Just incase you think my life is idyllic …..after yesterday’s comments….I would like to point out that I am the mother of teenagers. Life is often turbulent and difficult. That’s probably why I cling so desperately to the tiny moments of peace and happiness, and why I spend so much time knitting socks.

Today I ran away and went to a very nice exhibition in the Zürich Art Gallery. Winter Tales – an exhibition of European winter pictures from the Renaissance to the Impressionists (on until April should you wish to visit).

I loved the early Dutch paintings, mainly by people I’d never heard of, but brimming full of scenes of rural folk skating on frozen canals, like the one above by Peter Brueghel (Winter landscape with bird trap, 1601)

It was also a delight to encounter paintings I knew from elsewhere – like Monet’s Magpie (1868/9) from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

A little oasis of calm in a life that is presently anything but.

Helen

(I’m sorry about the beige boxes under the pictures…I can’t seem to get rid of them!)

14 degrees, sitting on the back step knitting a plain vanilla sock of my own devising (using delicious Sock Hop yarn from Crown Mountain Farms), drinking a nice cup of tea in the sunshine.

Hard to beat.

Happy Saturday

Helen

I left the UK nearly 23 years ago. I was 25, had just taken my last accountancy exams and was excited to move on to pastures new. I was lucky enough to have secured a job transfer for myself to the US – and what’s more, to the city where everyone wanted to go – or at least where those who didn’t want to go to New York wanted to go – San Francisco.

Well the rest you’ve probably heard before….on my first day at work at KPMG I sat next to a tall, gangly Swiss guy with improbably large red glasses and long wavy curls. He looked like the antithesis of an American businessman….and well reader, I married him.

But that was a way down the line…

After a couple of fabulous years in California his work permit was expiring, I had a job offer and could have a permit to stay. I was torn between my career, which was taking off, and the Swiss guy. Always up for an adventure and ready for a jump into an unknown that was going to be bigger than I could imagine (I mean, have you heard Swiss-German??) I followed my heart and 21 years ago moved to Zürich.

I’m very happy here. I have my own business as a translator and editor, have taken Swiss nationality and really now this is HOME. I make it back to the UK a couple of times a year and keep up with a fair few friends. It’s always good to go back, but I’m staying put here.

There are still a few things about England that I really miss though…

• Fish and Chips – the children and I are on a quest to see if there’s anything that approximates to proper fish and chips in Switzerland. So far even the Irish pubs have failed the test!
• Marks and Spencer – nowhere beats their underwear and socks and I really wouldn’t mind the odd ready meal even though I’m not really a ready meal girl.
• John Lewis – especially their haberdashery departments
• The sea – especially walking along a windswept coastline and blowing the cobwebs away
• Cream teas – well that’s pretty obvious really! We do our best at home and have now finally found something that approximates to clotted cream
• Big English bookshops with books at normal prices. We have an English bookshop in ZH, but you almost need a mortgage to go there!
• People who strike up a conversation when you’re standing at a bus stop with them.
• Being called ‘pet’ by all and sundry (my Geordie roots are showing!)
• Old friends who I’d really like to see more regularly than I do.
• Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate (can be found here, but only in small quantities and at a whopping price)
• Having a drink and my dinner in a cosy English pub
• The National Trust
• Wearing hats to weddings

If you’ve moved away from where you started out, what do you miss the most?

Helen

Woohoo….today I’m allowed to tell you my secret….

I’m taking part in my first ever bee. An international mystery bee no less. How exciting – and scary – is that?

I was asked to take part – along with a group of other quilting bloggers from as far afield as the US, Morocco, the UK and the Czech Republic –  by Di from Random Thoughts Do or Di – and if you take a look here you can see what we’re all going to be getting up to!

I’ve been dithering on for weeks, knowing that I’d have to come up for an idea for my quilt. I really wanted to do something that I hadn’t done before, that wouldn’t be too hard and that would work out well with blocks or strips made by 8 different makers. This is my final inspirational mosaic…

So now you know what I’ve been up to with all my wonky stars! If you want to know more about any of the wonderful stars in my mosaic, just click on them and they will link back after a couple of clicks to the original flickr link, where you can see who made them (Just so you know I’m not nicking things off the web without giving credit where credit is due!)

I think it’s going to be a lot of fun – and I’ll be introducing you to my fellow Stitch Teasers very soon!

Helen

I’m going to be taking part in a new bee that’s starting up very soon, but as it’s all very hush-hush at the moment, I can’t really tell you much about it. Part of what I’ll be doing is making wonky stars – something I’ve never done before – despite being the patchwork star queen. Wonky is a new adventure for me.

There’s a very nice tutorial here that got me going in the right direction.

I started out using some left over Amelia and a bit of white muslin that was lying around.

Lesson learned: muslin isn’t a good idea. It doesn’t have a tight enough weave and it moves and stretches, so although this looks OK from a distance I wasn’t all that happy with it.

I then moved on to using divine ash Kona cotton as a background, together with some bright patterns that I picked up in Canada a couple of years ago. Aaaah, much better! As you can see I’m diddling around and trying out different sizes. This is heading towards being a table runner, which is something I’ve wanted to make for ages.

Normally I have a really hard time cutting into lovely new lengths of fabric unless I’m embarking on a big project. It takes a lot for me to make a first cut, it really does. I’m always plagued by thoughts of ‘what if I waste this and then I haven’t got enough when I really, really need it’, which just ends up in an absolute block and my scissors won’t go there at all.

Today the sun was shining again and I felt a tiny bit radical – it must have been all that wonkiness getting to me, because I really did cast cares to the wind and dive right in.

And it felt really good!

Helen