Snow days & needle felting

A few days ago the snow had been melting for a while and it looked like spring was on the way, just like my crocheted groundhog predicted :) Now, however, winter is back again. With a vengeance. It snowed for 24 hours a couple of days ago, and yesterday everything was chaos. The traffic stood still and the power was out some places. The plough has left huge piles of dirty snow on the sidewalks, walking to school feels like walking through narrow alleys. This is how our street looks right now:

Can you believe that underneith that mountain there actually is a car? It's a fairly small sports car, but still... The poor thing's been there all winter, I have no idea where the owner is. I placed my boyfriend by the heap for scale :)

Dug up my wool and felting needles today and I have started my latest project for the new hobby challenge. But, since I want the result to be a surprise, I'll just post some pictures of my first attempts at needle felting from a few years ago. A horse, cow and a pig, a few sheep, a hen, rabbit and a ladybug. They have a sort of boxy shape, because they've been stuffed in a bag for a long time.

Anyway, my current project entails a framework of pipe cleaners, and I'm going to make it a lot more detailed than these old creatures, so I hope I get it right. If I do, maybe I'll try making one of the dogs from this cute book:

It's in Norwegian, but the English edition is called "Fleece Dog" by Nobuko Nagakubo. The book has instructions for 20 different dog breeds, including an Afghan Hound, a Poodle, Chihuahua, Scottish Terrier and a Dalmatian. I'd like to try making a German  Shepherd :) There are color charts for each dog, and silhouettes that clearly show the shape of the dogs.

All I need is a few more colors and a set of these things, whatever they are called in English...

Well, not a dog brush like this, but the kind you use to straighten out the wool fibers. Handy for mixing colors, too. They're just a bit expensive, so they'll have to wait a while :/

Groundhog Day!

Today, February 2nd, is the day when the groundhogs come out of their burrows and check out whether spring is coming soon or not. If they can see their shadow, it will be six more weeks of winter. If there's no shadow, spring is upon us :)

My crocheted groundhog for the Groundhog-along went out in the snow this morning, and there was only the teeniest hint of a shadow, so his prediction is an early spring. It has to be said that if he hadn't been in our backyard, he would have had a big shadow, since the sun was shining everywhere else. So, what to make of it, I wonder? I think I'm hoping for an early spring anyway :)

The picture looked okay on my computer at home, but on this library computer it's very dark, so I hope you can se anything... Here's a picture with flash, just in case, but it gives him a shadow and messes with the prediction, so it doesn't really count!

Back to school

Woke up to 20 degrees C in our apartment this morning, almost comfortable :p I think it's getting warmer outside as well, so I'm hoping the indoor temperature will rise to a survivable level during the next few days.

Yesterday I bought school books for more than 3000NOK (more than 350USD), the most I've ever paid for curriculum books in one semester (yes, books are insanely expensive in Norway), but then I haven't taken as many courses before. Two linguistics classes, an Egyptology class and a full semester of Latin :) I think all the courses adds up to about 2.5 regular semesters of credits... I'm going to be very busy this spring! This means that I probably won't post as often as before, partly because my studies aren't that exciting, but mainly because I won't have time to do much crafting to blog about.

Today I have tried to tidy up my yarn stash, but with little success... I have too much! Bags and boxes everywhere, and nowhere to store them :/ I think I'll give up the tidying and start working on my Latin vocabulary instead. First class tomorrow, yay :)

Freezing!

Got back to our apartment today, and it was just over 3 degrees Celsius inside! No time to unpack, just to turn all the heating on, and then we curled up under a pile of blankets, with hot water bottles (yes, plural!) and tea. We lit lots of candles and had a very quick dinner, and now I plan to stay in my chair until bedtime :) Poor Glyptodon had to rest on a hot water bottle, he was so cold. I still have both my alpaca hat and wristwarmers on, and I have trouble typing... It was actually warmer in the fridge! Now, a few hours later it's almost 8 degrees, practically summer :p

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, hopefully the apartment will have warmed up a bit more, and I'm going to buy lots of new school books. Always the most fun part of the semester :)

By the way, this is what it looks like when I go back from a holiday.

To start with, I pack very little yarn, a few balls only, because I know what I'll end up with... The strange thing is that I rarely need to buy colors that I know I already have, so I don't end up with several balls of colors that I use very little of. Quite practical :)

The holidays

There hasn't happened much this Christmas, so there isn't a lot of fancy stuff to blog about. I did promise to write a little about my presents, but I have nothing exciting to show off, as I only got practical presents this year, and nothing craft related at all. I/we got a radio to have in the kitchen (baking/cooking is more fun with music), a new bread knife, an apron with wine glasses printed on (perfect!), a pair of knitted socks (I wear wool socks all year if the temperature allows it), a book about archaeology, a new external hard drive and some foreign coins (which I of course collect). Pretty happy with the outcome this year :)

For my birthday I got (and will get) some money to buy whatever I want, and I think I'll spoil myself with some fancy yarn and a few Tunisian crochet hooks when we go shopping on Friday :)

We spent New Year's Eve with some friends, eating turkey for dinner and playing boardgames and Warhammer RPG. A few days ago I went to see the new movie Avatar in 3D, and it was amazing! The plot itself is pretty predictable, but the 3D technology really works, and the movie is visually stunning, so all in all it was an awsome experience :) I'm definitely going to buy it and watch it again, though I'm not sure how the movie works as a regular dvd. Some of our friends was very disappointed when they saw it in 2D... Yesterday we saw The Imaginaruim of Dr. Parnassus, and that's also an awsome movie. Totally weird and crazy, but I liked it. And Tom Waites rocks as Mr. Nick :) I would recommend both movies to anyone who likes going to the theater.

The weather has been freezing the whole time since we got her. I'm not used to temperatures this low for very long periods, but I like freezing winter a lot better than melting away in the summer. On New Year's Eve we went for a walk on a frozen lake right by the house, and the ice was 20cm thick. You could drive a car on it. Tomorrow we'll walk over to the other side of the lake :)

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.

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: