"Mit Bonde-Hyte et Konge-Slot skal blive"

What's missing from this picture?:

The answer is snow! Its gone. All gone. I am ecstatic. The grass is on the verge of becoming green again! Today was a gorgeous day and we were outside for nearly all of it. I took a whole bunch of pictures of the house and the neighbors' houses because we are gearing up to stain the house later on this spring, and I'm hoping to make a few small adjustments to the color scheme. I've never been wild about the red roof - brown-red base - ochre trim - blue door - combination. I don't really like any of the colors individually very much, and together I find them grating. So change may be afoot. Here are some of the factors to consider:

1. The house to the south really dominates our yard:

As you can see, the two base browns are fairly close, but they don't really coordinate very well. The next house up the street is pretty much the same reddish brown too, so it would be nice to distinguish ourselves a little bit.

2. There's a big white house behind ours that totally looms over the terrace:

It's actually a fairly attractive house, but we feel like we're under surveillance, so we're thinking of putting up a fence. Even though it has a big new addition, it's a fairly traditional house, and it would be nice to connect with it visually in some way, since it's so dominant.

3. On the north side there's an unassuming red house:

I think a darker brown would look better next door to a true red than our reddish brown. The neighbors both died a year ago, and we're not sure yet what their heirs are going to do with the property, so it's a bit of an unknown factor.

4. The house that shares the property line with both the red house and ours has my favorite color scheme of them all:

It's not really visible from the street view of our house, or from most of our yard, which means that it wouldn't be a big deal if we copied the scheme. I love dark brown (bordering on black) houses with white trim. I think their roof is a little too bright, but I'm seriously thinking of trying to go a few shades darker with our brown and then change the ochre trim to a warm (creamy?) white to emulate but not copy this. Not sure what to do with our blue doors, though. We'll do a dry run on the garage during Easter break, then if we're happy with the result, do the whole house once we're done with school.

I sat out on the deck and knitted and read and dozed for most of the afternoon. Got the body of the Noro Laurel sweater finished and started on the cowl neck. I'm basically satisfied with it:

The sizing is turning out totally different from the Laurel I knitted out of a different single ply worsted weight yarn on the same needles. Very strange.

Sportsidiot

Let me start by saying that I have no experience with the sport of cricket. For some reason, though, KE and I decided to watch the last half of the world championship finals in cricket, which was broadcast on NRK yesterday. Much to our surprise, we were both intrigued, and ended up watching it to the end. I'm most surprised at myself, because cricket is a little like baseball, a sport that I have always loathed. We had a lot of fun trying to figure out the rules. I think by the end we had made sense of the basics, and though we were a bit disappointed that underdog Sri Lanka lost to India, we thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

I think cricket has to be the best knitting sport ever invented. After all, yesterday's match lasted eight and a half hours, and the pace of the game is slow enough that one can work on even quite complicated things. After all, if the players themselves can drink tea and get massages during the game, the level of attention required of the spectators  can't be all that high.

So I knit and knit and knit on the striped Noro sweater, and then quite suddenly decided to start ripping it out and start over. At one point I made a mistake in the waist shaping (yes, I had really gotten that far!) and took it off the needles to frog back to the mistake. Once it was off, I decided to slip it on and see what the fit was like. As I had feared, it was a smidge tighter than I would like, so I made the snap decision to start over. If you look closely, you can see both versions in the photo:

Aside from it being too small, two things bothered me about the first attempt: 1) the technique I used for the raglan increases looked incredibly sloppy, and 2) I hate the first 5 cm or so of the color combinations of the striping. After it gets to the blue-gray bit I really like it but before that it's just ugly. In version two I'm able to fix both problems (and make it bigger), so I think it was worth it to start over.

Stygg som juling?

This week I finally did something I've been dying to do for a really long time, namely go to a Zumba class. As a middle-aged and highly sedentary person, I really need to get moving. I have a past as an active salsa dancer, but since my courting days are over it's not really an option any more. I also am a person who hates "working out," so a normal "spinning" or aerobics class is right out. But Zumba is really more like dancing than working out. The mother of one of E's friends happened to mention that she was going later on the evening I picked him up at their house, so I jumped at the opportunity and went too.  It was the most fun I've had so far this year! I'll be going every Wednesday for the rest of the spring and hoping that the instructor offers it twice a week in the fall...

Even though I'm not quite done with the Cowl Vest, I couldn't resist getting started with the Noro Silk Garden yarn. First I had to wind it into balls to see how many knots it has. Noro is notorious for knots and it really kinds of matters if one is trying to control the variegation in a pattern. This is what twelve balls looked like after winding, and as I later discovered, I missed a few knots.

I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to make Francis Revisited again, since it's a really good fit and a very quick knit. My plan was to knit stripes of two rows each, and I had visions of it being spectacularly beautiful, given the colors in the yarn. Unfortunately, so far I think it's what my Grannie would call "as ugly as home made sin." See below:

One of the things about Noro, however, is that sometimes the whole effect turns out kind of fantastic, even if the details aren't so great. So after putting it away for a couple of days and pulling it out again, I've decided that I'm going to keep going for a while longer, just to see if maybe it gets a little better. Otherwise, I suppose I could start over with two other balls and hope that it turns out better, but there's no guarantee...

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...