Making a purse...

There are an enormous amount of very interesting artefacts in the museum I work at.

In fact, I've decided to choose a particular one every week, to vary my guided tours and also get to know the "depths of the museum" better. (wow, I just had this vision of "the bowels of the museum"!)

Anyway.

Last week it was the now famous cow crampons: I love them. It had actually never occurred to me that cows might need crampons to walk out in the winter, but of course, it totally makes sense.

This week I'm not sure what I'll choose. Maybe the cow-pat flattener. People didn't have much fuel to use here in the old days and so they would dry sheep and cow dung in the sun before throwing it into the fire. Hence the flattener, for cow pats.

But anyway, this wasn't my point.

Another of the artefacts here is a small woollen purse people used to keep money in in the old days.

Gunna, a beautiful old lady, who also happens to be the curator's younger sister, knits replicas of those for the museum shop. She used to be a crafts teacher (sewing and knitting and such) and she agreed to teach me how to make these purses. How lucky!!! :o)

Here is my first attempt. It's also my first time using such small needles (2mm dpns)

The purple one is one Gunna made, which i'm using as a reminder of what it's supposed to look like when finished... It's pretty hard to knit so tight, but I guess you get used to it.

At any rate, it's fun!

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Sleep

Despite the quietness here, it's getting somewhat difficult to sleep in the mornings, at least this week. For one, it's getting much brighter in the mornings, and the birds are getting chirpy quite early, but also Fimmvorðurháls, where Eyjafjalljökull volcano erupted last year precisely, is just up the road from me (well, litterally just up the mountain actually) and I'm not quite sure what's going on, but there has been a lot of traffic to and from there in the last few days, mostly starting at 6 am in front of my windows. I'm talking of big buggers here, like the caterpillars from Björgunasveitin, and also a helicopter which was buzzing around all evening yesterday.

Maybe it's just for a film or something.

Anyway, I guess it led me to have strange dreams last night.

The weather has been eXtrEmely bad lately, alternating snow, hail and gale all weekend and yesterday, and I woke up in a jump last night after an outburst of thunder (rather rare here) with hail hammering at the window. It was so unexpected I actually thought it might be the volcano erupting again, but I guess if it had been, we'd know about it by now...

Alice came here this weekend, and it was so horrible out that we decided to spend most of our time indoors (I feel I'll turn to dust if it carries on any longer!) ... knitting (what a surprise!) (not!)

Anyway, this is the result of the weekend, a new pair of mittens for Alice, because she gave me her favourite pair 2 years ago and since then she lost her other pair, so it's only fair! :o)

Back

Not quite sure how satisfied I am with the "flowery" pattern, but the rest is nice, and álafoss lopi is so pleasurable to work with!!!!

Front

And this here is a hat I started last week... I bought loads of beautiful álafoss and wanted to make a sort of "Easter coloury looking hat", so here it is... I possibly wouldn't wear it, but I'm sure someone will love it someday!! :)

Ahaaa

Lost in iceland and looking for something to knit... I wish I were so gifted as to be able to just copy the jumpers off this website, they are so beautiful, especially this one Looking for a pattern to knit Mr. Q a lopapeysu, but I guess we won't know which one before he comes here to choose it! :o) Just started my new job.. it's interesting and I'm learning heaps!!

In Skógar bara...

"Home"

"My own private waterfall"

Well well well...

So now I m far away from what we know as "civilization" (a.i a place where you have to hitch hike 100 km from to buy chocolate, for instance...) with not much to do but work and learn more and more about Iceland when the weather is bad, and go and walk out on mountaintops looking at glaciers in good weather :o)

Yesterday was beautiful actually, very sunny in the daytime, and aurora borealis (though not very strong ones) at night. Næs...

But when the weather is bad, what is there better to do but to improve one´s knitting skills, hey... :o) Here are the latest borns, following the pattern of Icelandic mittens from the Westfjords. They are made of lett lopi, and it took me a couple of days to finish them, so that I can now say: never again mittens out of létt!!! :o) It just takes too long. If I do mittens again (no dount that I will), then at least it will have to be álafoss!