Blogpause and gardenpictures

I am leaving for Holland tomorrow because of the anniversary of my father's wife. I'll be back in the beginning of next week.
Some pictures of my garden,:

I think fall is in the air.....

Tomato sauce and my new doll quilt, what do they have in common...

Last saturday my greengrocer on the local farmers market asked if I wanted about 10 kilo's of tomatoes for making sauce. And YES I wanted them, I love homemade tomato sauce in winter. So on sunday i was making sauce and sterilized the jars.

And today I finished the RED dollquilt that i made a week ago. Another one in blue Japanese fabric is waiting for finishing too....

I also bought some dollquiltbooks, so inspiring...... I think I have patterns for years and years .......

The grandchildren were here

Last week I had no time to blog, because the grandchildren, and their parents, were here... They arrived in their yellow oldtimer van.

The cute little boy is three years, the whole day he is asking questions: what are you going to do; can i go with you; may i help you; what is this: why. 

And of course he wanted to help feeding the animals.....

His little sister is only 7 months, she was laughing the whole day and she LOVES to eat. 

We had some wonderful days together.

I love to make doll quilts

I already made two doll quilts, maybe you remember them:

The Japanese heartquilt

The 30th reproduction dollquilt

This week I finished the (almost) civil war doll quilt, I also used some French General fabric.

It was machine pieced and both hand- and machine quilted. For me this was the first time that i quilted on my sewing machine. I saw some videos about machine quilting, practised a bit and here is the result; however not perfect at all, I am very proud!!!

I bought 5 (!) doll quilt books in the last three month, I 'll show them in another post.

i also finished the binding of my Orvieto leaf sampler.

What an awful day it was!

Monday was my second summermarket this year. Weather forecast was not bad, some raindrops in the morning and sunny in the afternoon.  When I left home at 6 o'clock in the morning it was raining. I was not impressed and  thought, these are the few raindrops that were  talking about.
But the rain did not stop, it was raining for hours!!!! I sat in my car the whole morning...... with my stall covered with plastic.

No need to say that I did not sell a lot. 

There however was a special moment when I saw a lady wearing one of my bags , which she bought on the market a month ago. She told me that she was very satisfied with the bag!

Here she is:

Harvest , lots of plums

I have told you before that I am a member of an association for preserving old varieties of fruit trees.
There are 2 orchards, one for the apple and pear varieties and one for the cherries and plums. They are planning another one with chestnuts. All those varieties are from this region.
When there are a lot of fruits, you, as a member can come and pick them for 1 euro the kilo.
Last week I went, with my friend Lucy , to pick plums.

Together we had 25 kilo!

How are the pumpkins growing?

Do you remember that we planted 60 pumpkinplants in May ? Because of the heat in june they had a difficult start, although my friend Lucy watered regularly, they suffered. The rain in july made them grow , there also are some fruits but not a lot yet, they need more sun. Weather is not stable at the moment,  after some hot days there are  immediately thunderstorms ....

To be continued!

Sugarfree carrotcake

Already some years I have 'pre-diabetes', that means that my blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes.
I try to make healthy food choices and eat (almost) sugarfree.
I don't like artificial sweeteners so I was very happy with the natural sweetener STEVIA. On this site you can read more about stevia.
Some studies even have shown that stevia extract effectually regulates bloodsugar!

I often combine stevia with homemade syrup or agave syrup, because using only stevia there is often an after taste of liquorice, a kind of bitterness.  To be able to measure small quantities I bought these measure spoons, the smallest is for 20 mg et the largest for 320 mg.  Stevis is 300 x sweeter that sugar so you always need only a small amount.

My sugarfree carrot cake is my version of two other recipes together. ( here and here )
You need:
225 g flour wholemeat
2 tbsp bakingpowder
1 tbsp biocarbonate
2 tbsp cinnamon
pinch of nutmeg
pinch of salt
250 g grated carrots
165 g chopped walnuts
40 g grated coconut
100 g dried figs
90 g dried apricot
60 g sunflower oil
2 eggs
50 g homemade syrup or agave syrup
250 g plain yogurt

Preheat the oven, 180 degrees.
Wisk the eggs and the oil. Put together the dry ingredients . Mix those by hand with the eggs and oil. Put in the other ingredients and mix together.
Put in the oven for about 40 minutes.
If you want the carrotcake sweeter you also could add bananas or honey.

I am so sorry that I don't have a picture, it's all eaten!!!! I made this post today because a blogfriend asked for sugarfree recipes.

You can find more sugarfree recipes here and here.
Bon appetit!!

So gorgeous

Look wat was in the mail today.....

49 different colors of hand-dyed wool that I ordered at Sue Spargo's shop. The wool is so soft and the colors are so beautiful! The colors are labelled so I can make my own colorcard. 

  I bought it with the money that I 'earned' on summermarket, two weeks ago.

I want to make this wall quilt with this wool:  

I already bought the book some years ago. 

Here is another picture of the wool!

I am so happy with this!!!!

My Orvieto leaf sampler.... FINISHED

I finished the embroidery of my Orvieto sampler. It was so fun, each leaf was a little project...which thread in which color; which stitch; beads or no beads.....  I used the stitches i learned in Orvieto . Did you ever heard of the drizzle stitch and the whipped woven circle?
I used the wool and fabric that we swapped with our group , the background is from Renée. So this leaf sampler became a wonderful  memory of that great, inspiring week in Orvieto with Sue Spargo and those lovely groupmembers.
Here is the result:

You can click on the pictured for more details .

My Orvieto leaf sampler

It's nearly finished. I hope to show you the sampler tomorrow. I already give you two leaves.......

See you tomorrow!!