Textile Bag KEANE Makeover

One of my favourite music bands is called Keane and I have loved their music for eight years. I have been to two of their conserts here in Sweden and each time I have bought some merchandise to have a memory of the consert. The Perfect Symmetry World Tour back in 2008 I bought this textile bag. My mother sew a lining in it because it was very thin and for years I have used this bag to carry my lunch box for work and my knitting equipment.

Here is the final result of the makeover! :)

As you can see the original bag was quite damaged so I decided to give it a little makeover.

 

I cut out the print from the original bag, washed it and sew all around the edges.

 

The fabric I used is a Laura Ashley fabric that is very thick, so thick that you can use it for upholstery. I am sorry I didn't find the exact fabric on the internet to show you, but if you like the style of it you can check out Laura Ashley homepage and browse through their collection of fabrics :)

I pinned the edges of the printed square and sew it on one of the Laura Ashley fabric squares.

 

Drawing Meg Ryan

One of my favourite movies is "When Harry met Sally" starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal from 1989. I can't remember how many times I have seen that movie, probably fifteen times.
Meg Ryan's character Sally Albright is a lovable person and I wanted to make a drawing of her. The picture is taken right in the beginning of the movie when Sally is sixteen years old, waiting in her car for Billy Crystal's character Harry Burns to stop making out with his girlfriend so they can start their journey from Chicago to New York.

The technique I use is lead pencils with the softness between  3B and 5B. I also used a pencil with pin to get really sharp details around the eyes and in the hair. The paper is sketching paper.

There are some details I couldn't point my finger at that made the drawing not entirely looking like the original. I think I should have used the darker pencils like 5B and 6B much more to get a "wow-effect". However, I think it looks quite good when I am comparing it to the original picture.

Vanilla Cupcakes with Blueberry Cream Cheese Frosting

When my husband and I had our birthday party my mother in law gave us a new kitchen machine - a cupcake maker! I didn't even knew they existed! My first thought was that this machine was one of all new inventions that would be great for two tries and then one would discover that the result gets better in the oven. Well, I was wrong, the result is very good! I will definately use it many times in the future :) The concept of this machine is to be able to make cupcakes easy and fast without oven and without all the oven plates and baking cups in paper or silicone. Well I used silicon cups anyway :)

The cupcake maker we got was bought at the store Clas Ohlson, a large retail chain in Sweden. The store has a English homepage and a Swedish homepage. The cupcake maker you find with the English link doesn't look exactly the same like mine but I am sure it is basically the same machine.

I started from a recipe from a little book called "Cupcakes" by Corinne Jausserand (but I made a few changes on the way). Together with this little book you also get 16 small silicone cups that you can use again and again. I use them when I bake and they fit very well in the cupcake maker :)

Vanilla Cupcakes with Blueberry Cream Cheese Frosting

Vanilla Cupcakes
1 3/4 deciliter flour
1 milliliter salt
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate
1 deciliter sugar
100 grams room temperatured butter
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
2 eggs

Put the oven on 175 Celsius (I turn on the cupcake maker and wait until the green indicator lamp light on the top goes out)
Mix flour, salt and bicarbonate into bowl number 1 and set it aside for now.
Put the sugar into bowl number 2 and add the butter in pieces.
Add the vanilla sugar into bowl number 2 and whip the butter, sugar and vanilla sugar with a electric mixer.
Crack the first egg into bowl number 2, whip, add the second egg and whip again until the it is all homogeneous.
Use a fine mech strainer to get the flourmix from bowl 1 very fine and add the flourmix to bowl number 2 while you are whipping with the electric mixer.
Whip the mixture in about 2-3 minutes until it is very smooth and fluffy.
Fill the cupcake silicone cups with the mixture using a spoon. Fill upp about 2/3 of the cups.
In an ordinary oven you let the cupcakes bake for about 15-20 minutes (depending on the size of the cupcakes), however if you use a cupcake maker like me the time is about 10 -11 minutes.
When the cupcakes are ready you let them rest and cool on a plate.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Frosting
100 grams of Cream Cheese (Philadelphia is one option)
1 deciliter icing sugar
2 tablespoons of blueberries (fresh or frozen)

Mix the blueberries and the sugar in a saucepan. Let the mixture simmer and crush the berries with a spoon. Let the mixture cool.
Stirr the cream cheese with a fork to get it smooth. 
Use a fine mesh strainer to get the icing sugar very fine and add it to the cream cheese. Stirr well.
Add the cooled blueberry mixture little by little into the cream cheese/icing sugar mix to get a 
Spread the frosting on your cupcakes with a knife or pipe it out as a swirl (but remember to have a big opening so the blueberry pieces in the frosting don't get stuck).

Knitted Soft Toy Moose

Knitted animals and soft toys - who doesn't love them!? I have thought of making soft animals many times before but I have never really giving it a fair try. This time I decided to really make an effort because these kind of handicrafts are very lovable and you can really use your imagination to create cute things. I love to create from scratch and build things with my own imagination and design and I think this could be a new fun hobby!

Today I will show you my first soft animal friend :) He is a Swedish moose and his name is Sven. Sven is one of a kind because he has red pants (and I can tell you it is not very likely to find a moose with pants in the Swedish woods these days). Ever since the day he got the pants he loved them and whatever others may say or think about it, he will never throw them away!
As you can see he is quite a lively moose making silly moves every time I tried to take a picture of him...!

I wrote the pattern myself as I went along and the total time from making the first calculations until he was finished was about 10 days.
It was Easter holiday this past weekend and I had a lot of time knitting while my husband played videogames and I watched sitting beside him. At the moment he is playing Bloodborne, which is a new game related to the Demon's Souls and Dark Souls games. I really like to follow the stories these games are hiding - it is almost like a movie sometimes. So there I sit in our sofa having one eye on my knitting project and one eye on the tv-screen :) 

The horns were apparently excellent support when standing on the head...

Perhaps standing a bit too close to the camera...