This picture makes me happy. Many things have changed since last year (there's a ladder in the hedge and I'm blogging elsewhere now) but some things stay the same.

pinky up!

I do love the yarn though. Frog Tree alpaca... dreamy. And the purple is so lovely. I'm kinda into purple now. In addition to my purple ruffly scarf, I also got a beautiful crocheted scarf from Garnet Hill for Christmas.

With two purple scarves, I suddenly felt like I needed something purple for my hands. (And my head, which is next on my list.)

So I ignored the little voice in my head saying, You'll never finish ten tiny fingers, and went for it! And, I'll have you know I've knit five fingers already. One of them was even good enough to keep. So there. Okay, lesson #1 learned: I have weird hands. I had knit all four fingers of one glove and then after starting the thumb, I realized it was way too high for my actual thumb. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to knit A LOT of extra rounds after my pinky before beginning my ring finger. Who knew?

Now the little voice is saying, You'll never find the time to finish these! I hate that little voice. Especially when it's right.

Yes, you read right: two thousand SEVEN. That was over three years ago. That was so long ago that this is what wee looked like then:

This little cutie was to some extent responsible for the disappearance of this lovely pink sweater. When she started walking and grabbing things, I had to move my yarn stash out of her room. And in that process, a lot of things got stuffed in bags and into a closet. Bye, bye Frances.

After recently going through my chest of knitted sweaters, I remembered Frances and started a search for what was left of her. I dug up a bag of unfinished projects and there she was, untouched, looking exactly like she did back in 2007. Now, however, she looks like this:

Front and back complete. And I've cast on for a sleeve. Let's see if I can finish her in this decade.

Actual knitting content!

Since school's been out (my school, that is, and I still got three more weeks off!), I've been a regular at knitting group again. And wee's been coming with me! It feels so nice to hang out with the gals again and actually do some knitting. Before the Christmas holiday, I finished my Cha Cha scarf.

I've worn it a lot since and have gotten so many compliments on it. People can't believe it's knitted. For my fellow Cha Cha newbies, one hank made a 6 ft. long scarf that I can wrap around my neck twice. I cast on 12 sts. so it's not very wide, but I really like the narrow width. And it's warmer than I thought it would be. It is, after all, almost 50% wool! Don't forget to watch the video about how to work with the Cha Cha yarn. One thing not in the video, however, is a clear explanation about how to bind off. Thankfully, my knitting buddies helped me figure out some way of dealing with the final stitch, but if anyone knows the secret, do tell!

As you can see in the picture above, I'm not the only one sporting a new knitted item in the new year. Wee's stripey hat is also finished. Santa brought me exactly the Spud & Chloe yarn I needed to finish it. That Santa is a real mensch. Now we have a matching set!

And I've already picked up a new project. Well, it's an old one, but it's new to this decade! All will be revealed next time on where are they now....

And, of course, my handmade advent calendar is up. The boys have been enjoying special little presents every day. I kind of thought they were getting too old for this, if only because dollar toys are slightly less exciting to 9 year-olds than they were for 6 year-olds. But hubby said I should keep doing it, so I had to come up with some new ideas. I decided I could swing some bigger gifts if they were divided up into parts: one part one morning, one part the next. Last week, the boys had a three-part chocolate pretzel gift that kept them stumped until the very last day!

the pretzels were delicious!

This week it's a three-part LEGO surprise!

They had no clue on day one, but after day two - this morning - they were on to it. They're looking forward to playing Lava Dragon tomorrow!

Wee is ecstatic over this year's Playmobil advent calendar. She picked out the fairy one, with flowers and magic wands and fairy princesses.

seven days in and it's already so pretty pretty

She loves this thing so much that every afternoon, she'll suddenly look up at me and say, 'is it the next day now so I can open another box on my advent calendar?' Sorry, babe, not yet.

In the meantime, when we are not spreading early Christmas cheer, the kids are busy with their usual things and I'm bogged down with final papers for school. I have begun my three-year quest to become an elementary school teacher by taking a math class and a psych class. Math has been by far the more interesting class. In fact, I find myself doing math with wee all the time now. Here we made a bar graph of the different Hello Kitty noodles wee got in her pasta.

we have more flower noodles than Hello Kitty noodles

A few weeks ago, when wee wanted to eat her dessert before she'd finished her lunch, she suggested a pattern (making and recognizing patterns is a very early pre-algebra skill), so we drew it out and she got to eat her food as follows:

Two nachos, one chocolate ball, one nacho, one chocolate ball, two nachos, one chocolate ball, one nacho, one chocolate ball.... Math is yummy.

Also very very yummy, is this faaaabulous little yarn from Trendsetter, called Cha Cha. It makes the most delightful ruffly scarf ever.

Can you believe that this this is knitted?! I couldn't believe it when I saw a sample being knit up in the store. All I knew is that I loved it! And I loved the rich purple color too. I was slightly less in love after watching the silly video about how to wind the tricky ribbon yarn and knit the first few rows, but once I got past the starting difficulties, I've really enjoyed working with it. Part of my enjoyment is due to the rosewood needles I borrowed from the store while starting the scarf. Mmmmmm, rosewood. I didn't even mind that they were straights. Yes, you heard right, straights!

I may have to sneak some more Cha Cha and some rosewood straights into my own Christmas stocking on the 24th!

Halloween night was cold! Too cold for a hula girl without outerwear. So our little hula girl grabbed her mother's just finished hat and wore it for trick or treating!

I've been teaching a lot of hat classes recently and it always helps if I make a hat along with my students. I can model techniques on my hat and they can all take a turn using dpn's even if they haven't gotten that far on their own hats. In my hat class before Halloween, I pulled out some left over Spud & Chloe Sweater yarn from wee's crazy pompom hat (which has pompoms now, but is still awaiting its tassels!). There was plenty of pink and green left, so I thought I'd make a little striped hat for wee. About halfway in and I realized the hat was more my size than hers. No worries. I can always use a new hat. I finished it up and set it in the hat box by the door.

The next day was Halloween and hula girl needed something to keep her head warm. Something in a "watermelon" pink and a "grass" (skirt) green maybe... My hat! We stretched her flower headband around the brim and she was all set. Serendipity!

A few weeks later and I had another hat class and still more pink and green Spud & Chloe Sweater left over. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to make a hat just for wee one! This time I thought I'd make the reverse of my own green and pink hat: pink with green stripes. It looked awesome...

Until I ran out of the watermelon pink yarn right there, a mere inch from the top. So much for using up leftovers.

Yesterday, B brought home the requisite 'what are you thankful for' activity that he'd done in school, but this year, his teacher had them think of less tangible, more conceptual things. He wrote that he is thankful for space, friendship, laws, light, warmth and the full feeling of food. (He's a poet at heart, our B!) Of course, he is also thankful for LEGO, K'Nex, and Pokemon...

...and books, to hold up giant marble roller coaster creations.

Told you he was a poet at heart!

I am thankful for brothers who get into tickle fights while I'm trying to take a picture of them.

And little girls who love to shop for purses.

And a husband who takes care of them while I go back to school.

And two homework-free days to enjoy with them all.

Happy Thanksgiving!

hula girl

I was cutting out the pieces for S's Mr. Six costume on Saturday morning, but I made it! By Sunday, the kids' costumes were all done and I'd even found time to improve that crappy looking cummerbund I'd made for Mr. Six.

Mr. Six's bow tie and cummerbund were from McCalls 4290. Turns out, I could have skipped the cummerbund entirely because it was so chilly that S had to keep his jacket closed the whole night. The jacket was from Simplicity 3997 and looked awesome! It came together very quickly and really made the costume.

The pokeball costume was made from Simplicity 3993 (the same pattern I used for the boys' pumpkin costumes four years ago). The little quilting experience I have helped me rework the pieces into colored sections and stitch on the big circle applique in the center. Recalling some quilt labels I'd made with inkjet printer fabric, I thought that what the pokeball really needed was a big Pokemon sign across the chest. I found an image online, printed it out on the fabric, stitched it on, and it was perfect! The Six Flags logo on S's jacket was made the same way.

And then there was the hula girl. This costume was from McCalls 2795, which is a great simple pattern for six different costumes. I'm so glad wee changed from the ladybug costume we had originally picked out to this one. It was so her! Once we talked her out of wearing her flip-flops, she had a blast running from house to house telling everyone she was a hula girl and beaming when they told her she looked pretty.

I'm so lucky that the kids enjoy the costumes I make for them and I can't wait to hear what they want to be next year!

B LOVES his pokeball costume so far! He keeps saying, "that looks just like it! that is exactly how it looks!" He was giddy when we did this first try on. There are still a couple of details to finish on it, but I made enough progress that I could take one evening to start S's Mr. Six costume.

The cummerbund is by far the manliest thing I've ever sewn, which is ironic because it was a little bitch to make! The satin did not cooperate. It'll look good enough though. In the dark.

And last but not least, we have wee, who had a completed costume to wear to her little kid Halloween party over the weekend. She took off her flower headband and flower leis after a few minutes, but she was still pretty adorable. Here she is doing her version of a hula dance.

It's going to be a cute Halloween!

One sixth of a pokeball and one half of a hula girl. Math is everywhere!

So, if it took me one week to sew one sixth of a pokeball and one half of a hula girl, how long will it take me to sew the rest? What if I sewed twice as fast? And how long before I start Mr. Six's cummerbund and bow tie? What if I procrastinated twice as much?

Answers are due by Saturday when wee one has a Halloween party to go to. If she can't go as a hula girl, she can go as a math problem!

That's the makings of two Halloween costumes there all stacked up on top of my actual homework from school.

Wait, did I mention that I've gone back to school? Well, if you were wondering where the heck I was, I'm at this tiny desk right here doing homework next to my serger. Do you like how the serger tray is now a pencil holder?! Priorities are a little different around here.

But Halloween must go on! After much deliberating, the kids have settled on their costume ideas. S, as we know, will be Mr. Six from Six Flags, complete with bald cap and giant glasses and black jacket, black cummerbund and red bow tie sewn by mommy.

B will also be in red and black, as he has chosen to be a Pokeball.

This was a much better choice than some individual pokemon - most of which are crazy dragon-y looking creatures that no one but other equally obsessed 9 year-olds would recognize. And I already had the pattern I could use! It's the old Simplicity pattern I used to make the boys pumpkin costumes back when they were in kindergarten. Awwwwww.

And wee one, breaking with the red/black color scheme, is going to be a hula girl.

She picked out the most awesome blue flowered fabric ever!

Sewing will commence very soon in the impromptu sewing area I've set up in the dining room. I've got to do homework in my sewing space, you know!

p.s. - You might have noticed that all my archives and finished projects pages are nonfunctional right now. I don't know why. I hope I can get them back. I'd hate to stop blogging this way.

update - My master webmaster seems to have fixed the problem. (THANK YOU!) So, for now, it looks like I may be back from the dead. How very perfectly Halloweeny!

Any guesses?

Eagle Air - so cute

We were picked up at our hotel in the morning by a van and brought to the local Reykjavik airport (which is a tiny airstrip that we could see from our hotel and is only used for domestic travel and these little tourist planes). Once we were at the Eagle Air trailer, uh sorry, "terminal," our pilot came out from behind the counter and pulled down a window shade over the window to reveal - surprise! - a giant map of Iceland. He then proceeded to go through the highlights of our tour, which was called "Ice and Fire" and sounded even better in his cute Icelandic accent (the accent reminds me most, and I say this with love, of the Swedish chef from the Muppets). The flight plan would take us over Reykjavik, further west over the Golden Circle sights (Þingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss), then out past the volcano Hekla, and finally to the glacier-volcanoes Eyjafjallajökull* and Katla. All in a tiny little Cessna 7-seater.

Our fellow travelers were a couple from Canada. They were very quiet and took nary a picture. Never fear: I took enough for all of us.

wanna take off for a flight over Iceland?

I was a little nervous about the plane flight, since I am crazy scared of heights. Pointing the camera at the Hallgrimskirkja (Reykjavik's landmark) and watching the take-off through the lens was my little coping mechanism. But the whole flight was super smooth, despite high winds near the mountains - our pilot was aaaaaaawsome! - and the views were spectacular.

We passed over the Hellisheiði power plant we had visited on our own tour of the Golden Circle and could even spot steam rising from a new borehole in the distance. From our perspective above, we could clearly see how and why the landscape here quickly changes from lovely green fields to desolate areas of rocks and ash: this is just where the lava stopped. Cool.

a river running through the low-lying bushy terrain we'd driven past earlier in the week

Our first genuinely breathtaking sight was Iceland's largest lake, Lake Þingvallavatn, as blue as can be.

The water looks calm, but the steam in the distance reminds you that this area is very active, geologically speaking. Lake Þingvallavatn feeds into Þingvellir valley, home to Iceland's parliament for 800 years and one of many locations in Iceland where huge crevices have been formed by the movement of the tectonic plates. As we flew toward Þingvellir, we could see the massive rift in the earth alongside the lake and even through that incredible blue water.

wanna see a geological rift from the sky?

The rift continues all the way into Þingvellir valley. I can't believe that we walked through that ravine just a few days ago!

A few minutes later, hubby spotted this out his window.

A whole series of craters that created the lava fields here! Wowzers.

Next we flew over what our pilot called "a typical Icelandic forest." He said it's typical because "if you get lost, you just stand up." Badda-bing! Iceland jokes!

Just five minutes later (note: not 30 minutes on a crazy, pothole-filled gravel road), we approached the Geysir hot springs area. What a different view from above!

That cairn-covered hill we'd walked up behind Geysir was a mountain from the other side; the river alongside the road cuts an amazing zigzag pattern in the land; and Geysir itself, which looked like nothing more than a steaming hill from the ground was this shimmery bright blue pool from above.

And we circled long enough to see Strokkur erupt.

Alright, Strokkur might have been a little more impressive from down below.

Gullfoss was next, with its ever-present rainbow rising out of the mist and its distant view of the southern glaciers.

As we flew further inland to the center of Iceland, we reached the highlands, a vast uninhabited area of the island, marked by innumerable deep ravines,

huge mountain ranges,

I can't get over how blue the water was in these pools!

and expansive lava fields.

It is very apparent that this area has been shaped by some serious geological activity and that the area is still very active. This region, called Landmannalaugar, extends to the base of the southern glaciers and is a favorite hiking destination for visitors to Iceland. When we visited Skogafoss waterfall, we spotted many hikers beginning their journey down Laugavegur, the four-day long hiking trail (which shares its name with Reykjavik's longest shopping street!) to Landmannalaugar.

The trail leads you through the varied peaks to the glaciers Mýrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull. Atop (or beneath, depending on how you look at it) Mýrdalsjökull lies the volcano Katla, a sort of sister volcano to Hekla that also has a history of large, devastating eruptions.

Katla's last eruption was in 1918, but she has become increasingly unstable in recent years, as if preparing for another eruption. Katla has also erupted after all three previous eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull (the volcano just to the East that erupted this spring). Katla, our pilot explained, is not "a tourist volcano" like Eyjafjalla. Its eruptions can be explosive and can also cause a glacial flood outburst where parts of the glacier break off and float away in massive flood waters, wiping out everything in their path. So, in the immortal words of Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters, "it would be bad."

Okay, enough scary stuff,** let's see that tourist volcano! "It's just lava," says our pilot.

our first view of Eyjafalla

Lots of black. Don't forget, this is a glacier. (Remember my photo of an ominous Eyjafjallajökull overlooking Þorvaldseyri farm? Well, here's how the view used to look when there was still ice up there!) The small white patches you see here amidst all the black ash are the only remaining bits of ice left. Except for the little bit of white just to the right of our fellow passenger's headphones. That's the hot steam coming off the open crater!

Our approach brought us over inconceivably large ashen lava peaks towards the crater itself. Our pilot assured us that we were very lucky to be able to see right down into the crater. On a normal day, even a relatively clear one, the volcano will pull the clouds down over it. But not today.

wanna look into a volcano?

Now that was a once in a lifetime moment. I flew over a freaking volcano! A still, technically, active volcano! (As of August 24th, five days after we flew over it, Eyjafjalla could officially be called dormant again, since it had shown no activity for three full months.)

You can check out how Eyjafjallajökull looks right now on the live webcams here! (They've got cameras at Geysir and the Blue Lagoon too!) From a little further away, we could see the astonishingly long swath the hot lava and ash cut into the side of the glacier. Our pilot pointed out to us that at the foot of the glacier there, right where that ash and ice slide ends, there used to be one of those beautiful blue lakes like we'd seen in the mountains earlier.

Oh.

After allowing us to ponder that for a few seconds, the pilot finally turned away from Eyjafjalla and started to turn us back toward Reykjavik. The flight back wasn't quite as scenic as the flight there. Unfortunately, the Westman Islands (the volcanic islands we'd spotted from the main highway on our drive the day before) were completely covered with clouds - the clouds had to be somewhere! - so we didn't get to see them like we'd hoped. (We had, in fact, hoped to take the Eagle Air tour to the Westman Islands, but each of the tours needs a minimum of four passengers to go and we were the only ones who'd signed up for that one. Maybe we can get the kids to take that tour with us next time!) We were a little overwhelmed from all the sites we'd just seen and then the plane got hot. We'd been rather high, because of the strong winds in the mountains, and it was really sunny, so we'd been steadily heating up the whole time. At some point, both hubby and I started to regret every bite of breakfast we'd had that morning. I began contemplating how to surreptitioulsly make use of the little vomit bag in the seat in front of me. Somehow we both managed to hold everything down until we were down again. Thankfully, the landing was just as smooth as the take-off (did I mention that our pilot was aaaaaaaawsome?!). Once we were back on the ground, it was sort of like I imagine it is for astronauts returning to Earth after having been in space for a week or two: we just did not feel right. We headed straight back to our room for a good lie down. There was no talk of lunch.

As we were recuperating, horizontally, it occurred to me that perhaps man was not meant to fly over volcanoes in tiny little propeller planes. Upon further reflection, I concluded that as true as that may be, it was so worth it! The flight was, by far, the highlight of our trip. It's expensive (although not that expensive when you consider that one of those über-popular helicopter trips is going to run you like $500 more per person!), but the view was absolutely priceless.

Once we'd recovered, we spent the rest of the afternoon visiting the shops along the urban Laugavegur. (Pics of our booty in my last Iceland post next time!) While walking around the city, we stumbled upon a green area in front of the current Icelandic parliament and found pretty much every citizen of Reykjavik stretched out in the grass in probably their only pair of shorts to bask in the rare sunshine.

We ended the day back at the hotel with the best dinner I will ever eat.

Grillið restaurant is a tiny, like 15-table gourmet restaurant on the top floor of the Radisson Hotel Saga. It has a panoramic view of the whole city and the most amazing food. The 6 courses they brought us and the wines chosen by the sommelier were absolutely amazing. It was all very Top Chef and I have no idea what I ate, but it was good. Really good. It was a perfect meal to celebrate our 10 years together. The skies were still absolutely clear, so as we ate we got to watch the sun go down over Hallgrimskirkja and the mountains beyond. And I didn't take any pictures of it at all.

- - - - - - -

* - Don't worry, the Icelanders assured us that it's easy to pronounce.

** - Interesting Iceland fact: Did you know that the Icelandic volcano Laki could be said to be partially responsible for the French Revolution? A huge eruption of Laki in 1783 caused weather disruptions serious enough to decimate crops throughout Northern Europe, including France, leading to food shortages that exacerbated the poverty and unrest in France at the time.

Big beds rule. Cribs drool. (She had to get in on on the fun!)

Now that wee is completely potty trained, she needs to be able to get up to use the bathroom in the night. It's amazing that we were able to keep the crib sides on her bed for so long - the boys hurled themselves over them at age two! But she was never a climber and never complained about them. She was excited for them to go though.

Guess it's time I finished up that quilt for her, huh?