progress

My Tubey is coming along. My sketch in my "Designer's Journal" explains how I'm adjusting it to my own taste. Yarn: One strand Karisma superwash from Garnstudio and one Garnstudio's Alpaca. I've only finished one sleeve so far (The other one is elbow length still), but boy have I finished it.





Let me say it slowly: I - c o r d. My red I-cord hem is just... (I'm trying to say something not too smug here about how happy I am with it) perfect. That's the word.

Then there is the body to do. I have some math, some learning and some picking up stitches to do before I really can tell if this is going as well as I think it is. Sorry to brag people, but this thing might turn out just... (Here's that word thing again...) perfect.

tindra

...is a very strange furry yarn. I got it as part of my gold medal gift after the Knitting Olympics (Team Sweden created our own Gold Medal Secret Pal Circle) It's as if I'm making a homemade version of Animal!

If not Animal, what will it be? I promise to show you once it's done, whatever it becomes in the end...

pomatomus toques

I made two!


The first one simply became too big... I have to find a friend with a big head... or fold it up. It works, but...

It's not nearly as cute as the green one! (Though I do look like an egghead in this type of toque... Cute egghead though.) And it totally matches the Flower Basket Shawl that Mandy made me!

silver lining

People watching has become a real hobby for me. I see people that stand out as well as those who really try to blend in. Anonymous or famous, I don’t care, but in my head I create stories about their lives, styles, circumstances or coincidences around them. This is the story about one of them. I have hundreds of these in my head and I might give you a story about a girl in a wig that I saw today later, but for now, you get the story of someone who just got a second chance. I have no idea how, but this is the first day of his new life.

It was finally his turn. He was wearing his brand new jeans, that felt weirdly stiff compared to the worn second hand sweatpants he’d been wearing the last few months. He felt sparkling, even though his old rag of a t-shirt still peeked out over the zipper of his jacket. The jacket, or as he saw it, the symbol of his success, was also brand new. The blue color wasn’t stained by beer or dust from some dirty park bench, and he intended to keep it so. He constantly glanced around him at the people in the store. He wondered what they thought of him. This was the first day in a very long time where he didn’t get those glances of pity or disgust. Only those who rested their eyes on him for more than a second got something of a questioning look in their faces. No, his metamorphosis was not yet complete. His hair was clean today, but not yet cut, and the cut could only be described as something that would suit Sasquatch. But that too was about to change. This morning he had actually made an appointement at a hair salon for the first time ever. As a child it was always his mother who cut his hair. And last time... He searched his memory. Last time was with his pocket knife over the sink in a public restroom. He pushed his cart in front of him. Shopping for groceries... This too was a very new experience. He had no idea what to buy, but he let his index finger run over the different brands of coffee, the many boxes of cookies. He lifted a carton of milk into his cart, but immediately seemed to regret his decision and put it back. Instead he reached for two huge bottles of juice. One with a mix of tropical flavors and one orange juice. This had to be a normal thing to get. He was just out to replennish his stock of juice in his plenty full refridgerator... or that is what he hoped the people around him would think. He had no refridgerator. He had no stock of juice. He didn’t even have a kitchen to put a refridgerator in. Yet. That was the next step in his new life: The apartment. The dream he had been feeding for over a decade now. The dream of a place to call his own.
He headed for the counters but stopped in front of a big freezer full of ice cream. What was that? M-a-r-sh-m-a-l-l-o-w-s... He’d never heard of such a thing, but he knew chocolate and caramel. And he knew this was a fancy brand of ice cream. He’d seen the commercials. And he could get it. He could buy ice cream that he didn’t need. He could buy luxury. Suddenly the ice cream was as tempting as a Ferrari would be to a millionaire, or so he thought. He just had to have it. He put the ice cream in the cart and smiled inwards.
This was definately one of the best days of his life! And its silver lining was two bottles of juice and a tub of ice cream.

constantine

Note to self: All you need to go to hell is a cat and a big bowl of water.

I know I'm a year behind, but I didn't see this movie until tonight. It is a creative mix of fantasy, religion, Blade Runner, James Bond and Matrix. Our own Peter Stormare kicks ass as Satan and the very crossgender type arch angel of Gabriel is played to perfection by Tilda Swinton (Who I didn't like half as much as the White Witch of Narnia). Sure we giggled and scrutinized, snorted and critisized, but it's still worth seeing. I think.

a knit fit

You know you're knitting somethiung fun when you do what I just did.
I needed to go to the bathroom, but didn't. "Just one more stitch. Just one more row" I've been home for five hours but I was actually in a hurry when I finally made it to the toilet. What I'm knitting, you ask? A Pomotamus toque. Yes, not socks. A toque. My genious knitting friend Lydia recalculated the pattern to be turned into a hat, and it's turning out gorgeous. I'll show it as soon as it's done and as soon as I find a camera that works (or a new battery for mine).
Now: Back to knitting.

41

I tried to make this the answer to everything, but I’m still not quite there.

I haven’t written about much else than knitting lately. I haven’t even been doing much else than knitting lately. So if you miss me, you’re not the only one. I miss me too. The reasons for this are very simple: I have been knitting a lot, and not done much else worth writing about. I work and knit. That’s about it. And the stuff worth writing about has been too difficult to find words for, so I just haven’t. This is a bold attempt to find words for some fragments of everything, and after this post I will consider this blog updated and up to date (even if the words I find aren’t the ones I was looking for). Let’s hope I write something worth reading.

If I start with today, let’s just say things are hectic at work. I work a lot. I never think I do enough, and I don’t get paid enough for what I actually do. Yet.
I have so much fun at work, but I’m exhausted when I get home and I get an anxiety attack every time I pay my bills. I feel it’s going to change soon, but this pace of working like a maniac for a month, then hardly work enough to pay the bills at all the next month I think could kill me if I keep it up.

Anyway, work is Fun, and so much is happening. I do lessons at the design museum, and everybody loves them and I feel I’m doing a good job. This upcoming week I do a new and different lesson on light and design, and I don’t feel prepared enough because I didn’t have neither time nor energy to do my best preparing it last week... But I’ll make it fun. I so want it to be fun, it just will be.
Furthermore we’re writing an application for money so that I can start writing a book of which I was offered to be editor. We’ll see what comes out of it, but it’s an exiting idea all the same. It’s supposed to be a city history of Gothenburg combined with tutoring chapters on methods of how to build a good walk. It’s to be used by teachers as well as just being a pretty, different and fun history book. I have so many ideas for this!

(Everybody reading that know more about me than the fact that I made a Birch Shawl recently are jumping in their seats yelling: Get to the point you moron!)

I’ve desperately wanted to write about my stay in Canada, but it’s difficult. I did blog the whole trip in Swedish, but even there I mostly told it in the then-we-did-this-and-then-we-did-that-version of things. I left out the rest. This is the rest: Difficult.
Which is why I haven’t written about it. It’s about love mixed with long distances, big decisions and fear, but also logic not agreeing with the matters of the heart, misunderstandings and long lost crap that floated to the surface of my consciousness. We’re either very good for each other or very bad, but it’s in the extreme forms so the two are deceivingly similar.
No, I couldn’t find the words for it today either. Difficult is the best I can do.

The best memories from Canada are too private to write about, but the runners up for the trophy of best memory are actually more than one. There is no way I could decide what the best memory is, when I get to choose from amazing things like these:
- Finally meeting Mandy! And Zak of course! (But in all fairness, Zak I actually had met before). Mandy dearest, you are as amazing as I knew you would be. I only wish we’d had more time just the two of us.

- Banff. I had a day in Banff with Spencer I will never forget. My back hurt like hell that day, but all I remember are amazing views, hot springs and warm smiles.

- The road trips. We drove to Vancouver and back from Calgary over new years and those many, many (many, many) kilometers over the Rockies were adventurous, wonderful and horrible all in one. Whenever I touched the wheel we hit a blizzard or a rainstorm. And poor Spencer pulled his back just in time for me to be stuck driving over Roger’s Pass – again – in the snow, in about 40km/hour with a visibility of approximately 10 meters in front of the car. We made it and Spencer’s back did get better. We had an adventure for sure, and we got many, very dear, memories.

- Vancouver with it's Casa de Gelato (218 flavors of ice cream!), the clothing stores Mandy showed me (that skirt is the hottest thing in my closet still!), Cleveland Dam and the resevoir where Spencer took me. I really liked Vancouver.
- Victoria. Seeing where Spencer grew up. Meeting his brother and his family. Seeing the scenes for all those stories I've heard...
- And I’ll remember all the friends and family of Spencer’s I got to meet, Christmas dinner with the huge turkey, the good coffee at the Planet, disgusting Tom Horton’s coffee, Long View Jerky and Dentyne gum, the autocross, how I regret not buying more stuff at Gina Brown’s, baked sweet potato and then there are many fond everyday memories of just spending time with Spencer.

I wish I could teach you all Swedish instead and refer you to the Swedish blog for more on my adventures. Anyway, I’ve been back home for almost two months now, but my mind is still in Calgary a lot of the time.

The latest news are mostly work related and not that exiting, so I’ll write again whenever I have something knit, something new, something felt, something seen, something exiting or surprising to tell you.