Påvirket tilstand

Lessee here, had a glass of wine, sho I'm a wee bit fuzzy... had a fabulous evening on the town along with two lovely friends from grad school (you know who you are...). Just wanted to get a quick update in before I go to bed.

I had trouble picking up the stitches around the body of the Whisper Cardigan on Sunday. Which is to say that I was too cocky to bother to count how many stitches I had picked up. When I got about 2 inches into the 3-inch ribbing band I realized that I probably had too few. I counted and I was almost 100 stitches short! Aghast at my knitting hubris, I ripped it all out and hid it in a drawer while I lick my wounds.

To console myself I started knitting the plainest possible shawl, a garter stitch triangle in gray Rauma Alpakka Inca. For some ridiculous reason, I had to get a pattern as I was sure I wasn't going to be able to do it. The pattern is as follows:

• Cast on 2 stitches.
• Knit every row, increasing one stitch at the next to the last stitch of each row.
• Continue until it's big enough.
• Cast off.

For this I paid 40 crowns? (actually I initially bought the booklet for some of the other patterns) I know there are dozens (hundreds?) of simple shawl patterns available for free on the internet, including the very popular Karius and Baktus shawls, but somehow I needed it written out in a format that was familiar to me (like a Raumagarn pattern). It's irritating to be so dense, but screwing up the Whisper Cardigan so royally really has me questioning my knitting acumen.

I also couldn't resist the big 40% off sale on Garnstudio yarns. It seemed foolish not to stock up if they had anything decent, so I squeezed in a visit to Tjorven on Monday, since I had to go to campus anyway. I bought a motherlode of two yarns (14 skeins of each, since I didn't have a pattern in mind for either).

Merino Super Fine (DK weight) in "Brownmix":

I didn't realize that the Merino was actually superwash. It has a much better texture than the Karisma that I used back in January, though, so I think this will work better.

Silke-Tweed (sport weight) in "Gray Green":

Tuesday I had a day of ridiculous meetings with a professor from China who wants to establish closer contact and exchange with the University of Oslo. It was frustrating for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because yet again someone is proposing to study Nordic literature in English. The de-Norwegianification of Ibsen through the Ibsen Studies all-English MA program here in Oslo is bad enough already...

Today I spent much of the day with my Mom sightseeing (first tried to write site-seeing) in Oslo. We had lunch at the yummy Café Celsius, tried to go to the Museum for Contemporary Art (it was closed in preparation for the opening of a new exhibit tomorrow), went to the Architecture Museum to see the Snøhetta exhibition, went to the Opera House to climb around, walked most of Karl Johan, then stopped into Husfliden to check out the Spælsau yarns there.

I discovered much to my amazement that Rauma has always had a spælsau knitting yarn--it's only recently that I've become aware of the wonders of spælsau (a very hairy Norwegian breed of sheep), and I though one could only buy weaving yarn (single ply). I'm so excited! I want to use spælsau for everything now, as it apparently wears like iron, and really isn't all that much more expensive. Plus the colors they had were lovely. I didn't buy any but was sorely tempted. Had I not bought all that Garnstudio stuff I probably would have. Sorry all you soft yarn people out there. I like mine hard as nails!

After that I dropped my Mom off at the ferry and went up to campus to work for a couple of hours (on the Volvo Lastvagnar article--good progress there!) before meeting my old buddies for dinner. What a good day, and how nice to come home to a sleeping son and groggy husband (KE has a nasty cold).

Bonus tidbit: on the way from Café Tullin back toward the palace I walked by a medical supply store that looked like the kind of place that might sell glass specimen jars for my buttons!