Store begivenheter

Gosh, it's over a week since I last posted. So much has happened that it will be hard to catch up. First and foremost, the secret event I took part in over the weekend was the marriage of my dearest friend. It was a magical event, but it's not my story and not my place to broadcast it. Let me just say that the couple, who are both in their fifties both married for the very first time (very unusual!) after being together for sixteen years. They were married in full-on traditional folk costumes in an 850-year-old stave church in the village that the bridegroom's family emigrated from about 150 years ago. Everything about the wedding was lovely and moving. We were only a party of eight, and I felt incredibly privileged to have been able to take part in it.

I decided I needed a thoroughly mindless knitting project to take along for the trip, so I ended up going for a Clapotis scarf. This is about the most popular knitting pattern in the world. Right now there are well over 17,000 projects listed on Ravelry. I dug out some Garnstudio Drops Silke-Tweed that I had left over, and just went for it:

It's a very fun and satisfying travel knit, though I'm not yet sure whether I'll actually use it. It may end up as a gift.

Unfortunately, I came down with what I sincerely hope is the last cold of the season. It really put a damper on my week, which is why I'm only now finding the time to blog.

Veiledning

I found a good video guide to knitting top down set in sleeves. Can't wait to give this a try on my Cowl Vest! The back is done, and I've started on the front, so it shouldn't be too long now...

Rolig

Slowly but surely making progress on the Cowl Vest:

I made it through the waist shaping and up to the split for the armholes without incident. At least I haven't noticed any dropped or mistakenly added stitches, which is the danger when knitting stockinette with such fine yarn.

This coming week big things are afoot, and I'll be taking a little top secret trip next weekend. Right now feels like the calm before the storm. It's good to have something really simple to work on. But I have to confess that I haven't quite been able to shake my temporary fascination with variegated yarn. Rather atypically, I made an impulse yarn purchase the other day:

It's twelve balls (1212 meters) of Noro Silk Garden number 47. You see, I had a thing to go to in Majorstua, and my favorite yarn store in Oslo is in Majorstua, and I had a few minutes to kill, and it turns out they were phasing out Noro products and had a big bunch of this one color marked down by 30%, and I loved the color combination, and, well, I just couldn't resist. I've been so good about not buying yarn (I actually think I haven't bought any sweater quantities since our vacation in Denmark last summer, other than for my bias skirt) that I can't really feel all that guilty about it. The plan is a top-down raglan in stripes made by alternating balls, in the spirit of Brooklyntweed's Noro scarf. I can't quite explain why I am so attracted to these yarns... Jared Flood's description on the Brooklyntweed blog does a pretty good job of it.

In pizza news (yes, there really is such a thing as "pizza news" in my life at least), we have had a breakthrough with E. I've been trying for a couple of years to come up with a pizza that he will eat. He hasn't liked any of the plain kid pizzas we've tried, though he will eat pizza at other people's houses. I sort of started to develop a complex about this, because pizza is one thing that I almost always get compliments for, so it was demoralizing that my own son wouldn't eat what I made. Then recently, he took a piece of the pizza I make for myself, and he totally loved it. I was shocked, since it has tons of onions, black olives, mushrooms, spinach and garlic. Not your average kid fare. Yesterday I made one for him with most of that, and he gobbled it up, and then this morning he ate one of the leftover pieces of mine for a mid-morning snack. I'm totally stoked that he shares my taste!

Opptur

This weekend has been entirely dominated by the Nordic Skiing World Championships and a phenomenally high level of whining and pouting around home. Oh, and lots of knitting too. I've been going hard at the Cowl Vest in lace weight yarn, and have made it through all the decreases for the waist shaping:

Still not much to look at at all. The yarn has been unravelled and it's going to look terrible until it's blocked. I'm still hopeful that the project is worth doing. I have to admit that it's a little boring even for my minimalist tastes. My mind starts to wander to other projects. I've been revisiting the idea of knitting a Clapotis (from the Knitty website) in lace weight yarn on very small needles. I had bought the yarn two years ago, the last time I was at the SASS conference. It practically killed me to get it wound. No one will ever understand what a triumph this photograph represents:

It's a really nice green merino. I think it could work out really well. It would be cool to have a chic Clapotis to wear at SASS at the end of April--perfect to have a big open work scarf to wrap around my neck in windy Chicago.

The other thing I've been thinking about in knitting is a process called stacked color pooling. Here's an example on Flickr. Basically, you take a variegated yarn with fairly long color blocks, figure out how many stitches each section of  color is in width, and use that to figure out a pattern that will maintain each color in a column. It's fascinating, kind of like the Noro Lanesplitter skirt I knit back in September, only more challenging to figure out.

Work is going pretty well. I finished off the Fosse/Ibsen article and am getting it critiqued tomorrow. It would be great if I could get it sent off to a journal by the end of the week. I also just got word that I need to return some final corrections to one of my cabin articles that will be in an anthology. This is the last round before the whole book (which is on various aspects of cabin culture in Norway) gets sent out to peer review. And my very best news is that I got the go-ahead to teach an MA level seminar in the fall. I'm thrilled! It's going to be called "Romanens rom" (the spaces of the novel), and it's pretty much my dream seminar right now. I'm having tons of fun trying to decide on the exact reading list: so many good novels, so many interesting theories, and I can't include it all...