New blog!

My beloved plushie, The Great Boll, has finally got her very own blog! I created it a few months ago when I had a brilliant idea, but I haven't found the time to sit down and write a proper introduction to Bollan and her adventures and family life. Yesterday I suddenly discovered that the blog has two followers, and I realized that it was time to put thought into action. Now there are already a few posts, and more will follow shortly :) Now, she already has a Facebook page, and there are about two hundred pictures of her on Flickr, so the new blog is a place to write a little bit more about some of her adventures. I feel like the little info in photo comments doesn't always do her justice :)

You find the blog here, and I have also added a permanent link on the right sidebar.

Mushroom patterns!

The patterns for these three shroomies are now posted on my pattern blog, you find them all here :)

1 - Onion-shaped mushroom

2 - Skinny mushroom

3 - Chubby mushroom (an Advent calendar project)

The Clanger

In case anyone's been wondering, I did actually finish the Clanger by Christmas :) It had been knitted up for a while, it was the assembly that took time... It was more work putting him together than I'd expected, the ears and feet especially were a bit fiddly. Felt, cardboard and chenille sticks to hold the shape. The ears from the original pattern looked a bit weird, so I made up some new ones, a little rounder. I think he looks great, my mother was very happy and impressed when she got him :)

The luxury of flying...

It was going to be so quick and easy and practical... Just figure out the travel date, my mother-in-law said, she'd pay for the whole thing :) Only where I come from the bus connection sucks, so the trip to my home turned out to be only two hours shorter than it would have been if we'd taken the bus all the way (like I usually do when I'm alone), and a lot colder and more expensive..

Now, that was going from our apartment and home to my mother. Going from there to where my boyfriend's home is, is another thing. It's almost twice the distance, making the bus totally impractical. It would take something like fifteen hours, and we would still have to be picked up for an hour drive home. So plane it was. After taking the bus for an hour, a boat, and then another bus, we got to the airport, checked in our luggage and had dinner in the cafeteria. Our plane would be half an hour late, but that wasn't a big problem. We were supposed to land in another airport and get on a second plane home, but we'd have enough time there to catch it even with the delay. We thought. The plane was in the air for half an hour longer than planned because of fog and snow (remind me never to wish for a white Christmas again..), so when we landed we were ten minutes late for the next plane. Which of course was about the only plane leaving the airport on time. So we stormed out onto the runway in 13 degrees freezing, into the terminal hall and ran for at least half a mile to get to the right gate (on the other end of the airport, of course). Painful, and not very good for my asthma/bronchitis-thing. I'm still a bit wheezy today :/ When we finally landed, about 45 minutes late, our luggage didn't. We were told that it would most likely arrive with the next plane, which would be about two hours late. We were tired and cold, so we just reported our bags missing, bought new toothbrushes and went home. We had most of what we needed anyway, and our luggage would be delivered to our house the next morning. (And it did :) Yay!)

When we eventually got home, the mother (what I call my mother-in-law) felt sorry for us and made milk and honey, and then we got presents :) (The ones that weren't mailed to us because we would have to bring them with us here anyway..) I think I'll make another post about this year's presents. Anyway, I don't blame the airline for losing our bags, I think the luggage people were actually more in a hurry than we were. They had to get all the bags out of the plane, drive for half a mile, and then load them into the next plane. We just had to run.

 

Today we'll have some friends over for some roleplaying (Warhammer, in case that sounded totally weird), but I'm not feeling very good, so we'll see how long they can stay. Anyway, we'll spend the evening sitting down, and I can crochet some more mushrooms :)  The patterns will naturally be posted when they are done.

Merry Christmas! :)

The presents are all finished, wrapped and placed under the tree, the dinner is cooking, the final project of my Advent calendar is posted, and there's Disney cartoons on TV... Everything is how it should be. Even the snow that came a few days ago has stayed, so for once we actually have a white Christmas :) All that remains is to wish a Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Merry Christmas from me, Bollan, our families and friends! :)

Oh, Christmas trees...

Here is my grandmother's fake Christmas tree. It's actually quite nice for a plastic tree, and it's so much easier to deal with. You don't get your house full of nasty creatures, and the needles stay on forever. Plus, you save a lot of money :)

We'll be decorating it tonight, we always do the day before Christmas eve. It probably sounds a bit late, some people start decorating in the beginning of December, but we decorate for Advent instead, and purple and red don't exactly match :p

Here is another one that I helped decorate on Monday. Thankfully I didn't have the honor of making it stand up straight. Because it certainly doesn't. I laughed quite a lot when I first saw it. Some guys tried to straighten it, and failed miserably...

I also have a plastic tree, it's tiny and is totally perfect for Bollan and her family and friends :) I don't have a picture of it yet, but I'll add some later when it's decorated.

Knitted wrist warmers

Finished, at last! Quite happy with them, I think I'll consider making a pair for myself some time :) Made from this pattern, knitted in wool and mohair on 3.5mm needles. The thumb hole was not in the pattern, I just made it up when I sewed them together.

Cookies :)

We made cookies today :) My grandmother has made several other kinds before I even got here, but these I just have to make every Christmas. My favorites :) The first ones we call "flat toads", because the first time we made them the dough/paste was much too soft and runny, and the result was very flat and sticky cookies. I loved them, of course, I'm not a fan of crispy food. The name "flat toads" stuck, and is much better than the original, which would translate as "almond blobs". I like almonds, but blobs are not tasty :p

These are called chocolate sweethearts, basically the same dough as the previous cookies, but somehow different. (They look pretty much the same this year, because we made a mistake and put chocolate in the toads, instead of just on top.) The sweethearts are supposed to be glazed with chocolate, but we never do, it's too much work. They are also supposed to be all hearts, but we use other shapes as well, like bats, squirrels, frogs, people and pigs :)

This last kind is something my mother usually makes, and I tried to crochet one that turned into a Ferrero Rocher :) They consist of crushed oats, cocoa, butter, coffee and sugar, mashed into a paste and rolled. Easy and delicious :)

The Boll helped, as always :) She felt there should be a hedgehog cookie shape, but I'm not sure... I don't think we'd be able to eat them, they'd be way too cute! :)

Hello, kitty :)

This is my grandmother's cat, our own little sphinx, Ronja. She's named after a character in a Swedish children's book, and she fits her name quite well. She's kind of crazy, the weirdest cat I know. The first year we had to remove all the decorations from the bottom of the Christmas tree, because she wouldn't leave them alone. Otherwise she's completely uninterested in cat toys. She hates strangers, and disappears for days if something happens in her house (like relatives visiting), she has been speyed, but hunts everything that moves. Kills lots of mice and little birds. The mice are usually left as presents for us, but she swallows the birds head first (if we can't get to her first). She is extremely spoiled with food, she will only eat the soft kind with sauce, but she doesn't eat anything with fish. What cat doesn't like fish...? She's practically voiceless, but she does her best to let us know when she wants something. She squeaks more like a mouse than a cat :)
When she's not hunting she sleeps all day, but she'll usually only sleep on my mother's lap. Here she is tucked up in her favorite chair behind my mother:

I'm dreaming...

Last night it started to snow, and today it was two inches of snow most places :) Could it be? Will we have a white Christmas this year? That hasn't happened for twenty years, if I remember correctly. If it snows at all before Christmas it always melts away after a day or two. Usually it rains a little :/ Here is my grandmother's garden covered in snow for once:

Of course the snow had to be tested! Glyptodon put on his new scarf that I crocheted for him, Bollan put on her knitted vest (made last year by my mother), and they went out to play in the snow :) They wanted to make a snowman, but it was so cold they ran back inside right after we took this picture:

More apologies :(

Turns out that my grandmother's internet connection is way too slow to do anything on my blog, except write stuff (and my Advent calendar is kind of pointless without pictures). I will have to catch up with all the posts on Monday or Tuesday, when I go back to my mother's place for a few hours. So then there will be lots of posts, with lots of pictures :) A post with two or three pictures takes about half an hour to finish, and that adds too much to the phone bill, so I'll just have to do it later... (Beats me how I managed to upload over two hundred pictures on Flickr during a few weeks this summer...)

Lots of stuff has happened this weekend, so I think I'll just post stuff in the order it happened, and ignore the actual dates on the posts. Hope it's not confusing anyone :p

Felted granny square coasters

Finally done and sent in the mail today :) The original plan for the colors failed, as I ran out of black/gray yarn sooner than expected, so I unraveled the final round of the coaster I'd finished and added a row of white instead.

Although they are not similar, I think they came out OK. My boyfriend agreed, and into the washing machine they went. After felting they turned out to be the perfect size :)

New patterns!

Just wanted to let you know that I have now added the patterns for these two small projects to my pattern blog :)

A knitted Christmas tree cone and a crocheted napkin ring, both felted.

Crocheted spiral coasters

This idea I actually got from a nice lady on Ravelry, who commented on my original spiral thing and said the pattern could work as felted coasters. So thank you for that tip :) I used a little bit thicker yarn and a 5.5mm hook (3.75mm on the original). They didn't come out as big as I'd hoped, so I felted them a bit carefully so they wouldn't become too small. Our washing machine is good at felting stuff :)

Anyway, here they are, before and after felting:

Home, sweet home :)

Home, at last :D Up way too early today, at 06.00! Had to catch a flight at nine, landed at 10.50 (about 30 minutes late), waited at the airport (the tiniest airport I've ever seen!) for almost an hour, then took the bus home (changed buses several times, too). The whole trip took about seven and a half hours. That's too long... It was insanely cold waiting outside for the bus, and it wasn't even below freezing. But now we're finally home, and relaxing in front of the TV with a glass of red wine :)

Of course the whole Boll family came with us on holiday, here they are anxious to go:

It was Glyptodon's first time on a plane, and he enjoyed the view a lot:

(The red light is because of the sunrise on the other side of the plane)

All together in my mother's livingroom:

We're going to stay here with my mother until the weekend, I think, then we'll go to stay with my grandmother. We will be there the rest of the holiday, until we go to my boyfriend's parents, where we will celebrate New Year's Eve. At my grandmother's I have a very poor internet access (33k modem, I think), so my blog probably won't be updated very often, at least not with pictures (which take several minutes to upload).

Apologies...

Just wanted to let you know that my Advent calendar won't be updated for a few days :( I will be busy packing and cleaning out the apartment before going home for the holidays on Tuesday, so I won't much have time to finish my latest projects. Plus, I have a few Christmas presents that must be prioritized, because they have to be mailed to my boyfriend's family on Wednesday at the latest. After that I'll have time to catch up, and the rest of the calendar will hopefully continue to be updated daily as planned :)

More presents (family, look away!)

The orange scarf is finally finished! It took a while, but I got there in the end :) Unfortunately it felted a lot more than I expected, but I have stretched it a little and I hope it's not too short. I fear it will look more like a bow-tie than a scarf... My boyfriend has tried it on, but I'm not sure how his sister wears her scarves, so I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I have two new projects, both are crocheted and felted coaster sets. Granny squares for my in-laws, hopefully the coasters will shrink a lot, because I think they're too big. It's supposed to be a set of six , but I fear I will run out of gray yarn... Maybe I'll make the other three with opposite colors so I won't have to buy a new ball of yarn. I'm all out of money, so shopping is out of the question.

For my oldest cousin and her boyfriend I plan to make coasters from the spiral shell I posted about earlier, four or six coasters in different shades of brown and white. So far I have made two, I hope come out ok after felting.

On the whole I feel like I've been good at using what I have this year, I haven't bought too much yarn or other craft stuff to make presents or calendar projects. If I can keep it up maybe I can save up some money to go to Egypt and celebrate Christmas next year :)

Happy birthday to us :)

Yesterday was the birthday of a friend who's visiting us right now, and my boyfriend's birthday is on Saturday, so we decided to celebrate them both together. My birthday is in just a month, so I got a present, too :) I got a set with figures of the main characters from the Mouse Guard comics by David Petersen. If you haven't read it or heard about it, you should definitely check it out! It has also been made into a roleplaying-game, which I intend to play some time soon, if I can get my boyfriend to be GM :) My boyfriend got a t-shirt and a plush brain cell from Giant Microbes. Our friend also got a t-shirt, and she was very happy with a red and black owlet keychain I made for her.

Anyway, we went out for dinner at a Sushi place (I have eaten eel!), afterwards we went home and had home-made muffins for dessert, and then spent the evening listening to music and surfing the internet on our laptops. Yes, we are very social people :p

I haven't really been up close to sushi before, I've only seen the knit and crochet patterns for sale on Etsy, so now I want to try and design my own patterns, based on the photos I took at the restaurant. Don't know when that will be, but I'll definitely give it a try some time.

The muffins were the perfect opportunity to try out my newest food coloring: BLACK! The muffins aren't that successful, but with black frosting and sprinkles they look pretty good :)

On Monday we went out to celebrate that my semester is over and had cheeseburgers at the best burger place in town. The Great Boll joined us, of course, she loves that place. It's a rock place, and all the burgers are named after heavy metal songs. I always have the Paranoid with tzatziki dressing :)

Hmm...

I don't know how some people do it! I needed some thin yellow yarn for a project, and then I found two skeins of shiny golden crochet thread I'd stolen from my grandmother two years ago. It would be perfect, if I could only find an end so I could begin unwinding the thing. But no... Before I started it looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

That's after my boyfriend saved me from the yarnmonster (and my bad temper when it comes to knots and tangled yarn). At least I got enough yarn for my project before we gave up.

Check out my Advent calendar in a few days to see what this thing is a part of :)

Look... kitties!

Lot of complaining about exams lately, so I thought I'd post something a lot nicer today :) 

The other day my boyfriend and I went to visit some friends who are fostering these cats for the animal rescue center in town. They are not sure if they will adopt the cat/s as their own yet, I think they will figure it out after Christmas. They really want to get a Siberian, because they're gorgeous cats AND I won't die of allergies when I visit. After fifteen minutes with these guys I started sneezing and had to go home before it got worse :(

Aren't they cute? The mother is so pretty, I love calico cats. Her name is Paloma, the kittens are called Tina and Kristian (the black one is the girl). I'm pretty pleased with that first picture, they remind me so much of Mochimochi Land's Stackable Cats pattern :) (Which reminds me, I have to knit those cats some time...) Paloma was very shy, and extremely protective of her kittens, but not as bad as she was when they first arrived in their new home. She won't sit on your lap, but she likes to lie beside you in the sofa and be petted :) The kittens are really fat, I don't think I've seen kittens that round, and they were only three weeks old! I guess the mother is spoiling them with milk because she used to have two more..

:(

Had my final lingustics exam today, and it went totally shit (pardon my French). I studied all day yesterday and thought I was pretty well prepared, but I guess I wasn't :/ My motivation this semester has been pretty much absent, and besides, the fall semester is way too short to really do anything constructive.. When you finally get around to studying, the finals are something like two weeks away, and on top of it all you (may) have started thinking about Christmas preparations and presents. My head was everywhere but in the exam room today. After doodling a little and writing a page and a half (which was about a quarter of the whole exam and not nearly enough for a passing grade), I started designing a crocheted scarf pattern in my head. *sigh* I actually envied the other people who had an exam in geology or something...

Oh, well, I'll just have to take it again in the spring, which will at least give me a little more time to read. I came home and went back to bed and slept for three hours, and now I feel a little better. Certainly wont let this ruin my Christmas holiday! It's finally time to finish up all the projects I've started, Christmas presents, Advent calendar things and other stuff. Yay :)

Blogs, blogs, blogs...

On my Advent calendar blog I have now posted a knitting pattern for a tiny santa hat, here's a picture of Tiny trying it on:

I have also posted the pattern on my old pattern blog, and for that reason I have changed the blog title, description and (maybe somewhat confusingly) the url. You will now find my pattern blog here, the old url does no longer exist. (I have changed the links in my old posts, but in case I've missed some, I thought I'd mention it in a new post..)

Calendar contest & give-away update

I have a few links to share with you today, plus an update about the Christmas give-away on Tygra Beaumont's Dollie-cious blog. The ending date of the give-away has changed from the 25th to the 15th of December!

There's an Advent calendar contest at Thessans Amigurumis, where you can win a crocheted amigurumi :) I know it's a little late, but if you hurry you can still catch up and collect some points if can answer the riddles correctly.

Fröken Elsa has created an Advent calendar that features her adorable crocheted mice. Read about their new adventures every day!

You can also find a good Advent calendar at Drops Design, with a new knit or crochet pattern every day :) (Note: the link brings you to the American English version, but if you click 'home' you can find the patterns in your own language.)

My crafty Advent calendar :)

Just wanted to post the link to my Advent calendar blog, now that it's up and running. Should have done it yesterday, but time just keeps escaping me.. So here it is, hope you like it :)

(I will make a permanent link on the right sidebar when I can find a pretty picture to put up..)

A final exam and possibly a new blog

Well. My Sanskrit exam is now over, and I think I did allright. Not exactly brilliant, but then I have now idea what the level of the course really is. As the only student in that class I guess I should know, but...

After much deliberation today and last night, I have now decided to make a separate blog for my advent calendar :) That means I am one project short, because I have also decided to make all my holiday projects holiday related. I'm not completely happy with the layout of the new blog yet (can't find a template I really like), so the link will be posted later. I plan to spend the evening figuring this thing out :)

Contest!

The blog Syltyg & Saftig is having a contest to celebrate two years of blogging. Congratulations :) Three lucky winners can pick their prize from this lovely selection:

Just leave a comment on her post for one ticket, and mention the contest in a post on your on blog (with a link) for two tickets :) The contest ends on December 13th. I really love those plush cakes, they look absolutely yummy! :)

Promises, promises...

I know I said that I wouldn't post much this week, because of my exams and stuff, but I've never been good at keeping such promises. The kind about me not doing whatever I want to when I don't really have the time. If anyone out there has some willpower and a little impulse control to spare, I'd be happy to pay for some :p

Oh, well, enough with the complaining :) When I got tired of reading last night, I started making lots of tiny crocheted things. Mainly it was for trying out some patterns and shapes from my new crochet book, but then I thought I could make something out of the shapes.

This thing is not really very Christmasy, but I thought I'd show it anyway. I like the shape, it looks like a fossil Ammonite (not the Biblical tribe!), an ancestor of the squid and octopus (and actually not as closely related to the modern Nautilus as you would think). I'm a sucker for anything prehistoric :) I'm thinking about making more of these, possibly in different sizes, and sew them on a bag or something. I like making bags, but most of them come out pretty much the same. I need some diversity.

Anyway, the blog will be my Advent calendar this year :) This is actually the first year ever that I don't have a calendar with candy or little things in it, and it's kind of sad, but we can't afford it.. So I will have to cheer myself up with updating my blog with little things that I make every day :) Well, maybe not every day until Christmas, but I'll try :)

A very huggable hedgehog :)

Today this adorable little guy showed up at our house:

He really should be hibernating this time of year, but for some reason he decided to visit me instead :) I'm very happy he did, although I don't think I'll have much time to take care of him just yet. Not to worry, though, The Great Boll has promised to look after him while I study for my exams :) I'm sure they will be best friends in no time!

The pattern is from Fiber Trends, designed by Debbie Radtke. It is really easy to knit (garter stitch all the way!), but you need to keep careful track of your rows. I made many mistakes with this one, but the great thing about felting is that it hides all such small mistakes :)

By the way, it takes quite a lot of stuffing for these hedgies, this 225gram bag of fine polyester stuffing was barely touched when I started! I think the next hedgies I make will have to be a lot smaller to save stuffing and money :)