Father and son t-shirts and a road trip to Lappland

I have noticed that the menfolk of my family wear the garments I have made quite a lot and they seem to like them. So, when I saw this lovely Rust organic cotton jersey by Mereen I decided to make matching father and son t-shirts for both my husband and K.

Pattern-wise I had it easy as both my husband and my son still fit into the old patterns I have used for them before. For my husband, I used the pattern from the book Sy! Urban Collection by Jenny Hellström. A while ago, I adjusted the pattern for a better fit at the shoulders and now I am pretty happy with it. For my son, the pattern I have drafted by myself.

Here finally the father and son tees from the back:

My son turned 13 this week and starts high-school in the autumn. I can’t believe that I’m already a mother of a teenager! However, I have noticed how much more fun stuff we can nowadays do as a family when the kids are big. This global pandemic has made travelling harder but right now Finland is pretty safe place to be, so road trips around the country have become a hit.

Lappland trip

A few weeks ago we drove all the way up to Lappland and climbed on top of Saana mountain that is 1029 m from the sea level and 556 m from the surface of Kilpisjärvi lake. It took 4 hours to the top of the mountain and back but the kids did fine, even though rain showers made parts of the trip a bit tricky. Here are some gorgeous views from the mountain:

Lappland nature is completely different from Southern Finland and it was fun to show it to the kids. To see even more, we crossed the border to Norway. (This is the only land border open to us, as Norway and Finland have both got the disease under control, for now at least. Alas we could only gaze over the river to Sweden…). The weather was a bit rainy but that was expected. However, Northern Norway is beautiful even in a slight drizzle.

There was still quite a lot of snow on the mountainsides and the melting snow formed countless waterfalls and pretty rivers with crystal clear water. We drove all the way to the Atlantic where we stopped at a pretty beach to gather some shells. We stayed overnight in Tromso and then returned home.

And of course, we saw a lot of reindeer that were roaming everywhere. We even got to pet some captive reindeer. (Those reindeer were unable to live wild due to one being orphan that never got to learn how and the other having hurt her leg while pregnant with her calf.) These ones were free and wandering around lake Kilpisjärvi:

Now we are safely back at home. It is raining almost every day so I’ll stay inside and plan more sewing projects.

Thank you for reading and stay safe! Happy sewing!

Katja