Winter Flowers, Rainbows and Stuff

My family gave me this lovely book Winter Flowers about Swedish embroidery on nalbound mittens for my birthday.  I've been paging through it over and over.  The embroidery is so beautiful and the pictures are great for seeing the structure of the work.  I need to finish translating the other books on my list, but this one is in the queue!  Just to give you a peek at the book, I'll share a few pictures.  (The site like above has more pictures if you're really curious about the book.)

My daughter was gaga over these lovely mitts with the rainbow fringe.  I guess little girls will always be attracted to rainbows.  So, I think this may very well be the key to being able to share crafts like nalbinding with her.  

My hubby thinks I need a fulling/waulking board like this one.  He already helps me make nalbinding needles.    To see him excited about another part of this craft, well, it just makes my day.  

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You can probably tell by the dates of my posts, that it's a First Lego League season at my house.  It's a blast, even though it tends to be quite consuming for me as coach.  So I'll play a little catch up on crafts in this post too.

Maria Lind Heel has this really spiffy set of nalbinding project booklets in Danish.  (Though she'll likely be translating them to English at some point.  I'll let post when I hear more details.)  My favorite of course is the Christmas booklet.  It has darling ornaments!  Her booklets can be found through her blog.

For Christmas presents, I've been busy making nalbinding needle rolls, nalbinding needles and a sewing needle (with hubby's help), and another subzero weather hat.   (All of which I can't show you right now - secret and all...  Sorry!)

With all the nalbinding I've been doing, I'm finding I MUST make my stitches loose, or it stresses my hands.

I've made a ton of the little nalbound mitten ornaments.  So I'll be sharing the pattern later today.  They're such a quick project!

Over Thanksgiving my kids and I made butter.  It was the first time they'd seen the process.  We made ours in my mixer (covered with plastic wrap to keep down the mess).  When the cream molecules broke into the butter and buttermilk parts it was almost magical for them.  Unfortunately I had no experience with butter molds, so our attempt at a Pikachu shaped butter was a fail.  Rice molds were not meant for butter.  But next time I'll have a few ideas to try to get that butter out of the mold - such as oiling down the inside of the mold.  (Or maybe I'll just be smart and use a silicone mold...)