Busy as bees

Lately I've been thinking what I want to share with you on this blog. I've got so many things going on in my life that I don't think it's realistic that I share every aspect of it with you, even though that would be cool. But blogging is not my job, like it is for so many of the people whose blogs I read weekly. I tried to make this space into a knitting blog, but that put too much pressure on me to produce stuff, and I lost focus (and got an inflammation in my arm/wrist!). I don't want my favourite hobby to become a chore and something that I dread to do. I'm sure you can sympathise with me here. 

I have been learning how to sew,  both garments and other things for the house, but I don't feel skilled enough to write confidently about it, and I normally keep everything so busy around my sewing space that it isn't very photo-friendly. This has contributed to me not feeling that inspired to share my sewing adventures with the world... So, that leaves sewing out of the picture. 

I've always been really into food, and especially traditional cooking and older methods of making delicious and nutritious food. I want to become more or less self-sufficient in vegetables at least, and preferably animals, too. I've recently started to indulge my passion for herbal medicine, and have started to harvest wild foods from our surrounding area. It is so rewarding and so beautiful, and it gives me so much satisfaction and joy. I'm only a novice farmer/gardener/herb-geek, so I take my notes and keep them safe, mostly for my own good and learning. I don't feel confident writing about this either. 

All this leads me to my motivation for blogging in the first place. I started this blog when I was 18, I think, and now I am in the middle of my 26th year. That is nearly ten years! I think at the time I needed this space to sort of create my own self a bit, after having struggled with relationship- and family stuff for several years, resulting in me just putting myself and my needs/wants on hold. This space offered me an opportunity of showing the world what I was and what I wanted to be.  It was great and it was liberating. The blogging world was also quite different then, it was just starting to grow into a proper community, and I felt like I belonged. While I still truly love it, I don't feel like I necessarily need to have my own space anymore. I think for me this is mostly a good thing. 

So for now I'll leave you with this busy bee, and I'll continue to be a different kind of busy myself. Perhaps I'll return to this amazing world in some other form at a later time, when things have calmed down, when all our walls have been painted and our shelves of books have been put up, and our vegetables are properly settled and the herb garden flourishes. We'll see. 

If you want to follow me on my adventures, you can find me on Instagram: @elise_albrektsen. 

Thank you for having me. 

Happy New Year

In January 2015 I started the year off by stating that this quote from Walt Whitman was going to be my guiding motto for the following year:

"Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place, 

not for another hour, but this hour."

By the end of the year I'm sad to say I had completely forgotten this guiding principle that I so hopefully set myself at the start of the year. I'm also rather saddened by the fact that my state of mind this New Year's Day is pretty much the same as it was at the same time last year: hesitatingly optimistic, but still mostly rather insecure.

I do get a general feeling of eagerness when I look ahead at what the new year might bring, which I try to hold on to whenever it takes place in my mind. My problems in the past couple of years haven't really been that I haven't been able to imagine good and valuable things to come in my life, but rather that I struggle to thoroughly appreciate the small, but good, things in my day to day life. By thoroughly appreciating I mean letting those little things form the basis of my happiness and become my focal points from day to day.

I have a bad habit of always wanting to be in control, to always have a master plan for the future. I think part of being able to live thoroughly in the present involves letting that need for control go, and to accept the future as something malleable and variable. The nature of the future is to succeed the past and the present, therefore allowing my current self to change and develop involves allowing the future to be what it will be. I do have a plan for the future, but it is overarching and indistinct, and the road to that future is unclear. My future, however, does not involve an insecure and apprehensive person like the one I see myself as now. 

A lot of my insecurity revolves around career options (or in my case, the non-career option, which is my ultimate goal which I hope to achieve in not too long) and it has to a great extent been chequed and kept under control by the constant comfort I get from being able to sit down with my needlework at the end of the day. As you may know from previous posts from last year, I overworked my arms and wrists some time in October, and had to stop both knitting and refurbishing the house. I currently work as a teacher in the local high school, another one of my career options, after having received a MA in History from the University of Edinburgh. The problem is that I'm not sure. I'm unsure and insecure about what I want the portion of my time that I spend outside of home, earning money, to consist of. I've given working in nurseries a fair chance, having worked in a couple for over 12 months together, and now I'm giving teaching teenagers a fair chance. Getting a job after uni is expected, and from I finished studying in June 2014 I decided that, having a job that's non-profit, and which can benefit more people than only myself (in that I make money from it), is something that I'd like to do. The trouble is, after having spent over a year trying it out, I'm not so sure anymore. One way of escaping the gnawing thoughts about the future and what I should or should not do, has been to knit.

What I do know, is that I obsess over the fact that I'm not enjoying the 'plan' I had for my future self, back in the spring of 2014. I also obsess about the fact that I can't knit at the present, and not being able to escape my thoughts through working with my hands (either knitting or refurbishing) has had a severe effect on my general well-being. I'm quite shocked by the importance that knitting has to my sense of well-being, and frankly, a bit frightened of my dependance on it. Therefore I've tried to reflect, and reflect again, on what's important to me, besides knitting. Knitting and textiles remain my number one passion, and that will not change. However, harking back to the paragraph above the picture, the future is uncertain. My current self will not be the same as my future self, therefore the future I envision now, cannot be the future that I eventually will experience. This necessarily means that the current situation in my life and health is not the entire and eternal situation of my life and health. Things change, develop and move on. Just as surely, my arms will improve, and in the mean time I need to focus on my motto of last year (which I officially choose to claim for 2016 also), which to me means to let the present take centre stage in my life. To not obsess over what I can't do right now (knit), but embrace all the things I can do and do right now. I'm in the geographical place I want to be, now I just need to get comfortable with the person that I am, and will become, in time, and accept that I might need to try a hundred different "careers" (non-profit and for-profit ones) and still perhaps not find the right one, but that that is also just fine. It's ok. 


On another note, I would LOVE some suggestions of interesting and fun new hobbies to try out, while my arms recover their former strength. Preferably something that does not involve using one's arms... and does involve using one's head (or any other body parts).


Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for sticking with me through this past year, your visits mean more to me than you might think!

Love,
Elise

life

After much toing and froing on this blog, I've decided to let my shoulders down when it comes to the content I post in here. I hesitate to share anything in here these days, simply because I don't have any finished projects or any exciting photos to show you. I'd like this to be a space for me to share my finished knitting projects, but I'd also like it to be a space for the random everyday bits that I so enjoy in my life.

So without much further ado, here's some randomness:

- since the last time we spoke, I seen a bouquet of tulips bloom

 

and wilt 

 

 

- I've decided (after much deliberation, mind you) to upgrade my phone, and the result will probably (it already has!) be visible here on the blog, in the form of pictures I take 

- I've tried to calm down about the future a bit more, sometimes with success, sometimes not so much, but I think I'm getting there 

- I've finished a pair of socks for my dad, and it was one of the most satisfying knits I've done to this day, because they were so thankfully recieved and they have been so gently taken care of since he got them 

- I've been burning candles and enjoying all the lovely green plants that I keep in my house - they make me so happy! 

So, I survived after uploading grainy mobile phone photos, and I have to admit it made me want to do it more!

If you read all the way to these last lines, it would make me so happy if you would let me know what you think about these little changes I've made.

Have a happy weekend,

Elise

autumnal musings

As I'm typing this, I can hear the sounds of cooking going on in the kitchen, and the smell of roasted spices. Ginger, cumin, cinnamon - all autumnal in colour and scent, somehow.
The other day we went for a walk to a lake outside Oslo, to get out of the city for a while, and to see how far the autumn has come, because when you're in the city most of the time, it is sometimes hard to stop and notice things properly. In small ways I'm trying to notice the seasons changing, and to actually live properly in the now. It's hard! But this week I'm going to make some marmalade, to accompany our weekend breakfasts as the weather gets colder, as well as continue my current knitting project in the most autumnal colour you could find - see my last post! I'm also trying to keep a somewhat regular weather journal, which is a new and refreshing thing for me to do. This year I've been more aware and observant of colours and textures than I've been before. I'm wondering if it hasn't accompanied my ever increasing joy in knitting in natural materials? I constantly touch, smell and stare at different textures and make mental (or photographic) notes of them so I can remember and keep being inspired by them.

Although our walk the other day wasn't primarily a walk to observe mushrooms, these pictures suggest otherwise:










And when we returned, tired in that good way from the exercise and fresh air, we ate the most delicious lamb stew. Don't be deceived by the slightly ambiguous look of this dish - it was truly wonderful! Eating seasonal is also part of my effort to stop and live here and now. That is why we're having lamb curry tonight!



I hope you are all enjoying the colder and darker days, wherever you are!

All photos were taken with Canon 400D, with my 50mm lens.

MA History - check!

A week ago today I was revising for my last exam here at the University of Edinburgh. It was - and still is - a very strange feeling knowing that the next day it would all be over, that there would be no more exams. At least not here, at this point. It is refreshing and daunting at the same time, not knowing what the next year will bring. As I walked out of the exam last Friday I sighed a sigh of relief, and thought about what's next. The last year has been hard in many ways, but now I'm happy I finished and that I proved to myself that I could and can if I want to.

The day after the exam, the rain came, and it has been raining on and off ever since, for the past week. It's been therapeutic, in a way, as if Edinburgh decided to wash away all the exam stress.






And I'm sure you've guessed already what I've been spending these rainy days doing. Exactly - knitting! And this is basically what my days look like now:



This is my attempt at the new shawl pattern from Gudrun Johnston, Halligarth. Earlier this spring I decided I'd like to knit a shawl for each of my grandmothers, and this is for my paternal grandmother, Karen, who told me she loves deep red. Since this pattern was inspired by a wood on the Shetland Islands, I decided I'd like to use wool from Shetland for this shawl, and since I love Jamieson's Spindrift, it was an easy choice. They have so many incredible colours, I had a hard time picking a red that I thought would be perfect for my grandma, but I think this one, Sunrise, fits my criteria perfectly.

This close-up picture shows the colour more accurately:



For my maternal grandmother, Anna Elise, I quickly decided I'd like to knit Kate Davies' new pattern, A Hap for Harriet. After having read the beautiful story behind the design on Kate's blog, I was even more determined. I haven't started knitting this one yet, since the yarn I'm going to use is currently in Norway at my parents' house.

While I'm loving the lace pattern of the Halligarth, I also quickly cast on a new cardigan for one of the 'nieces', Olivia, in a simpler stockinette stitch, to knit while watching X-Files and other things.  Here's a photo of my progress so far:



I'm making a Cricket! I've unravelled a scarf I'd initially planned on giving to Olivia's mum for Christmas, but it got too tedious, in order to knit this instead. The yarn (Cascade 220) is not the right weight, really, for this cardigan, but I'm only a few stitches off the right gauge using 4, 5mm needles, so I'm sort of counting on it to end up somewhere inbetween a 4 and 6 year-old, which is a good thing, right? Olivia will turn three right after Christmas, but she is a very tall girl with very tall parents, so fingers crossed she'll be able to wear it for a full year at least (maybe even longer?). I'm planning on using some of my moss-green left-overs from a shawl knitted in the same wool for the lining of the pockets (which, incidentally, I'm super excited about knitting, since it'll be my first time!).

So that was that for this time, but it feels wonderful to have rested and to have knitted guilt-free for nearly a whole week. May the next year be very knitterly and wooly!

Red

When my older sister and I were litte girls, our mum used to read us a book about a dog who built his own house from scratch. It was one of those really simple children's stories, with only a couple of sentences on each side, but this one had lovely illustrations full of details. I remember that he finished off his house by putting a red geranium on his window-sill. Ever since, I've loved a red geranium on my window-sill to get that 'home' feeling wherever I am. I don't know about my sister, but that book is strong in my memory.
This particular geranium is special to me for other reasons - my boyfriend got it for me when it was a tiny seedling last summer, and I have watered it and fed it, and stopped feeding it for its dormant period during winter. It has, however, never seized blossoming, all throughout winter! I came back from my Christmas holiday, and there it was still, red and blooming amongst all the dark, and dreich of Edinburgh's mild winter. I'm so confused, but so happy, it has really helped me through the year, in its simple way.

I was very happy when my younger sister wanted me to knit her a cabled, red hat, since her old one that I knitted years back has finally capitulated:



It is not the exact same colour, but it was just as pleasing to me as the red of the geranium, and now it's warming the head of a loved one.

Today I'm knitting a fluffy, silky, dreamy blue thing for my good friend, Ingrid, who really deserved everything fluffy, silky and dreamy.

reflections

Soundtrack: Eddie Vedder – Long Nights

It is at times when you're so busy you feel like you don't have the time to do anything nice, that you have to remember that there will be days like these:



when you'll have time to drink a cup of tea and watch the sun slowly illuminate your home made orange marmalade, and not worry about a thing.


Expired 35mm film, 200 iso
Pentax MX