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 :/

Black & blue

I have made another felted granny square pillow cover:

This is just one big square with an extra edge. Before felting it measured 50x50cm, now it's 40x40cm. Before felting:

The best part of this project was that I crocheted over ALL the ends as I went :) Look, no ends to weave in!

Along with the pillow cover I felted these two dice bags with similar colors:

Just two more bags to go, and all eight are done! Woohoo :D

The oystercatchers are back!

Every spring/summer the last few years there has been a pair of oystercatchers nesting on the roof of one of the university's buildings, and a webcam has been put up there right by the nest. It's not really bothering the birds, you get to see them doing whatever they do, cleaning up around the nest, grooming, sleeping and almost getting blown away in bad weather. They are so cool, and the chicks are even cuter :D I've been checking the page often and looking for the birds almost every day the past two weeks, and two days ago they finally arrived :) Here is a picture of the pair collecting stones for their nest. You can see an egg by the wall. Two more will probably be laid soon.

The page is both in Norwegian and English, and you can choose how often the picture updates, from 1 to 30 seconds. Streaming video will be up some time later :)

Pulling teeth...

Would actually be quite pleasant after a week of excruciating toothache... Instead I got a temporary root canal or whatever, and I have to go back to the dentist in a week to fix it properly :( Argh, I hate my teeth... Almost looking forward to old age and dentures :/ Maybe a set like these?

(The picture is borrowed from the site where I found the pattern)