Drawing Best Friends

Usually when I choose faces to draw they are all serious looking with no visual teeth or smiles. The reason is naturally because it is easier to draw something plain without special edges and curves. This time I tried something different. I found a great photo of my sister in law Liselotte and her friend making funny faces, and I started drawing right away because of the inspiration and the challenge!

I used lead pencils to make this drawing and the range of softness lies between F to 6B. I used a stomp to make the shadows. 

If I would point out one thing I am the most satisfied with in this drawing, it would be how the tongue turned out because that part was really tricky! 

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Icing and Coconut

This cake is very common on the Swedish "fika" table when we drink coffee or tea while we sometimes eat pastries or just a little biscuit. This cake is usually baked in a large oven pan with high edges (about 3-5 centimeters) and that is mentioned in the recipe below, but this time I tried using an ordinary baking pan with removable rim (diameter approximately 24 cm), which works equally great.

I admit that I am not a fan of coconut (not the texture nor the taste), however, this cake is the only cake with coconut that actually works fine with me :)

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Icing and Coconut
150 grams of butter or margarine
2 eggs
3 deciliter sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa
4 1/2 deciliter flour (wheat)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 deciliter milk

Icing
75 grams of butter or margarine
1-2 tablespoons cold coffee
1 tablespoon cocoa
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
3 1/2 dl icing sugar

Garnish
Coconut flakes

How to...
1. Put the oven for 175 degrees Celsius.
2. Melt the butter and let it cool down. 
3. Whisk the eggs and the sugar until it becomes a white and fluffy texure.
4. Mix the flour, vanilla sugar, baking powder and cocoa and add this mixture alternately with the melted butter into the egg mixture. 
5. Pour the batter into a greased oven pan (about 30*40 centimeters) covered in bread crumbles.
6. Bake in the lower part of the oven for about 15 minutes.
7. Let the cake cool.
8. Melt the butter for the icing into a sauce pan and then add the rest av the ingredients into the sauce pan while stirring.
9. Spread the icing on top of the cake and spread the coconut flakes over. Work fast because it will harden quite fast. 
10. Cut the cake in squares.

Purple Wool Kilt

This year I wanted to make something of my own to wear on Christmas Eve (that is the big celebrating day in Sweden) and it turned out to be one of my favourite garments - the kilt. I made another pink squared kilt last summer in the same style but this one is made of wool fabric and in a more traditional fashion where the pleating is narrower and the fabric is darker in color.
I really like this fabric, it is heavy and have colors of red, black, purple, yellow and green which makes it easy to match with other garments in other colors. I bought a couple of meters extra of this fabric, so maybe it will be a dress or a jacket in the future too :) However, I will never wear them at the same time as this kilt ;)

 The pattern is home made by my mother. She made me several kilts of this kind when I was a  teenager so I have used my old kilts to make my new ones. I have decided to make and wear more kilts in the future because it is such a nice and cool garment, especially when it is modernised and made in a more feminine way like this one.

Blue/Green Baby Hat

Hello and welcome to a new year of creativity! I think the best way to start the new year of 2016 is a cool, colorful and fun baby hat for those chilly winterdays :)

This pattern is from Drops Design Studio's website and I can really recomend their patterns, they have a lot of baby patterns and they are all free. If you are lucky you can even find a video tutorial on their website for your garment, or at least get technique tips from their videos. The link I attached in this post for the pattern is in swedish but if you would like other laguages than swedish you can easily change the language in the bar to the left under the picture in the pattern. Isn't it neat?! ;)

For this hat I used a green/blue acrylic yarn from RedHeart. I really like the color and the thickness is great for me, I think the result is getting smooth and nice.

Happy knitting everyone!

Soft Pink Teddy Bear

It is teddy bear time!
As I was browsing trough my patterns I found this very cute teddy bear, and since I got a lot of fur fabric in different colors from my husband for my birthday I finally found what I was going to do with it (beacuse I wanted to make something really nice). For this bear I chose a pale pink fur fabric and since the fabric was about 1,5 m long I only used about 30 cm width! That means that I have almost 1,5 meter width left ready to be used for something else.

The whole body is one piece, the only separate pieces are the nose and the ears which I have sewn by hand. The instructions were not easy to follow when it came to the nose area since the pictures were very dark and authors used dark brown fabric. In the end I just got a bit frustrated and I made some own decisions and it came out good. I usually is quite impatient with patterns and if I don't understand right away I just do my own thing and hope for the best. However, this time I really pushed myself to understand for a long time but it didn't work out. I think the result is good and I will stick to my own routines if I do more bears of this model. The pattern I found for this bear is coming from the same book I used for the Soft Toy Elephant.

Happy sewing everyone!

  

Purple Knitted Mittens

In Sweden we are starting to get closer to winter time, and this morning we had -11 degrees Celsius. It is the perfect time to curl up in the armchair under a cozy warm blanket and knit mittens.
This model is borrowed from Drops Design Studio's homepage and you can choose your language in the menu at the right under the picture in the pattern.

If the thought of making your own mittens have crossed your mind once or twice my advise is "Go for it!", because it really is easy once you understand the pattern instructions and it really feels great to put the finished mittens on your hands and be able to say "I made these" to all of your friends and family :) Maybe you even surprise someone with a great homemade christmas gift <3

Since I always do "my own thing" with patterns I find, I just made stocking stitch for these mittens and used two purple colors to lighten things up a bit. I really like the type of ending in the top, it turned out very good. I hope my friend feels warm this winter when she gets this gift :)
Happy knitting everyone!

Ink Drawing Susy

As I told you in the post when I draw my sister in law Liselotte I have really started to like the ink pencils I bought some time ago. This drawing of my friend Susy took about six hours which is quite long time but I was really satisfied with the result. This time I tried to use the light colors more and be careful with the dark brown color in the hair. I think I nailed her eyes and those are very important to make it look like her, so I think this one turned out pretty great. 
I start with a light lead pencil to make all the details and then I use the ink to fill it with color. It is fun but a little scary to use ink because you can easily make a mistake and then it is hard to fix it.