Autumn Zebra

Wygilia is the Christmas Eve Polish feast, which is, as I understand it, very important and more important than the Christmas day (although, this might be changing in modern Poland due to general international influence on customs?). Maybe I'll just do pictures with identifying captions? Basically, we made some food and then ate it... :D Firstly, the table setting. One is supposed to use a white table cloth, so we do. I assume the white table cloth is so that it shows up the stains from any spilt beetroot soup better... We also have Polish bison grass vodka, and red wine in crystal glasses here. Matching table mats and plates too! Very pretty and nice. Barszcz (beetroot soup) with giant mushroom uszki (filled dumpling things) in it. We have these handy pierogi maker things (you put the circle of pastry on, put the filling on, then fold it in half and it folds it and crimps the edges for you) and we use the smallest for the uszki, but this makes them about 3 times bigger than when w...

There's this thing called "my creative space" where each week you post a pic of what creative stuff you're doing, and add a link to a list, so that everyone can go and look at everyone's stuff. I'm thinking of participating.... This week - more mindless than creative. That's a book with a picture of some stays similar to the ones I'm making, some cable ties that will be boning, and the fabric and embroidery thread I am using to make them - sewing boning channels in backstitch down each piece. Just another couple of dozen hours or something to go, sigh.. I'm not sure they'll work out that great even, but I wanted to hand sew some, just because I did. This weeks creative space link

Random pics of things I made or liked or whatever... It seemed like a good idea to follow the inspiration in the Spotlight catalogue and make food covers out of mosquito net with fabric around the edge as a presnet for my Mum. However, I discovered I don't really understand about getting a wide fabric border around a corner, and it was a total mess and really annoying. I wanted to sew one edge on, then fold it over and sew the other edge down on the other side like you can do with bias binding (as this seemed like it would be like a giant binding, essentially), but out of 4 sewing books, only one gave instructions for this kind of thing and those instructions were more-or-less "when you reach the corner, leave enough fabric to mitre it" and then when sewing down the other side "mitre the corner" - ok, not very specific there. I had the most success folding it in half first and sewing down both edges at once, and just messing with the corners when I got to them,...

I think I'll try and post some pictures from Christmas, before they become completely irrelevant... I made shopping bags to put everyone's presents in (except my husband's because I do most of the shopping so it would be like giving the bag to myself), out of fair trade cotton calico and leftover scraps of fabric I had. Since it's fair trade, and not on special, it's rather expensive, and with the cost of labour these shopping bags would cost about $50, as compared to $2 like they do when you get them from the supermarket. Of course, mine are a bit fancier than the $2 ones, but still... However, it was lovely lovely material, it felt very nice and it was really nice to sew. The weird thing is that cutting it felt a bit like cutting some silk I had- like the feeling through the scissors was similar in the way it sliced through it. Very odd. For those that like cutting fabric, you could cut this all day; it was lovely. So I did some of it batch-wise, and some of it in...