Hooray for Norway!

Today's the national day of Norway, our Constitution is 196 years old :) It's celebrated by parades and people wearing nice clothes and eating lots of good food (= hamburgers, sandwitches & hot dogs) and ice cream. All the kids run around and blow in whistles and toy trumpets that make horrible sounds, and then some inmportant people and the king give speeches. To finish the day there is usually fireworks in the bigger towns. This is what that looked like tonight from the Oystercatcher's view (the picture is black&white because it's dark outside):

I haven't really celebrated it for years, it's too noisy and crowded and the weather is always bad. We did celebrate a little, because Bollan and her family wanted to. Click HERE for the whole story :)

I just take it as a good day to relax, watch TV and do nothing useful, except crocheting a lot :D

Great Big Bumblebee pattern & more

I managed to finish the patterns sooner than I thought (I e-mailed the documents to my aunt who converted them to PDF and sent them back to me), so I actually listed the Bumblebee pattern yesterday. And I've made a sale already, can you believe that? I almost don't :D You find my Etsy shop HERE.

Oh, I forgot to mention in the post yesterday that the body of the bumblebee is brushed to make it furry and fuzzy and cute like a real bumblebee :) The pattern is actually based on the Buff-tailed Bumblebee, which is the most common species in Europe.

I edited my old Kitty Princess pattern and relisted it.

Also, both patterns are now found in my new Ravelry store :) I decided to try it because selling patterns on Ravelry is a little cheaper than Etsy, since there's no listing fee...

One final thing... I really could use some help with this, both me and my boyfriend are stuck trying to come up with a name for this pattern set:

The pattern is as good as ready, I just need a name for the little creatures. Now, I feel like I can't call them critters, because that would make them too similar to CraftyAlien's very cute knitted & felted ones. Calling them Something-something Friends also seems a little used... They are fairly small, with a flat bottom that allows them to sit up straight, and fit perfectly in you hand:

I plan to make a lot more of these sets, and not only forest animals, so I need a general name for all of them, and then the individual sets will have more specific names added to that. *sigh* Hate it when I'm stuck like this...

Ooh, I just had an idea... If I get any suggestions (as comments to this post), the winning suggestion will win a free copy of this pattern! I have a few thoughts myself, but I'm still undecided, so you have a fair chance of your name suggestion being picked :D (If I come up with a name myself you can still get the pattern from one of my stores..)

A very big Bumblebee

I have finally managed to make another pattern for my Etsy shop! Yay :)

I've been working on this bumblebee for a good while now, and yesterday it was finally finished. It's huge, almost as big as Bollan!

The pattern is almost done, I just need to finish it up and convert the document to PDF (which I have to do at the university library because the online converters only screw things up). I've only had one other pattern in my shop since I opened in September last year, and the listing expires one of these days anyway, so I think I'll re-write it a little to make it more similar to my new one (I've changed my pattern writing style since I began posting free patterns on my blog, plus I found a typo that really bugs me). Fortunately nobody has bought it yet.. :p

This bumblebee is the first in a series of Great Big Bugs. I have an almost finished dragonfly and a ladybug well under way. The bumblebee pattern will be listed on Etsy tomorrow :)

Big contest!

Mia Bengtsson has a big contest on her blog, where you can win this great prize:

Both of her amigurumi books (the 2nd book is released in June), a big pile of yarn and a handful pairs of safety eyes, a bag of poly pellets, a bag of brads & buttons etc., a couple of crochet hooks and a stuffing tool. Everything you need to make amigurumis :)

The winner will be drawn on May 17th, which, by the way, is the national day of Norway, so I hope I win :) There will even be five other prizes in this contest, plus a second contest for the same package as described above for people who have pre-ordered the new amigurumi book already. 

Good luck, people :D

Now what...

Just found out that I have to wait a whole year to apply for a Master in Arabic, because the institute doesn't have enough people... A new professor will apparently be hired from the spring semester, but I have no idea who it is. So, I suddenly have no plans for my immediate future :/ I guess I'll just wait and see if the job I have this summer is allright, and if it is, I can always apply for more store jobs. Hm, the local craft store, perhaps? :)

Felted bags

Two felted Tunisian crochet purses:

Both are made up of one long piece and sewn/crocheted together at the sides.  I used a 6mm hook for the bags and 8mm for the handles. I planned on felting them just a little, but they felted a lot anyway and came out tiny, almost the right size for Bollan to have her stuff in :)

I have also made this Patchwork bag from a free pattern by Lion Brand:

This was not supposed to be felted, but I did, and I don't know how I feel about the result. I forgot how well this yarn felts (Gjestal Cortina), and it also came out a lot smaller than intended. I crocheted the squares in hdc instead of sc to save time, and then I made a sc edge around the top of the bag in brown:

I made the handle a bit longer than in the pattern, and I decorated the ends with a few cross stitches in green and purple:

But after felting the stitches looked like un-even blobs. Pretty pointless...

My boyfriend thinks the bag looks great, though, he even stated that if he'd been a girl, he would love it :p

Two Swedish hats

As you may know I've made a number of crocheted hats based on the Swedish olympic hat, but none in Swedish colors. Blue and yellow is not my favorite color combination, but now I've made two:

With these two hats lying around it didn't take long before one of them was claimed by Iggy, Bollan's eldest son, who is part Swedish (read the whole story here).

The hats were made by request from my mother, so I'll be sending them up to her in the mail tomorrow. I will not reveal what they will be used for, but if you follow my blog you probably get to see it in June :)

Thou shalt not suffer a spider to live...

Yesterday a spider came crawling up our livingroom curtains. I just squealed and pointed, and my boyfriend jumped up to rescue me. He caught the thing in a cup and threw it out on the street. I took this picture of it just to show you how tiny it was, you can barely see it:

I took two other pictures a little closer, but I had to delete them because I couldn't look at them. Anyway, I was very happy to be rid of this thing, since sometime before Christmas it had been sitting on the floor in the corner behind the couch where I couldn't reach it with the vacuum cleaner. But of course, my happiness wasn't going to last long...

This morning my boyfriend found a big nasty spider in our kitchen cabinet, but it ran and hid in a crack before he could catch it and throw it out. So now I can't get to the plates and the bowls in that cabinet, because of that darn monster :( I've had plans for a while about spraying the house down with some sort of pesticide (I just call it "kill"), but it's not really healthy and the rooms would need airing afterwards, so it's a lot of work... One thing I hate about spring is that all these nasty critters come out of their holes to plague me :/