Montreal City

Montreal has been fantastic to us a few weeks ago. we had amazing weather, sunny but not too hot for a city trip, just perfect. with some great tips for coffee, food and strolling from my instagram friend Iveth ~  this is her beautiful jewelry shop ~ we enjoyed ourselves so much. 

basically we stayed out of the tourist areas as much as we could. above you see buildings that are part of Old Montreal. a beautiful area down by the river, surrounded by majestic warehouses that show pretty and warn marks of earlier times. 

below you see shots of the areas Le Plateau and Mile End. the shops on Mt Royal Avenue, delicious coffee and small bakery shops, bagels from St-Viateur Bagels, it was the perfect mix between European and Canadian city life. the side streets reminded us a little of Amsterdam, we felt right at home.

coffee at cafe Myriade, vintage clothing shops perfectly arranged by colour. all a feast for the eyes. and even more a feast for our yarn and fabric loving eyes was a visit to the local yarn and fabric shop. more about that tomorrow...

Screen Printing Workshop

a little while ago some friends and myself gathered at the beautiful shop of Tea With Gladys for a crafty morning. we learned how to screen print in a simple and effective way, a technique we would be able to do ourselves at home too. Darcy, my friend and owner of Tea With Gladys, was our darling host and she did such a great job. because of the drying process that takes a while, we started off with drawing our designs on the silk screen right away. then we used mod podge to black out the areas we didn't want printed. while our designs were drying we enjoyed tea, delicious cupcakes and of course admired the beautiful items in this pretty shop full of candy vintage colours, pretty prints and handmade items.

after the mod podge dried, the fun part started: the actual printing. we used fabric paint and plastic cards to swipe the paint through the silk screen and onto our muslin bags. I did a few roses, there was a deer, dragon fly, beautiful bow, a puppy, sunshine, hearts, a cameo... we really got creative and couldn't stop printing our designs onto bags and tea towels. what fun we had! we got to take our own designs home, for later use. now to find time to do some more printing. if you got the creative printing itch too and would like to use this easy and effective technique at home, just google 'screen printing embroidery hoop' and you'll get enough tips and videos to get going.

enjoy!

Summer Time

sweet Summer days, crocheting outside, drinking fresh fruit smoothies, thrifting happy finds, 

enjoying little girls' birthday parties... life is good.

thank you for your helpful comments on my last post, I will reply to them individually after I finish this post. besides legal rights, it is a feeling that comes with posting old patterns too. for me personally, posting them for free seems de-valuating to the actual worth of the patterns, and posting them for sale feels a bit like stealing. clearly I haven't decided yet what I am going to do with them. for now I'll use them and make a couple more doilies. if you are desperately craving to see one of the patterns, please e-mail me.

last week was a first week full of blog posts since looooong here. I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed putting them together. I switched computers in the mean time, so I am working on finding the right photo editing again. they might look a bit blue-ish on your screen now. it is impossible to make pictures look good on every single screen, which bugs me. so I'll be fine tuning the settings a little more these weeks. 

as for this week, I plan to update you on a fun screen printing workshop I did with friends, and on our trip to Montréal and the beautiful shop I visited there.

wishing you a happy new week of Summer!

Crochet Blocking Reveal

do you remember I posted images of these crochet items a few days ago? there is a little square made of granny squares, and two coasters I found at the antique market. and there is the doily I made myself. all looking messy and in this case that's not what I like. so, after washing them and pinning them wet onto my ironing board, they dried up and this is the result:

 

whoaaa, I so love love love the after-blocking results! I am thinking the granny squares look perfect now for a cushion front. the coasters are ready to use and are the perfect props for cupcake shoots, haha. the doily has become quite large since I used Catania Fine cotton instead of the real fine crochet cotton. but I absolutely love how the design worked out. especially the edging was really fun to do, the last round of green leafs actually goes through the pink petals, so much fun. it gives it a certain depth.

last question for you before we enter the weekend. I would love to hear your advice or opinion regarding the following matter. I've had requests for the pattern of the doilies I've recently been making. the patterns I used were from 1940-50 crochet magazines and I don't feel completely comfortable providing a printed pattern on my blog. however I do see some of them on freevintagecrochet.com and even quite a number of them in print or PDF for sale on Etsy. what is your opinion regarding posting these patterns? does it make a difference if it's a pattern that was printed in a magazine or book from 1949 or 2013, let's say it were a pattern from Simply Crochet magazine?

I would love to hear from you.

Happy Weekend!

depending on what the weather is like where you are, you might be interested in learning a new craft? if so, hop over to this post to find a code for a free online class with The Amazings! enjoy