a tree in the forest. And some more in a little conflict I had with my dad in the afternoon. There is a lot of unspoken in our family, silent reproaches, agression too, accusations. So the days at my parents place never pass by without tension but also a lot of good will to keep it together and make the most out of it. 

And for now, right here, I feel happy. Aaron went to bed an hour ago and is still singing to himself in the room next door, and a blackbird is still singing in the garden. I love their music.
I have not started with my actual spinning lessons yet since there was so much else to do, like dying some skeins my mum had already spon and twist it in different colors. Those adventures with different yarn types and colors are the most exhiting part of all for me. I am really a color freak. The moment a yarn gets dipped into a dye, the moment when two different colors get twisted together and make a knew one my heart beats faster.

Of course it is also very exhiting to see your designed yarn to come alive in a knitting, even if it is just a gauge. Unfortunatly the two different colors don't show very well in the pictures. One is a turquoise the other mint green. The somehow remind me of a iced cake so I calles the "The icing on the cake" ;-) Not sure what to knit with it yet... Any ideas?

I just ordered a book (fortunatly I was smart enough to let it sent to my parents place) about gardening in smal spaces. I have discovered that I can not only use our balcony for growing some herbs but also the little flower beds just down from the balcony (we live on the ground floor in a rented apartment) So I planted some salat there already and want to try some other things too. Yeah, gardening, how very exhiting for someone like me who has spent the last twelve years in rented city apartments...

My grandmothers forest (and my granddad looking for a frog with a stick)

Today we have been on a little outing with my granddad, passing by the mentioned forest to visit my late grandmum and on a kind of memory route of places we used to go to with my grandparents when we were kids. Like a small town at a lake called Bad Zwischenahn. They have rebuilt some of the very old farm houses there, like the ones my granddad used to grow up in. And the also restored a windmill. We always used to have lunch in one of these restored buildings, the "Spieker" and so we did today. My grandfather got lost in memories. The food was fantastic and very, very traditional northern German. And did you notice the wonderful blue little table cloth? Its made a traditional way of indigo textile printing well know around here. I really want a big one like that for our table at home. Maybe my grandmum still has one in her shelfs... I have to ask my granddad.

So far for today, I will keep you updated on the spinning...

Happy Knitting!

Preparing Easter Breakfast

"Fear not, for Christ is risen!"

After some days with grey clouds and rain the sun is shining again today. Its bitterly cold still, but bright and welcoming. A day just made to celebrate Easter it seems.

Celebrating Easter is and has always been all about breakfast for me. Homebaked buns with jam, flowers and, of course, eggs... we dyed ours with natural but bought colors.

So yesterday we prepared what still needed to be done, bake the buns, plant some flowers, dye some eggs and, best of all, make some more butter. I really fell in love with the simplicity of this act, shaking the cream to seperate butter and buttermilk. And Aaron helped me today and seemed to enjoy it too:

  

This is how it looks like when you have done enough shaking. The seperated buttermilk is very tasty and doen't taste like the one you can buy at all, more like vey creamy milk. I talked to my granddad (who grew up on a farm) on phone while I was making the butter and he remembered how his mother used to make butter the old style in one of these wooded buckets and how much he loved to drink that buttermilk. I wish I had such an old wooded butter maker but then again, you'd probably need too much cream to fill it. 

You then can add any flavour you like. We stired in some raspberry jam for the easter buns. Actually we used a bit too much jam so the butter became a little bit too soft to shape it properly but at least it was easy to spread like that coming straight from the fridge and truely delicious!

We have not started hiding eggs for Aaron yet since it would be impossible to explain to him how to look for something he has not seen before. I love hidding though and impatiently have to wait for next year to get into that with him...

After lunch we will meet with some friends and celebrate the day together, I can't wait...

I would love to hear about your Easter traditions and news. Do you have any special plans for today?

Happy Easter to you!