Hverdagskost 2

Such a busy week! After my mother left Monday night both KE and I had so much work to catch up on. I spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday giving oral exams in early modern Nordic literature. It was incredibly draining for me (as one of the examiners). I can only imagine how stressful it was for the students. Thursday I had to run a ton of errands and finish reading an MA thesis for Friday. Friday I flew to Bergen (had to catch a 05:20 bus, and wasn't home until 19.35) to evaluate the thesis and participate in the oral defense. It was a fascinating experience, though incredibly draining as well. Meanwhile, KE spend all day Thursday preparing for, running, and documenting an exhibit of his work at the local high school for one of his last independent studies in Digital Art.

No knitting was done. I was reading Camilla Collett's Amtmandens Døttre for the third time on the way to and from Bergen. This time the book is really hitting home. It's so good. Right up there with Jane Austen and the Brontës. I'm delighted that I'll be able to touch on it a bit in my cabin book (Sophie is described as a "seterjente" and both of the men who are in love with her associate her with the seter).

I'm hoping to knit a lot this weekend though: I want to finish off a little sweater for Eivind that has been languishing since last summer (all that's left is half a sleeve--it's a guernsey, so the sleeve is picked up at the shoulder and knitted down, so no excuse for not finishing it now that I have the final skein of yarn for it), finish my experiment (only have the sleeve caps to knit!), and pick up the Whisper Cardigan again (finally bought the right needles). I'm thinking I may want to to a ruffle at the bottom of the sleeves (gasp) since the cast on and cast off edges are so different, both in look and tension. I need to find a way to mask that.

Did I mention that I bought a skein of Hoelfeldt Lund spelsau knitting yarn? I am swatching (don't like that word--sorry) for making another Norah Gaughan oversized guernsey for myself (in black, for the fifth time) since my mom appropriated my brown one (Ravelry link). I swear. That sweater pattern is the most successful thing I've ever knitted. Three people have demanded that I either give them my sweater off my back or knit them one! And I simply wore out the other black one that I knit using Klippan Tuna yarn from Sweden. I'm hoping that the industrial strength spelsau will last longer.

I also want to use the spelsau yarn to make Alice Starmore's Fulmar (Ravelry link) from Aran Knitting. I'm kicking myself for not photocopying the pattern when I borrowed the book last fall through interlibrary loan (a former student has promised to copy it for me now--yay!). The other two I copied (Na Craga and St. Brigid) are for aran weigh yarn, but this one is actually for fingering weight, which of course I like much better. I am thinking that for next year, I want to pick just a few really challenging patterns to work on over time, rather than rushing to finish twelve sweaters. The NaKniSweMoDo is an interesting challenge, but I wouldn't want to repeat it, I think. So maybe Fulmar, the linen lace tunic from Vogue Knitting (Ravelry link), and something stranded for the whole year (along with smaller projects of course).

Hverdagskost 1

Being too tired to knit for a few days was probably a good thing, even though it pains me not to have anything finished. My left wrist was feeling sore, and now it's better. I picked up my improvised sweater yesterday and made a little progress (divided for front and back at the armholes and knit the back).

Interweave Knits Winter 2007 has a very good article on how to design set in sleeves, so I'm doing a very slight bit of armhole shaping, just to learn the logic behind the process. It is going to be a very tight sweater, I'm afraid. What I have left to do is: finish the front, join the shoulders (I'll probably graft them, even though it's tedious), do a picot edge around the neck opening (not the most flexible, so I'm worried it won't go over my head), knit the arms a little longer and include sleeve caps, then sew in the arms. Not too bad.

I got the Volvo Lastvagnar revisions done. Took a couple of hours on Friday and yesterday, and am relatively satisfied with the result. I'm glad that I will be getting feedback at the NorLit conference in August, as I don't really have a good sense of whether the work is just totally naive and derivative, or whether I'm actually contributing something to the discussion of intermediality.

But so now my list of small (non-book) things to write is starting to clear out:

• Når vi døde vågner article (I got good information at the National Theatre archive, which I now need to integrate; not too terribly much more to go on this before I can submit it)
• Knut Hamsun conference presentation (haven't looked at it for a couple of months, not sure what state it's in, or whether I'm even going in the right direction with it)
• review of Joan Templeton's Munch's Ibsen

I really think I'm going to leave it at that for a while so that I can get going on the book this summer. Articles are just so much more fun to write, and the publication process (though still slow) is faster and more satisfying, since you get more direct feedback on your ideas.

My mom leaves tomorrow. It has been a really good visit, though probably really dull for her, since we haven't gone anywhere outside of the home base of Nesodden and Oslo. I know she wanted to go to Bergen, but that just didn't seem possible right now in the middle of exams and taking over the whole house. She did get to spend a lot of time with her grandson, which was the real point of the visit, and his English (which was starting to lapse) is coming back stronger.

Speaking of E, we dodged a bullet in terms of child care. The half-day preschool he has been going to since January really wasn't all that satisfactory, but we were sort of passively planning on continuing, just because we were too overwhelmed to research and apply for a change. But then at a parents' meeting they announced that it's on the verge of financial collapse, and almost none of the other children were planning on continuing. KE really got involved, going to a meeting with the local authorities, etc. and along the way found out that there was a lone spot in a really great preschool that is considered far away, so less attractive to people where we live. It's a whole eight minutes away by car, instead of the three minute commute to the half-day preschool. Apparently there was a family with a little girl who had priority for the spot, but they turned it down, so, thanks to KE's quick work, E got the spot! We're all going to go there tomorrow to check it out, on our way to take mom up to Gardermoen. The preschool is a former farm (småbruk), so they have a barn and an old "sveitservilla" is their main building (swoon!). I'm so excited and relieved!

Overveldet

So for some reason (maybe it's my period) I'm now feeling totally overwhelmed. The week has flown by, and a number of good things have happened, but I can't seem to get it together mentally. I had a great critique session with a colleague on Tuesday. She gave me the best possible suggestions for improving the Volvo Lastvagnar article, and in a normal week I probably would have been able to crank through the revisions by now. But since my Mom is visiting I took part of the day off on Wednesday to guide her to a weaver's studio in Oslo, where we visited for a good long while. It was really neat to see her house and studio, which she shares with her free lance sound engineer husband and children. She is a former architect who switched to textile art seven years ago. The house was a fabulous blend of old and new. I wasn't totally wild about all her work, but some of the pieces I found really intriguing.

Yesterday I had to give my first (ever) oral exam for the early literature course. I was really nervous about messing it up for some reason, but it went relatively well. The student did great, actually. I took care of a bunch of nagging errands on campus, but didn't manage to get any writing or revising done, which is a bummer. I've also not knitted at all for two days! My wrist was starting to hurt a bit, and I was literally too tired to knit last night (gasp!).

The biggest news of the week is that the sofa (ordered a full two months ago) arrived on Wednesday. It's great! I love it, and never want to have to buy another. Such a relief!

Ordning och reda

KE got revved up this morning and randomly started cleaning without even telling me, which got me cleaning too, and golly we got a lot done. One task was cleaning out the bins in the hall that are filled with winter gear. I washed everything -- machine washed the things that could be, and filled a bathtub with the handwash knitted items. They're all spread out on the lawn now drying in a most satisfying fashion:

With the fabulous summer weather I've gotten a lot of small things done: massive amounts of laundry (drying on a rack goes much faster in the sun), shifting of boxes out of the storage unit (for the first time in 3 months we can shut the door!), sorting of recycling (before it got to be too much to manage easily), and putting out bark in the flowerbeds (not quite done, but maybe this evening when it cools down I'll finish the job), for example. Feels great!

The long weekend has been productive in terms of knitting too, though not according to my original plan. I had the best intentions for starting up on the Whisper Cardigan again, but I realized after I got it out that I don't actually have the right needle for the ribbing band. I was shocked, as I really thought I had a complete set of circular needles, gathered over many years. I have to admit that I wasn't all that sad about having to stuff it back into time out. Instead, I decided to improvise a very basic pullover with some of the yarn I bought in Madison last month. I'm borrowing bits and pieces very loosely from two different aran weight patterns to make a plain picot edged pullover. So far so good. I'm of course anxious that I'll run out of yarn. Here's how far it's come in 3 days of knitting (gotta love aran weight stockinette!):

I wonder about whether I should have made set-in sleeves instead of the dropped shoulders I'm planning. If I have anything left over after finishing the body and the neck, I may still do it. My plan is to make a picot edge around the neck opening too. I'll knit in the round up to the armhole openings, then separate front and back. I'm doing the waist shaping from the Hourglass Sweater to make it a little less boxy. It's been years since I designed my own pattern, though I used to do it all the time in high school. I don't know why I stopped, or why I suddenly decided to try it again. It seems like a reasonable risk with such a quick knit. I probably wouldn't be as willing with a fingering weight project.

trøstestrikking

After four days of knitting I'm done with the plain gray garter stitch shawl. I knitted until I ran out of yarn, so there were 231 stitches instead of 215 across the top when I bound off...

It remains to be seen whether I actually wear a shawl, but all in all I'm happy with such a simple little project.

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!

Vårstell

I know everyone else in the northern hemisphere has been working in their yards and are well underway with spring activities, but we've been a little slow. Yesterday we finally went to a local nursery and bought a lot of great stuff for both indoors and outdoors. It was a bit rainy, so we didn't really get a chance to plant or do much in they yard afterwards, but today was a glorious day so we finally feel like we're getting somewhere. We got a lot done and took a walk down to Hellviktangen to play in the tidepools. We also started moving a few boxes of things into the other unit, mostly to create more room in our storage room (we still can't close the door!). And I got a lot of knitting done on the Whisper cardigan. It was a lovely day. Here are some snapshots.

KE cleaning up one of the flower beds and adding bark. He's a happy camper. I'm glad I married an avid gardener!

Here's another bed. KE split and transplanted a bleeding heart. I think it looks great with all the tulips that the renters planted.

E had a lot of fun finding out what was inside the boxes we moved. He found all sorts of stuff and got a little silly...
Here's what will be our kitchen window once we get moved in. We bought the two geranium plants on sale.We also bought the white pots with a little row of beading, which I think are quite pretty. White is good since we don't know whether the flowers will be red, pink, or white. I'm very curious to see what color they end up being!

And finally a shot of the Whisper cardigan in progress. I'm done with the upper part (sleeves and back) and am now picking up nearly 300 stitches around the opening for the collar and rest of the body.

I had trouble casting off the second sleeve loosely enough. I ended up having to do it over again with a much larger needle and it's now a little better, but still not very good. Maybe the miracle of blocking will help?