Back from Norway

 I got back Thursday night, so today was the third day of putting stuff away, laundry, ironing, hacking back the garden and catching up on paperwork.  I have downloaded 3,000 photos from my phone but haven't gone through them yet.  I'm sure there are a lot of duplicates to whittle out and also a lot of failures - my eye would be seeing beautiful coastline through the grey overcast day and my smartphone was seeing dark silhouettes against a brighter sky.  Plus the inevitable photos of my feet, my finger, my boarding pass etc. to get rid of.  It is nice to be home again, see DH, talk to DS, visit my craft room, and gloat over my Norway loot.  Also nice to wear clothes that weren't in my suitcase.  The best thing is I have missed the latest UK heatwave - it was up to 35C for several days while I was away, meanwhile I was enjoying 13C-15C and overcast drizzle which I am more than happy with.  It was a great trip, albeit very expensive, and I can definitely see myself going back again.

I managed to visit around a dozen knitting shops, but was relatively restrained in what I bought due to being realistic about my knitting speed and lack of space in my case.  I got two books about the lovely Selbu designs for mittens, and some Rauma wool to knit a pair from each.  The white book is in English, the black booklet is in Norwegian so I'll have to use Google Translate.  I also got a kit for a third pair of Selbu mittens in Hilesvag wool featuring the typical Norwegian star/Selbu Rose pattern.  My last purchase was a kit for a cute pair of socks with Norwegian houses on them.

Garnhuset yarn shop in Trondheim, just one of the many enormous yarn shops I came across during the holiday. (the crowd is lining up for a Pokemon release at the next store along).

I didn't get much fabric, although quilting is definitely a thing in Norway. I went to a couple of sewing/quilting shops in Trondheim.  Quiltegarden was a beautifully laid out and well curated shop with lovely displays.  But it was all recognisable brands like Moda, Laundry Basket, ByAnnie bag patterns, and of course Tilda.  But Tilda not any cheaper as her fabric is all printed abroad then imported back into Norway. I asked the owner if there was any Norwegian fabric but she said no, they have a few designers but they don't produce fabric, too expensive.  Prices in the shop were similar to the UK at c £20-22 per metre. 

 However I did find some light canvas fabric printed with Norwegian motifs at the other shop in Trondheim, Abbys Textiler.  I found the cute spool tin at a knitting shop, and the cross-stitch motif runner and placemat was on sale at a home interiors shop in Oslo.

I added a zip to the placemat and turned it into a simple pouch. It was nice to be back at the sewing machine.

And of course I got some tourist tat: a teatowel, little tray, a mug, some fridge magnets, postcards and a fleece lined cute tourist hat that I was glad to have in Roros, when it was unexpectedly 5C with added windchill.

I found this postcard in a knitting shop.

And I saw so many beautiful textiles on display in tourist shops, museums, recreated interiors in open air museums, etc.  Norwegian sweaters on sale were typically machine knit unless they were in a yarn store, and very expensive: starting from £250 and going up to over £600.

Sami Hats in a museum display

The bunad is the traditional Norwegian folk costume based on historical rural clothing, worn by men and women and still very popular today. It features rich hand-embroidery, high-quality wool or linen, and custom silver or gold jewelry. The Husfliden shops in many Norwegian cities specialise in creating these works of art, and also sell the materials for them. I wasn't there at a festival time so I didn't see anyone in the wild wearing a bunad apart from museum staff, but I saw several on display in Husfliden or in museums.

I mentioned that I had started knitting the Norwegian Star Beanie by Sandra Jager on the trip, this is how far I had got by the time I came home, and I just finished it this morning so it is currently blocking.  There is something wrong with the third chart for the crown decreases, like many others listed on the projects page I just had to wing it.

I also took along a magazine kit from CrossStitcher magazine because it made me think of colourful Norwegian houses, but I didn't get a lot done on it.

It's good to be back!

Hello from Norway - land of knitting

 Hello, it's Sunday the 9th of August so I've been here 10 days, halfway now through my trip.  I flew into Bergen, did the Norway in a Nutshell loop to Flam/Gudvangen/Voss (staying two nights in Flam), then caught the ferry from Bergen to Alesund, then the ferry from Alesund to Trondheim which is where I am currently.  It's been a really great trip so far.  Some countries arent what you expect/hope they will be, but Norway is ticking all the boxes.  Even in bad weather (of which there has been much) the scenery is wonderful.  And it's all so clean and well kept, once again a foreign country throwing the UK into a bad light.  On the con side, it is extortionately expensive.  I am just having to go 'la la la' and try not to mentally convert too much - I have paid £20 for a baked potato, and a cup of tea is typically almost £4.  I am trying to keep costs down but it's not easy.  The sights are wonderful, I have had two fjord cruises so far (Flam to Gudvangen, and a day trip to Geiranger - the former in sunshine and the latter in steady rain) and the scenery was just incredible.  So majestic and unspoiled, so remote and beautiful.  Even just cruising up the coast on the ferry is amazing, with the colourful little houses nestled on the coast or up the slopes of forested mountains.  And there is so much history everywhere that I have been so far, lots of well kept period buildings, great open air museums, they seem to really value their history and traditions.  The weather has mostly been wet but so changeable.  Today was typical: it started out chilly and heavily overcast, graduated to light drizzle for most of the morning, then suddenly the clouds cleared and the sun came out and we had about 45 minutes of blue sky and hot sun, then it's gone and the temperature drops with an icy wind, then it suddenly rains quite heavily for 20 minutes or so, then we are back to the drizzle.  I am basically carrying half my wardrobe around with me all day so that I can put on or remove layers of warmth, waterproofing or sun protection as required.  But I dont mind, I grew up in a rainy climate and I have the right clothing with me.

I have been finding knitting and handicraft shops everywhere, knitting is hugely popular here and the shops stock almost entirely wool. One shop worker told me that Norwegians don't want to buy acrylic because it's not warm and it's plastic and not sustainable.  There is a lot of Norwegian made wool as well such as Rauma and other brands. It's not eactly cheap, but considering how expensive most things are in Norway, the wool isnt much more than in the UK.  Between £4-£5.50 for a 50g ball of Rauma for example. There have been branches of Husfliden, the shops of the Norwegian craft association, in all the bigger towns I've been to - they sell and make the traditional Norwegian costumes which are beautifully trimmed and embroidered, but also other Norwegian crafts and products including a good selection of knitting yarn such as Rauma Garn.  In Bergen there were four other knitting shops to visit, plus I took the bus up the coast to visit the Norwegian Textile Industry Museum in Salhus  - a former knitting mill that processed fleece from raw product into fine knit fabrics that they then sewed into items such as men's long underwear and t-shirts.  It also had a shop selling some of their spun yarns. In Alesund, in addition to Husfliden, I found Maskeriet AS which had more unusual yarns and fibres, and also got the bus out to Ultrad in Spjelkavikvegen.  Here I finally caved and bought four balls of Rauma Finull (fingering weight) to cast on for a Norwegian style hat pattern I found on Ravelry, and also a kit to knit a pair of Selbu mittens.  I had asked at most shops if they had any hat patterns with typical Norwegian motifs but apparently this isnt something that they knit - normally they knit traditional patterns on jumpers and mittens.  So I was able to cast on for the hat on my next ferry ride.  Here in Trondheim there was a large knitting shop called UniQ Garn and an even larger one called Garn Huset around the corner.  And by large, I mean the size of a small UK supermarket.  It's just amazing, and stuffed full of wool and other natural fibres such as alpaca and mohair.  I had really wanted to visit Selbu itself to see the small museum of Selbu knitting there, but just couldnt make it work between the museums opening hours and the sparse bus schedule from Trondheim.  So I was pleased to see some Selbu knitting at the Sverresborg Trondelag Folk Museum here in Trondheim today.  There were a few mittens and socks on display in some of the historic houses, and in the shop they had books of Selbu patterns and some Rauma 3-ply yarn.  I bought one of the books because it's a paperback, the other two were coffee table books so too heavy.  There is a Selbu shop there as well but only open on Thursdays unfortunately. There was also a lovely elderly Norwegian lady demonstrating in one of the historic buildings, she is a multi-crafter like me and had brought wonderful examples of everything from traditional wool embroidery, to tatting and band weaving.  She knew a lot about the Selbu tradition and showed me some of the Selbu mittens and a wonderful cardigan that she has knit, I showed her some online pictures of my attempts and we had a nice chat.  There's also a branch of Panduro here, like a European version of Hobbycraft.  And I've seen examples of cross stitch, hardanger embroidery (but not a shop yet for that), crochet seems popular, nalbindning, tatting, wool and silk embroidery and so on - in antique shops, craft shops, on display in historic buildings and museums etc.  I guess with the long dark winters, hobbies are important.

So I'm having a great trip and feel Norway really lives up to the hype.  I'm not going to attempt to upload photos because I already have several hundred on my phone and I need to go through them at home on a big screen, also  it is laborious to reduce file sizes to use on the web on a phone, or at least it is for me.

Old crock proximity warning

 I've been feeling like I'm turning into an old crock this week.  I pulled something in my back from lugging all the buckets of water around the garden (hosepipe ban so we can't use the hose) so have been struggling with physical tasks for several days - I even had to ask DH to help me put my shoes on earlier in the week. But it seems to be calming down now.  I also had a funny turn in the garden with a sudden dizzy spell after getting up, and felt odd for quite a while afterwards.  Neither of which are positive occurrences and certainly not what you want just before you fly off solo. Bleah.

Last Sunday, prior to doing my back in, DH kindly drove me over to the Lamport Hall quilt show.  Run by Grosvenor, this is their second year there but I missed last year as I was away.  It's a fairly small show with only one medium marquee of quilts to look at, I was able to look around in an hour.  It was held in the courtyard of the stable block of this stately home, which I've visited several times before to attend antiques fairs.  Luckily it wasn't too crowded on Sunday as the stable stalls in particular are very tight spaces and even on Sunday I was having to queue to get in and out.

old horse stalls

There were several dressmaking fabric stalls, a few knitting stalls, but several quilt related vendors as well.  Nice to see some smaller traders who don't go to Festival of Quilts, plus there were some bargains to be had. I got six one-yard pieces of fabric at £5/yd that I will sew together for backing, some bargain packs of zips and magnetic fasteners, and some deals on continuous zipper tape.

This week I've been quilting my Gail Pan embroidered blocks quilt on the frame, trying to get it finished before I leave.  Then I can load up the St Kitts quilt when I get back.

When I was in Cornwall, I saw a cute little red gingham zipped pouch on a keyring, I think they wanted £16 for it. So I thought as we all do, "I could make that".  And for once, I actually did. This is made using the free Tilda toiletries bag pattern, I cut the 'Small bag' measurements in half.

I made a start on my Cynthia Howe 1:48 Bliss house kit but soon ran into a problem: the supplied printed artwork was too small for the wooden pieces.  At first I thought it was just the base artwork, so I painted in the bare corners to match.  But then I realised it was all the artwork.  I still had my invoice from 10 years ago and she is still trading so I thought it was worth a shot to contact her.  Sure enough, she confirmed that they had a bad batch from the printer 10 years ago but no way of telling which customers had received them in their kits.  Most people had contacted her some time ago, but she is still happy to have the artwork reprinted and will send me the correctly sized artwork. So that's good.

Thanks to my new magnifying lamp, I  have been getting on well with my French monogram from the book I bought on my gite holiday. I'm stitching on waste canvas, applied to the vintage French linen tea towel I also bought on my gite holiday.

I've done a bit more on the Sashiko spools embroidery.

I've prepped a cross stitch kit to take with me to Norway - this was a cover kit from CrossStitcher magazine and I thought it looked vaguely Nordic with the brightly coloured houses.  

I started to prep a knitting project for travel as well but then realised I am very likely going to be buying Norwegian yarn so instead I will just take a few sets of DPNs and plan to buy a hat or mitten pattern.

I pieced a backing for my St Kitts quilt - I had barely enough of the palm tree fabric leftover from a long ago wall hanging made after our Hawaii trip.  I also unpicked the hem on the batik I stamped on our batik factory visit, and incorporated it into the backing as well.  This is in the queue to be quilted on the frame, so I also pieced some old sheeting all around the printed fabric to give me enough fabric to pin onto the frame and clamp at the sides.

After getting back from Cornwall, I changed out the quilt hanging in our hallway for a beach-themed wallhanging I made a very long time ago.  When DS was little, we had several lovely holidays on the Isle Of Wight and our favourite beach was the little one at St Helen's - which has the old stump of a church tower shown at the left, and a martello tower out in the Strait.  Pieced from various seaside fabrics with fusible applique to add fussy cut elements.

We had a surprise in the lawn waiting when we got back from Cornwall.  While the lawn wasn't getting mowed, a couple of roses have sprouted - presumably from leftover rootstock from when we moved a big Chianti shrub rose out of the lawn bed and over to another flower bed a couple of years ago.  So these won't be Chianti roses but will be whatever rootstock the Chianti was grafted onto.  They are surviving the drought just fine (unlike the lawn) so I will probably let them grow and see if they are something nice.

I fly on Thursday to Bergen in Norway and will be gone three weeks.  I'm not sure if I will be able to blog while I am away or not, hopefully I can managed a few posts.  The weather looks like it is going to be very autumnal: 15-17C currently with wind and rain.  Bit of a change from the UK heatwave!

To the seaside in Cornwall

 We've been away in our little caravan, down to Cornwall again as we liked it so much last year.  In contrast to last year's rainy blustery weather, this year was blue skies as the UK continued to experience the heatwave.  It wasn't too bad the first part of the holiday, low 20s, but was going up to high 20s by the end but with the benefit of a strong coastal breeze.  But at least we escaped the 31C at home. We seemed to spend a lot of time at, or near, the seaside this year which was lovely.  Didn't actually swim as the Atlantic is pretty cold and there were strong waves in places, but we paddled up to our waists and just enjoyed hanging out and the beautiful views in places like Bude, Tintagel, and St Ives Bay. I even found a few places offering gluten free Cornish pasties, one of them quite good so I mail-ordered some more from them for the freezer when we got home.

Polzeath beach

Our amazing pitch, right above the coastal path

I was able to visit the famous Cowslip Workshop quilting shop, outside Launceston.  It wasn't very big but crammed full of all the latest fabric lines.  Almost no prices on display which I don't like, and it was a bit overwhelming trying to look around as everything is so crowded together, in the end I only bought four fat quarters.  Interesting to see though it made me feel bad about how old a lot of my stash is.  I buy things I like with the best intentions to use them, and then suddenly it's five years later and they are still sitting there on the shelf.

I came across a cheap kit for a pincushion in a charity shop, probably an unwanted gift, so I bought it and it kept me busy for a few evenings in the caravan.  Everything was included, even the stuffing and the button, just had to hand-sew it.

Cornwall is a very arty place, lots of artists and artisans, galleries and shops selling crafts.  I got this cool re-made Victorian glass tile at a stained glass workshop.

And this hand-painted key holder from the gift shop of a historic house we visited.

I was also knitting on the Shawl that I started in St Kitts, and continuing to embroider the Spools sashiko panel in the evenings.

On the recommendation of my cross stitching friends, I've bought a Halo Go 2 folding daylight magnifying lamp.  It's amazing, like having the eyesight of a 25-year-old again.  I had been struggling with my cross stitch the last few years, even with magnifiers of different types and having a standing lamp next to my chair.  But this magnifies as well as illuminating the work with bright LED daylight lighting, fantastic.

It was nice to get home to my sewing room again, although the garden had really suffered in the heatwave without water.  We have a hosepipe ban in place now, so I had to lug buckets of water around to all the thirsty plants.  I lost some pots of Mexican daisies, and a few other plants are looking pretty sickly, but most things have perked up again with some water.

I was determined to use up some of my fabric stash so I made a few project bags, trying out some online tutorials.  For the first one, I used a piece of stitching I bought years ago from a woman selling off her deceased mother's prodigious cross stitch output, adding a vinyl front so you can see the stitching.  The bird fabric I bought from Cowslip was perfect for it.

For the second, I used a set of three Simplicity fabrics I bought as a pack some time ago.  Project bags are a great way to use feature fabrics.

I haven't had time to use the 3D printer much, although I did print off some cute 'wicker' baskets, including one to go next to the fireplace in my McKinley.  I've pulled out a Cynthia Howe kit for a 1/48th scale Bliss house replica as my next project but haven't done anything with it yet other than spray sealer on the wood.  I'm partway through warping up my little loom to make some more placemats, and I was happily collecting journalling supplies and scrapbook paper from some of the charity shops in Cornwall for my junk journal stash.  I've done a bit of longarming on the Gail Pan quilt but it's been mostly stitch-in-the-ditch which I'm not very good at on the longarm so I am procrastinating.

The heatwave seems to have broken somewhat now - while it has still been going up to 26C in the afternoons, it is cooling right down in the evenings which is lovely and gives the house a chance to cool down.  I don't mind it so much when I just have to stay indoors for a few hours in the afternoon.

A tough week of hot weather

 The UK had a terrible week of hot weather, with several days of 30-35C where I live.  Our houses, indeed our culture, is not designed for temperatures like that.  Very few domestic homes have air conditioning (although apparently portable air conditioner units virtually sold out this week) and even businesses were struggling - my big supermarket's freezers failed.  Schools were closing, commuters were warned not to travel by train due to heat-related disruptions such as distorted rails.  Our old house with thick walls was pretty ok the first few days but then the walls started to heat up.  My bedroom was 28C so I slept in the living room for two nights, then when the living room went up to 25C, I slept one night in the cooler basement on an air mattress.  I mostly stayed in the house rather than go out in the inferno, so felt very housebound, and unable to spend time in the upper floors such as my long arm machine room.  Any Australians reading this are probably laughing their heads off, but I'm assuming there is more air conditiong there and infrastructure that is built to cope with the heat.  I've made a note to buy a portable air conditioning unit this winter when they are back in stock, for m bedroom in next summer's heatwaves.

On Friday I got to spend two nights in an air conditioned hotel to attend a cross stitching retreat.  I had to travel in 35C weather to get there, and trains were disrupted due both to the heat and to a tragic crash that sadly happened earlier in the week.  My replacement train thankfully had some air conditioning so was only warm.  Reaching my 20C air conditioned hotel room was like entering paradise and I got my first decent night's sleep in several days.  Sadly the venue for the cross stitch retreat was also too hot, with misguided people deciding that opening the fire escape doors to let the 30C breeze in would be 'cooler'.  I ended up having to leave early because it just got so uncomfortably hot, and also the lighting was terrible: pitch black walls with glaring football stadium lights which right away strained my eyes and soon gave me a headache. So I didn't actually get much stitching done. Shame, but now I know and I won't go to that retreat again.  It was nice to see my cross stitching friends though.

We did a gift exchange amongst our friend group, my contribution was well received and in return I received this lovely stitched design, beautifully worked, I love it.  My table gifts of the 3D printed cross stitcher keychains went over well also.

So during the week, I spent a lot of time in the cooler basement.  I finished the top of my Carabelle Batik lap quilt.  This was made from two bags of scraps so I was really having to eke out and piece together scraps to get a quilt this size, and even ended up having to piece some of the background because I ran out of that as well.  An enjoyable technical challenge.

I also put together a Jane Harrop kit for two Arts & Crafts chairs for my McKinley house.  For the cushions, I grabbed a graphic of William Morris Willow Bough pattern wallpaper off the internet, tiled it, and printed it in scale onto printable fabric.

I've finished detailing my Norway itinerary, and now know what I am doing every day, with tours and entrance times pre-booked where advisable. I'm looking forward to it.  Especially as it is unlikely (not impossible but unlikely) to be 30C when I get there in August.  It is going to be horribly expensive, it is a very expensive country.  I'm looking forward to it though, especially the knitting shops.