My birthday!

Today was my birthday! Hooray!

It started with brunch with my mum and dad at my favourite old-fashioned restaurant, Russel William's in Burlington. Because it was by birthday I ordered the most enormous breakfast on the menu. It was hard to fit it all into the frame.  Yum!

Cute parents.

When we came home it was time to get ready for my cousin's wedding!

I had the bright idea that by standing on the bed to take a photograph I could try to disguise the total disaster which is my room. Clearly that idea did not work! My shoes didn't make it into the picture but I wore my beloved navy blue Ferragamos. They looked just right with this outfit, which I sewed myself from vintage patterns. 

The wedding and the party afterwards were wonderful. I was so busy talking, dancing, eating, dancing, talking, drinking, dancing, eating that I only managed to take this one blurry photo the entire evening!

All my nicest cousins that I hardly ever see were there and my cousin's new wife looked happier than I have ever seen anyone look. It was all lovely, and the band played all the best songs. We all danced and laughed and danced some more.

At midnight we left because my sister was getting tired, although I was not. It's saddest feeling I know to leave a party before you're ready!

I'm gonna kick his ask

 New haircut! I went back to my old hairdresser in Toronto and she did a great job on my bangs but I think I pointed a little too high when indicating the length. It came out a bit shorter than I wanted and now I think I look kind of like this girl:

It's very fancy on old Delancy street you know.

I AM GOING TO NEW YORK I AM GOING TO NEW YORK I AM GOING TO NEW YORK I AM GOING TO NEW YORK

I have never been before, which is quite silly considering how close I live. (Close by Canadian standards, mind you).  But I am going to fix that by spending the first week of September in New York!!!!

this year

My birthday is coming up soon, so I thought I would look back on this year a little bit. It's been different!

Good things: 

• I finished my Masters Degree!
• I received my residence permit to live in Sweden
• I sewed a looooot of great clothes
• I finally got over my fear of spiders, for good this time! I've always wavered back and forth between being (mostly) indifferent to spiders, to being petrified of them. Now I think I have really gotten over the fear! I see them all the time in my garden, and they are always trying to get inside, and I am never afraid!
• I got better at tennis!

The not-so-good:

• Living at home was ... interesting. In retrospect, I would not decide to live a two hour commute away from school (or work) ever again. It just eats up all your time. 

Life could be a dream, sweetheart

Here is how I looked today when I stayed at home studying and trying to organize all the many things I need to do this month.

This blouse is made by me, from a vintage pattern from 1957.  The shorts are from H&M and the watch is my dad's. It's so sunny that I couldn't keep from squinting!

My favourite part of this blouse is the double-pocket.

itty-bitty

I'm sewing a baby-sized shirt today. I'm obsessed with how tiny the pocket is!

Photos of the finished product tomorrow!

violette pastilles

I love violet candies. When I was a child I would buy big rolls of soft Parma Violets from the sweet shop in our cottage town and carry them around in my pockets all summer long. My clothes always smelt of water and sand and old-fashioned candies.

These violet pastilles are from the German grocer and have a single anise seed at the centre. They're perfect to have with me on the long bus rides home from school when I just need something small and sweet to carry me through till dinner.

dill.

Dill might be my favourite plant in the garden. I love its strange, wispy leaves and nodding, blowsy flower crowns. Most of all, I love the smell. It reminds me of summers at my grandparents' farm like nothing else can. My grandfather died eight years ago and I haven't been to that old house since then, but still the smell of dill filling my small garden takes me back there, to those warm warm warm afternoons picking red currants, looking for frogs at the pond, wandering in the pasture with the horses, running back to the house with the smell of dill heady in the yard.

 If you see some yellow flowers in this picture, they are cucumber blossoms. I'm hoping to make pickles this summer. But right now these vines boast just one, oddly shapen little vegetable, so I brought home a big field cucumber from the market and made snabbgurka ('quick pickle') instead.

This is so simple but makes the perfect, fresh, summery side dish. Kaninen's mother showed me how to make it. Use your trusty vegetable slicer to slice very thin rounds of cucumber (however much you want to eat) into a bowl. Peeling it first is up to you. Mix with 1/2-1 tsp each of salt and sugar and a lidful of white vinegar (ättika). Try to get a balance of salty, sweet and sharp. Cover your cucumber with finely chopped dill (or other herbs) and cover it with a little dish. Let it sit while you are preparing the rest of your dinner, say, boiling the potatoes to go alongside it. After twenty minutes or so: Eat!

Snabbgurka goes well with meats or with starchy vegetables like potatoes or roasted beets, anything that wants a nice sharp taste alongside it to cut through starchy or fatty foods.

PS I just noticed on my calendar that today marks the start of crayfish season. Timely, as crayfish are traditionally eaten with lots of dill crowns!

This guy likes dill, too.

♥

översättning:

ett enkelt recept för snabbgurka!

Organized, me?

I needed a better way to organize all my sewing thread. All my many spools were neatly packed in a box but it was impossible to see what colours I had. I had to root around to find anything, and removing one spool from the box threw the rest of them into disarray. I was thinking of threading the spools onto wooden doweling and hanging them across a frame, when I opened an old Burda pattern magazine and saw this great idea:

The perfect solution! Of course I had to make one, and it was really easy. I found a piece of cedar in our basement and measured the placement of the holes, then drilled them.  My drilling arm got a bit tired after a while so my dad helped me out.

I used my carpenter's ruler (a very handy tool, by the way, it folds up to just 15 cm in length so you can carry it in your purse, for all your emergency measuring needs) to mark 7mm dowels into 2 1/2 inch lengths (I think the mix and match approach to measurement units must be a canadian thing)...

...and sawed them off using a regular square saw and a mitre box. 

After sanding down the dowel edges and the surface of the plank, it's just a matter of inserting the pegs into the holes in the board. I had planned to use glue, but if you have a good match between drill bit and dowel size, it's not necessary.

I made the mistake of buying the doweling before I knew the dimensions of the board I was going to get, so I ran out of pegs, but as luck would have it I had exactly enough space for all my thread spools, so I suppose I don't have to hurry to finish it.

I have a mild obsession with organizing everything by colour (case in point:I recently bought a red eraser to match the box of läkerol, the tiny notebooks and the box of pens on the red shelf above my desk...) and especially with arranging groups of colours by tone, so I love being able to arrange all these colours and have them hanging on my wall for all to see!

golden courgettes

How to make a simple and refreshing salad:

Start with a yellow summer squash.

  And a handful of basil leaves.

Use a vegetable peeler, mandolin or the large slot on a box grater to cut the squash into very thin rounds. Tear the basil in small pieces over the courgette.

 Add lemon juice.

 Add a Serious Amount of olive oil. Grind over black pepper and toss with flaked salt (for extra crunch and flavour).

 

Yum!

Extra good with a dusting of grated parmesan or over sliced fresh mozarella. I like to use mini bocconcini, torn into pieces.

Summer food!

new purse!

This wonderful new purse came for me in the mail this week. It's small and cross-body, the perfect replacement for my big, floppy purse that I was quite tired of always holding on my shoulder.

Now is the time to show you what's in my purse!

• a couple of fresh hankerchiefs
• flash drive
• a little zippered pocket for holding cards
• sunglasses, my beloved vintage Ray Bans
• The best pink lip gloss
• tictacs
• violet pastilles
• my metropass and student id in a Mumin card case
• my iphone
• cash and coins wallet. I found it at a flea market in Dortmund, Germany where I was practicing my great German bargaining skills, which consist only of saying "I'll give you that price for two of those!"
• I usually have a compact mirror somewhere too... 

I take everything else I might need in my school tote bag, which I'll show you another time.

♥

Amaranth, and garden eating

I harvested a handful of massive amaranth leaves for my dinner.

I mentioned before that I had never heard of amaranth until I began growing it this summer. Now I love it. It grows so quickly, doesn't mind the heat, has been bug-proof (knock on wood) and despite being eaten down to the quick by rabbits last month, the plants are now all about 30-50cm high and covered with big leaves. If you garden, grow amaranth! I have only a few plants, in a tiny area, but they are so vigorous that I seem to be getting a large harvest anyway. You can eat the young leaves like lettuce, which is great now, at high summer, when lettuce is a bit fussy about high temperatures, and cook the large leaves like spinach, good for when the spinach is not yet ready (at least mine isn't).

Amaranth is popular in all around the world. I found and made this Indian curry recipe (the first one on the page). Try it with spinach if you don't have amaranth. Yum yum yum.

Of course curry doesn't exactly 'go' with the insalata calabrese I served alongside it. That's just how it is with garden cookery. Sometimes you simply have a basket of rapidly ripening tomatoes, a basil plant that's longing to be eaten, a small jungle of amaranth needing to be picked, and a serious craving for buffalo mozzarella all in one day. Of course there are surely ways to work all these things into a single cohesive meal, but I don't have anything against a mismatched salad and main course. After all, it's just me I have to please!

A thoroughly modern Thursday

My tennis practice was rained out for the second week in a row, so I did what any modern, 21st century girl would do. I sat down and hemmed some handkerchiefs instead. (and waited for a sunny day to photograph them, of course!)

I use cotton or linen, 1 foot square (30x30 cm). With cotton I usually machine-hem them, but with soft fabrics like linen it's almost as easy to hand-roll the edges, and it looks so elegant. I prefer white, because it's so easy to wash all your white things at once and stick them in the sun to dry. Otherwise I like to use fabric scraps from cottons I've sewn with, as in these green ones. Sometimes I initial or monogram them, but I don't always get around to it. The pattern for these initials comes from an old book of my grandmother's.

Handkerchiefs are one of those things I love because they are so perfectly practical, as well as being a little bit old-fashioned. Not to mention their versatility as an accessory. But I love things that are perfectly simple, designed to suit one purpose very well, and with no superfluous bits. Things like Converse sneakers, white t-shirts, and sturdy handkerchiefs.

It doesn't hurt that they are reusable, and it's so much nicer to pull one out of your purse or pocket than it is to use a kleenex!

I spent the summer wasting, the time was passed so easily

Sources:
1. 2.   3.  4. 5..  6. 

I just don't understand how summer days can be so short. It's not that I really want to do so very much. Just the usual, you know, have a couple of good meals, watch a film or an episode of something, get work done for my thesis, and have time for a shower and reading before bed, and some time to sit outside, listen to music, sew, draw, read books that aren't about Roman slaves. That's not to mention weekend days, going to the city, dancing, seeing friends - things it seems a thesis student is meant to set proudly aside.
If anyone has some time-management tips, or better yet, knows of some magical or scientific ways to make a day two times as long, or reduce the need for sleep (and I like a whole ten hours) I'd be glad to hear them!

Hej!

Working in the library on this sunny day! I am reading about Roman freedmen, it's interesting at least!

♥

lounge

I took the life-affirming decision this morning that even a girl with a thesis to write can have a lazy Sunday now and then. I'm not sure I can call this a conscious decision. When I saw that I'd slept in almost two hours past my dutifully set alarm, I took it as a sign and kept my pyjamas on, lounged around and listened to Radio Deluxe with John Pizarelli, the jazz guitarist, and Jessica Molaskey.

I sewed these a while ago from a vintage pattern. They have this beautiful yoke and little puffy bloomers.

Yesterday I dried my white laundry in the sun. There's no feeling like sleeping in fresh pyjamas in a freshly-aired bed. These ones make me feel like I fell asleep in the 60s and just woke up, which is a sensation I like to cultivate whenever possible.