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!