No knitting, but cookies.

Absolutely no knitting content today, I'm too busy doing other stuff, like writing to bother much with knitting. But no matter how much I write I still have to eat, right? So today I bring you: My snacks: A photojournal.
My grandparents brought me this yesterday:



They ran into it in some store, and since they know how much I love Moomintrolls they bought it for me. This is an appropriate snack for me since I am about to start a Ph.D. in literature, and these cookies are based on some of my favorite book characters. Let me introduce you to the family:



Meet Moominpapa. He is a philosopher and the author of his most excellent autobiography "The Exploits of Moominpapa." I highly recommend it.



This lady is the love of Moominpapa's life. His account, in his autobiography, of how they first met is very dramatic. She is, serendipitously enough, called Moominmama. Do you see her handbag? Well, let me inform you that she is a serious knitter, and she carries her knitting with her wherever she goes in that handbag. I would love to be able to peek into it.



This fellow is their son, Moomintroll. He is a good soul, but sometimes he gets into trouble by accident.



This girl is the Snorkmaiden, and she is Moomintroll's girlfriend. Well, I don't really know how serious they are about each other. We'll see, they're young still. Her hobbies mostly revolve around her looks; she enjoys combing her hair and being admired for her taste in jewlery.



I don't know what this guy is called in English, but here in Iceland we call him Snúður. He is Moomintroll's best friend, but he has a wandering spirit and cannot stay in the same place for very long. This troubles Moomintroll, because it means that his best friend is seldom with him. I have a friend who's like that; it's kind of difficult.



Finally, my favorite (characterwise that is; they all tasted the same). This is Mía Litla (in Icelandic). She is a close friend of the Moominfamily, so close, in fact, that she lives with them. She's not really a burden because she's so small. She likes to take naps in the yarn in Moominmama's handbag. She has a mean streak, and can be kind of snippy, but she has a great sense of humor. Because she's so small, she often gets misplaced and the Moominfamily has to spend alot of time looking for her, but they don't mind.

Not only are these characters entertaining, they make a great vanilla-flavored snack.

Infernal Internet!

I came here to the National Book Barn (Iceland's national library, I have no idea why it's called a barn) to escape from all the distractions at home that are keeping me from working on my thesis, not least among them knitting projects and the wonder that is the internet. But of course they have wireless intenet access here at the barn, so there is no escape. Blasted technology! A pox on modernity.

Procrastinating...

It's noon here on the calm little island we call Iceland. I've been up since early this morning, busily picking at my computer's keyboard and mousepad. The closest I've come to doing any actual work on my thesis, though, is opening the Word program. Then I instantly went back to Ravelry!
Oh, Ravelry, what a delightfully useful tool for procrastinators who want to look and sound as if they're working, but are really just salivating over pictures of knitted goods produced by othersI It's addictive and inspiring and fun, and I'm really going to have to summon all my willpower and stay away from it if I want to finish my thesis by August 15, as planned. If I'm good I'm going to allow myself all of August 16 to knit and lounge around the internet. Oh, but the pull of Ravelry is strong when faced with the prospect of writing about television history all day.
Despite all this working and pretending to work, I've managed to get some knitting and finishing done. Does anyone remember a gray Létt Lopi cardigan I began back in March? Well, I finished the actual knitting and end-weaving back then, but then I had to go to Denmark for a month, and I sensibly left the cardigan in Iceland. Upon my return to my native land, all I had left to do was blocking and sewing on some buttons. I've done that now, and so I give you:



The great thing about Iceland is that it's totally cold enough to wear this in June. All knitters should live here, wool is useful year round.
I've also finished a shawl called Hálfskák from the book Þríhyrnur og Langsjöl. Here it is:



It's unblocked so it will become much nicer. I'm a little worried about the blocking, because the shawl has a very nice frilly edging at the moment that I don't want to lose. How can I stretch out the shawl without killing the frill? Any ideas?
I apologize for the bad photo lighting, the Icelandic midday sun is blaring into the room. But look at my nifty new haircut. No more tangled, messy, felted clumps of hair for me.

Happy 17. june!

Today is Iceland's independence day. Although a joyous occasion for Icelanders everywhere, my attention today has, so far, been totally focused on Ravelry. That's right, I opened my email this morning and there it was, a shiny invite to join this exciting community. I promptly responded and can proudly say that Ravelry has only sucked up three hours of my day so far. Any moment now I'm going to stand up and walk away from the computer. It's just hard, because Ravelry is superfun and, I suspect, addictive in an inspiring kind of way. My profile there still looks kind of crappy, but I'm working on it. I'll just view this as added incentive to get my camera fixed. Yeah, tomorrow I'll stroll on down to the Sony Center and say: "Hey you guys, I'm having really annoying problems with my camera and I've been to lazy to do anything about it for six months." And they'll say: "For your laziness and lack of incentive we're gonna make you pay double the price of a standard camera-fixing." That oughta learn me.

On a cultural note...

I was just listening to Shellac, starring my beloved Steve Albini in the leading role. Does anyone know that song Prayer to God?
Well, I've always thought it was pretty good, and kind of funny in a way, but I've only just now grasped the full implications of the lyrics. Steve Albini must have written this text after being dumped! What foolish woman made the grave mistake of dumping him? He sounds like such a catch, in a geeky-sensitive-artist kind of way. Although, it must be said, he does appear, judging by the lyrical contents of this song, to have some issues with rejection and anger management. In fact, he kind of strikes me as rather vengeful, which is not really a quality I look for in a man. I wouldn't want to be the one who arouses his anger, that's for sure.
Still, as long as he doesn't take the killing spree any further than into his songs, I guess he and his works can still be appreciated.
Amen.

New stuff I learned

Hi!
Pardon the long absence. I´ve been travelling and working like a maniac, and when I've had free time I've simply been way too lazy to blog. I appear to consider blogging to be more akin to work than play. I need to adjust my attitude regarding this whole issue.
Anyways, I was in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago to visit the boyfriend. It rained the whole time, so I didn't really do alot of touristy stuff, but then, I really didn't need to since I used to live in Cambridge and had seen it all before. The real purpose of my trip, though, was to give him the secret socks (not so secret anymore!) for his birthday (I gave him some other stuff too, I'm not a total scrooge). To make a long story short, he liked them and that made me happy. Good.
Now I'm back in Iceland and working hard on my thesis which is due in two months. I've kindof finished the sausage arms cardigan, although blocking remains, and I've started yet another cardigan that is going along swimmingly. Photobooth will, in good time, bring pictures of all these wonders, but what I wanted to talk about today was this:



This weekend I attended the annual Viking Festival in Hafnarfjörður. I try to go every year, mostly because I think vikings are cool, and entertaining to boot. I'm also a little obsessed with my nordic heritage and want to keep it alive through educating myself about the ways of my ancestors. So, there I was enjoying the usual viking festivities (drinking mead, fighting with swords and axes, grilling whole sheep over an open fire) when I noticed that all the viking ladies were engaged in some kind of wooly craft. I asked one of them what they were doing, and it turns our they were nalbinding. I'd read about this technique before, and seen pictures of garments made with it, but never had I seen it in action. The lady viking was nice enough to show me the basics of the technique and sell me a needle to do it with. I want to try to find some more permanent instructions somewhere, though, because I'm not sure I remember correctly how she did it.
Nalbinding strikes me as more related to crochet than knitting. The only downside I can see to nalbinding is that you can only work with short lengths of yarn at a time, which means lots of ends to weave in. But I really liked the garments that I saw at the festival, they had a kind of freestyle look to them, not as structured and orderly as knitted garments.
Man, the world is just full of interesting stuff I want to learn, when will I have the time?