Nestled In

I thought we should tell that a short introduction was added today. We’ll probably add more info about us later. “About us” can be found at the main menu on the left side column.

Our newest project is to find and sew curtains for each window in our apartment. We were hoping to find ready-made curtains but the choices are limited and most of the curtains that fit to our budget are hideous so we ended up checking out the selection of local fabric stores and sew the curtains by ourselves. We had one strict criteria for the curtains; the fabric should be thick enough so that it wouldn’t be seen through.

On Saturday we hit the jackpot and found nice curtain fabrics for the kitchen and living room windows. For the kitchen window we found beautiful black and white cotton fabric with modern squares which will look great with black wooden kitchen chairs we are planning to buy. For the wide living room window we found almost clean white cotton fabric (the photo lies a little). Hopefully the living room curtains will be thick enough to stop the brightest sunbeams during the summer so that they won’t bother us when we watch tv or movies. We also stopped by Marimekko store and found cushion fabrics. In the photo on the top is Maija Isola’s design Ananas (”Pineapple”) and under it is Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi’s design Rekiretki (”Sleigh ride”). We are going to sew two Ananas cushions, two Rekiretki cushions and also one or two black and white cushions and put them on our sofa and arm chairs. We still have to find either ready-made curtains or curtain fabric for the bedroom windows.

I’m no seamstress but I get along with a sewing machine so I’ll be the one who has to test my sewing skills. We have borrowed a sewing machine from my mom and later this week I’ll cross my fingers and start to cut and sew (and probably unpick and sew again). I hope that by the weekend we can post photos of our new curtains.

(Photo taken with camera phone, hence the poor quality.)

Today was the annual Christmas fair organized by MLL (Mannerheim League for Child Welfare) in our city. Inspired by BuyHandmade.org we headed out to the fair to look for nice handmade holiday ornaments and gifts. We mostly found things for ourselves but some presents, too. It was nice to see so many people and groups gathered together to sell all kinds of different crafts and handmade goods. Most of the vendors had unique and inventive ideas but it was dissapointing to see a few that were selling self-made products which had popular copyrighted images and logos (like Hello Kitty and Donald Duck) on them - obviously without a permission. It’s perfectly fine to get ideas and influences from other people’s work but copying is just lazy.

Here are some of the things we found:

From left to right: A small fox key ring made of felt. Leaf earrings made of recycled glass. A wire heart ornament.

From left to right: A set of six wine glass charms made out of old nuts and trays. We thought they’d look great wrapped around the wine glass stems on New Year’s Eve party. I also found a nice set of kettle gloves and holder for a Christmas present for my mother-in-law.

We also bought a winter wreath to hang on the front door and Minna found a great pair of black elk leather gloves for the cold Finnish winter.

We took a little break from painting today and went shopping. We had planned to send out handmade Christmas cards this year but realized that we’re running out of time with everything we still have to do with the new apartment and went out to by cards. We also bought this cute Christmasy dish towel at Hemtex and a really nice grey dish towel to use in the kitchen after the holidays.

It’s been a busy three days! We have cleaned and painted our whole apartment and we still have to finish the second coat of paint during the weekend. On Tuesday morning we went to the hardware store and chose the colors for the bedroom and livingroom walls. The company that’s leasing the apartment to us provided the paint so we had to choose from their limited color selection. We were nervous if we’d find colors that we’d like but thankfully we found a nice shade of greyish blue for the bedroom and the lady at the hardware store was kind enough to let us choose the green for the livingroom wall outside the color palette.

We’re painting all the bedroom walls greyish blue but leaving the area around the windows white. As you can see in the picture (lower left corner) there’s also a thin white border around the window. In the livingroom we painted the largest wall (6 m x 2,80 m) green. All the walls in the apartment were originally very light beige so we had to paint all the rest of the walls white.