Ripple Purse and Table Mat

   The last week I was up to ... good :) Well, I was again experimenting and trying to adjust different patterns for different kind of crochet stuff. I supposed that ripple will look good in a purse. I don't know why but I feel like I am in a fear of starting some really big project, so that's why the things I have made so far are all small and simple. However I like this purse, with small roses attached to its' handles.

   By the way, I used polyester for filling up the handles. I tried it for the first time and I liked the way it shapes up the details. To make such crochet handles first I crocheted two stripes approximately 5-6 cm wide and 45 cm long. I was struggling a little with the edges stitching to each other and also was filling up with poly fill at the same time.

      I am so much impatient. Now I understood it, and my husband is right when he says the same :) Hehe. Yes, I am impatient and very excited to start making some new project without finishing the old one! So this is what I am working on at present - a table mat or a table cover. I picked up the pattern from the forum I participate in. Pattern is very easy and it can obtain genuine look by colour combinations.

      This is the actual size, I still have to work at least same number of rows to achieve table's perimeter. In my crochet works I also try to avoid that visibility of connection between stitches, what is not easy. Sometimes it comes out tighter when I finish the row, at times it's just not possible to close that gap. Yarn, I am using to make the table mat, doesn't have any marking about weight or size and I also have to roll it up every time. I found that it's perfect for making home stuff.

     Well now it's quite late here and I am still blogging about my crochet. Will say good night and do a few rows before sleeping :P

Last Sunday or Awesome Mausam

      Though it's been quiet a while after our last weekend, I still would like to share an incredible weekend I had with my husband last Sunday.

    We didn't go anywhere out of the city, nonetheless enjoyed our time together very much. The weather that day was awesome - cloudy, a bit windy with a tendency to the rain. We like to have such weather here at least sometimes, because it is very hot otherwise and you are in need of fresh air.

    The first idea of our Sunday was to have some tasty food outside. Home made food is good too, but you want diversity at times :) So, we decided to go nowhere else but Panjub University canteen!We did it not for the first time and we knew that we would certainly get something delicious there. There are a few canteen kiosks which serve Indian food. Prices are much more than  reasonable and for one serving of the dish which is enough for two people. So we had some kind of thali - boiled rice, mixed vegetables, dal makhni, rotis and salad.

  After a tasty meal, we still didn't want to leave the place and headed towards the palm alley. I must admit there are many plants on the university territory for example like this blossoming bush, you can find many of them in the city too:

    Pictures were taken with my husband's mobile. I like the quality :)
     What always takes my attention when we are at the university is the palm tree alley and palm trees around. When my parents came to Chandigarh and saw same palm trees at the lake shore, they thought that the trees were put into some kind of pots. However, these are the tree trunks:)

Yes, palm trees are everywhere there and it makes all look so exotic to me! The university has some fountains which have started working finally. The buildings are not new, but the architecture is much of Chandigarh, Le Corbusier. You can read about the city history here.

While we were walking among the palms, we noticed some flower beds with the dried flowers, what, of course, gave us a thought of collecting seeds for our garden!
And this is an Indian purse I took with me. I like the colour a lot! It also has a good idea of how to make a  close button for a crochet purse or a bag.

Just look at the sky! I am loving the trees shapes as well:

After our nice walk was over, we didn't want to go home again nd went to the city Rose Garden.  We were there last time, honestly, may be half of a year ago! But this time the weather was so tempting to walk there and enjoy fresh wind waves!
Here we are, in the Rose Garden, getting a bit crazy as we saw so many roses after so long. They are so different, but similarly beautiful!

Pink roses:

Scarlet roses:

Yellow roses:

 Not roses, but so cute, and ladybird is decently sitting on the leave:)

Another part of the Rose Garden:

 Oh and the sky that day was so unusual, can you see that sun triangle? I say that the entrance to Heaven has been open when you see such kind of sun coming through the clouds.

Clouds.. and then it started raining and we headed to the exit of the garden.

  We headed towards the market place, where I bought a few things. May be I will show them to you.

Have nice weekends and week days! 

* mausam (Hindi) = "weather " 

Important - Name of my blog changed

Dear everyone! I have recently changed my blog name into a shorter one and hope you will  like it . Before the name was silkwaytomydream.blogspot.com. NOW the blog name (and URL) is

hindustanka.blogspot.com

Now I will keep this name and this name only.
Have a nice day!

Indian ginger, chilly and papaya - what I like to eat

   When I started this blog, the main idea was do describe my life in Chandigarh. It included everything from what I do personally to how people live in the city. Today I am starting a new part of posts about Indian food, which was not familiar to me anyhow before I came here. I didn't know that vegetables could be so tasty, same as I never knew that there were so many more spices!
  My husband D, as a true Indian, likes spicy food. However, in my first months in India I couldn't share this love, because almost all the things I tried were unbearably spicy for me so that I couldn't eat them without pouring water in my mouth constantly. Now, after 2 years spent here, I am in love with spicy Indian dishes.  One of the main spices of India is chilly pepper. I knew about it of course, but we don't use it Russian dishes much.
 I used to order lunch from some dhaba (small Indian cafe). Besides the main course, there were always 2-3 chilly peppers, prepared in a way that they were not really hot. So, once I got how it was done, I decided to try it at home.  I made a small amount of chilly pepper in a jar day before yesterday.

 All you need is 10 chilly peppers, salt and crushed cumin seeds (Hindi "jeera" or "zeera"). You have to add salt and cumin  into chilly pepper halves and then keep them in a jar for few hours. Chilly becomes salty and loses it's excessive spiciness and you can eat it the same day (or evening).
One more very important ingredient of many Indian delicacies is ginger (I am not taking here about ginger tea). Ginger is an incredible spice and a very good remedy for many health problems. Ginger is a root and it indeed looks like this, what you can see in the picture below (there are also chilly pepper pods):

  I like availability of such products in India, because they are healthy and tasty too. I have started drinking ginger water in the morning, straight after getting up. It is said to have good influence on overall organism. I prepare it since evening by grating it and adding in a glass of water. Water becomes a bit spicy by the morning so now I will be adding half of a spoon of honey to it.
 Another thing I discovered when I came to India was that you could buy almost any kind of fruit in the market, be it exotic or an "ordinary" one, and it also won't be costly. I adore this fact! So, only yesterday we were helping ourselves with papaya - juicy, delicious! And the colour is awesome too, so summery!

Papaya has very interesting seeds, my husband read in Wiki yesterday that they are spicy in taste and can be used instead of black pepper. We haven't tried whether it is so, but we trust a reputable source of information :)

Summer on your plate! Many people here like to eat papaya and other fruits adding some salt and cumin for example. I prefer a pure taste of fruit. Mmmm, so tempting even in the picture!

"We are what we eat"... well means I am a spicy ginger fruit! :) Hehe :)
                                          <<< Have a nice week ahead, eat healthy food!>>>

Spring Crochet

This year every single tint of the flowers in our city seems to be more bright and it is bursting its bloom into your eyes. It makes me feel joy, it makes me feel happy. So even my latest crochet works were under this impression and I wanted so so much to make them cheerful and inspiring for my eyes :)

  I was willing to make this crochet post one week back, but as usual it was postponed cause of some reasons, so I was trying to fill up the gap with the posts about flowers. No way this time. Today I am finally going to show some crochet achievements for the past three weeks. I haven't done much, as I am just learning new forms and new patterns.

My first achievement so far is this star pattern which I tried to make out myself. Star is my favourite symbol (and it is the symbol of my sign of zodiac). I am planning to make a star cushion out of two such parts. The thing i like about such patterns is that you can expand as much as you want.

The next achievement is these two mobile covers. The left one was the first I made. I tried to combine different colours. You can also see a small decoration in the front. And the main detail of them is a button, which serves 2 purposes: to close the cover and to decorate it! I got these lovely buttons and some other from the same 38 market where I purchase yarn too. The price for one button was 2 rupees (!), means 0.04 USD! Hehe :)

Number three is this newly learned and attempted by me ripple pattern from the blog post Neat ripple pattern of Attic24 blog. I started making it when me and my husband went to Gurgaon for 4 days and I had plenty of time to learn it! It is on the stage of becoming a purse now. I bought few new colours like that grey, light blue and pink and couldn't wait to use them!

And as the flower theme continues, these are cute small flowers I have made so far to decorate my future purse.

 

 This is how it looks together, a ripple and a pink rose with seven petals (next ones I have  made have six now):

I am glad to achieve this much in just few weeks and hope to finish some pending projects and, of course, start new!!! :)

Happy Easter 2012

Happy Easter! I know that the world celebrated it last Sunday, but today is an orthodox Easter. This is my second one in India, which I try to keep as much close to our way of celebration as I can.
Yesterday evening I coloured eggs, and today me and my husband went to see our friends - couples which consist of a Russian wife and an Indian husband, just like we. These are decorated eggs. Not so many this year, but they look nice :) I took some stickers and colours from my parents when we visited them in the winter. The letters "ХВ" on the eggs mean "Christ is risen" (Russian "Христос Воскрес")

Close up of two eggs with the image of church and a pigeon.

Happy Easter once again! Христос Воскресе!

Colours of the Spring

I am mad... Mad about the flower potential of our city! Difficult to imagine how many of them we have here in Chandigarh. Honestly, I don't even know the names of all of them as I have never seen such in my life until the day I moved here. In spite of all of the gardens in the city like Rose Garden, Garden of Fragrance and others, smaller and bigger, there are so many places where you can find beautiful creations of nature. So let's start our pleasure for eyes from the nearest place. This is, of course, our home Garden.
This time we have gorgeous rose bush with tiny pink roses on each of the branches!

Also we have one more bush just beside the rose one, which name I don't know. The flower colours vary from white to red.

In the picture below is not really our flower, but our neighbours. However, we have one common wall from one side, and neighbours arrange their flower pots on it. So I can say that their plants are half our too :) Just look at these scarlet flowers!!!

Next time, I am going to create gallery of the city flowers. I am really excited to have in my collection all of them!

Past week or Nature around me

  Past week didn't leave me a chance for posting even a single picture. From the middle of the last week and beginning of the present I was out of the city with my husband. He as usual, went for official purposes, I went to be with him and settle down few deals in Delhi.  I was very happy to be out of town for some time and take rest from my work. What was a very wise idea is that I took my crochet with me and successfully learned ripple pattern and a bit of amigurumi technique! (pictures will come).

Leaving crochet for a while, seems like my last blog posts turned out to be so "green". Well, not so green these days as more and more flowers are appearing. This island of green and blossoming plants inspires me so much, that I check it in the morning before I leave, I check it in the evening when I come back home and in the night before going to bed. There are few questions in my head like: Who made flowers so extremely colourful, with different shapes of their petals? Who invented trees to change leaves colour with a change of season?  Where did such diversity of these wonderful in many ways plants come from? And how it happened that so many of them give us so delicious fruits? Of course biology answered all these questions, but still WHY is it all like this? I don't know the answer, but I do love nature.

Our beans grew very fast in past week and we got small pods hanging in between leaves, where there had been flowers before. We have two type of beans, the one which waves and the one which grows as a bush. So those pictures with red flowered plants in them, are the "wavy" ones, others, with slightly purple, are the

"bush" type:

 So proud to have first pods:

I guess that with such speed of mellowing, we can have more than one harvest in a year :) Hehe. Look at these cute round tomatoes, they are too good!

And my second pride (again) is fennel, which grows way too slowly, but became much taller though since the last post about it. Hence I will be able to add it to salads soon! Happy now :)

In my plans are more posts about flora of the place I live in, as there is so much of nature here to tell about!

I would like to tell that my crochet is not forgotten, tempo just slowed down a bit due to stirring life. 

Hollywood "invasion" to Chandigarh

Only one month passed by since the remarkable shot of the Kathryn Bigelow' movie in Chandigarh, and our city is again under Hollywood attention, now, of the world famous movie director Steven Spielberg. It is said that the crew has already arrived in the city and not announcing publicly the place of their residence. Here is the link to the news source. Steven Spielberg is going to shoot not less than... "Mission Impossible 5"! So, Tom Cruise will be jumping over and flying above our city, may be you will have a chance to see him somewhere, watch! :)

Steven Spielberg

It is pleasant to know that Chandigarh is gaining popularity day by day. Let's see the results from the two movies shooting later on.