Long Time No Blog

We have a truly magical garden in Kaskinen. The Murrays have their garden open in the summer for everybody to walk around and feel the special atmosphere of a freshly modern lush and green garden with huge rocks and high plants in the middle of a complex consisting of several wooden houses from the late 19th century. One of the houses is the pottery, one is for the lovely pottery shop plus living quarters. The third is more of a shed/henhouse. Strongly recommended! A corridor leads from the Murray's to Bladh's House garden, which is a unique experience, too, arranged in a more traditional manner as to illustrate the garden of olden times. Both gardens well worth a visit. The photo above is one of the Murray's plant boxes, quite unique in style. No ordinary blooming, but a delicate combination of various shades of exciting greens.

The text above was to explain the photo. Now I want to tell that I really and truly intended to blog regularly from early on and feel disappointed with myself for the very long break, as such a lot of interesting things happen in my hometown all the time.

The reason for the break originally was that I left for a short three-week holiday in Bulgaria in early July more than a year ago. There, various unexpected turns of events followed one another, so I finally ended up returning home in mid-August with a new puppy and a Bulgarian car. All my ambitious plans about the new garden here in Kaskinen were, in consequence, ruined, as I had been absent for more than two months.

After that, it was trainng the puppy as well as a lot of great forest walks with the dogs. Basically, the same agenda every day. Home from work, forest with the dogs, picking mushrooms, home. Slicing and frying, drying, packing and freezing the harvest the remaining hours of the day.  Very time-consuming.  But now we'll be self-sufficient with mushrooms till all eternity!

Then I got the crazy idea of a crochet Christmas tree. The amazing people in Kaskinen got really involved in the project and as a result of hard work and great many cups of coffee we were able to present the new 3,5 metre granny square Christmas tree to decorate the pavillion in Town Park. The tree received quite a lot of media attention and visitors to our town from near and far. Shame we didn't come to think if a guest book fot the tree.

As to other excuses, the twists and turns in our local politics have been a keen intrest of mine. After a lot of profound disagreement we finally stayed independent. Now it seems that not everybody accepts the fact, and not much seems to be done to sort things out. The next local elections are to be extremely interesting.

At the moment a new crafts project is going on. Crochet ladies meet in the new cafe, Cafe M & R, to crochet flowers and butterflies for a midsommarstång/juhannussalko. That's more of a Swedish tradition common in the Swedish-speaking communities in Finland. The latest one has been photographed in Kaskinen in the 1970's. It can be seen online in the local museum's digital collection. The traditional ones are made if birch-twigs and real flowers. Our six-metre version will be crochet and knitwork and it will be placed close to the music pavillion as we also hope to have some programme and activities around the pole to celebrate the Finnish midsummer.

We even have a new facebook forum for all crafts-oriented people here. It's named craftsislandkaskinen. The page is meant for communication between us all, as well as for sharing our new projects, both common and individual. I hope it will also work for marketing purposes for those of us who sell their products. We even have Instagram, but so far there's hardly any material there, as no Instagram guru has appeared among us to make the page great😕. But we're working on it...