Christmas is coming...

I´ve been busy creating different things lately.

The first thing I want to tell you about is our new advent-candle-holder. I really love driftwood and I found this beautiful piece in the north of Iceland about 2 years ago. I took it with me because I loved it, without knowing what I was going to do with it. Right now, I´m so glad I did! 

Using my pretty piece of driftwood, old candle-holders with a needle at the bottom - the ones you would normally use for candle-wreaths (like those) & tiny wooden stars I bought at Laugarvegur (púkó og smart) I made this really simple and natural-looking advent-candle-holder. :-)   

Ooooohhhh how I love it...

Kría

The second thing I want to tell you about is my second Kria-shawl - what a wonderful project... you can work on it everywhere and in almost every situation (except maby while driving or sleeping)... 

you can take a look at my first one in this post and on Raverly. 

yarn: my own, handdyed einband (icelandic wool), dyed with different kind of plants

made for: my lovely friend Rodrigo for his birthday

Button: from my "button-stash"

And now to my nr. 3: my candle-decorating. 

How I did it: 

1. I found some lovely pictures on pinterest (you can find them over there in my "jól" board), printed them out (normal paper, landscape layout, with black ink only) 

2. Cut the picture out in the right size, depending on your candle

3. Finally, I mod-podged my candle about 3 times, glued the picture on the candle and mod-podged it from the outside. 

It has been burning for a few days now, the paper has still not gone up in flames and we really love the way it looks... 

I´m thinking about making some special designs, using Illustrator as Christmas-gifts...

Elves at home...

A few years ago I found an interesting slipper pattern on Ravelry (felted) - I really wanted to knit them for myself but at that time, I was overchallenged by this pattern beeing written in english and filled with short rows, so I ended up just dreaming about those slippers... until now! On a relaxing cottage-trip at the countryside with my boys the other day, I finally had the time&the right skills to make them!

This pattern, "Elf Shoes" really is a piece of cake if you know how to knit short rows (I recommend using youtube if you don´t), it´s interesting, fun, goes really fast and I learned a lot about sock-knitting while working on this project. 

Details:

Yarn: léttlopi (aran) for the shoes and my plant-dyed einband (laceweight) for the freehand embroidery 

Needles: 6 mm

Modifications: I made my slippers longer than it says in the pattern, since I´ve felted léttlopi several times and know how intensely it feltes.

I really, really love those shoes and I´m sure the elves do too!

Freehand-embroidery with plant dyed einband (onionpeel, lichen, lupina and calluna vulgaris)

 I used some iron-on-patches to make them last longer...

ohhh how I love those colours of nature... 

I also wanted to show off my new button - a very dear friend of the family gave it to me, knowing that I have a thing for buttons :-)  

It´s probably one of the most beautiful buttons I´ve ever seen...

Kría

I think crochet-projects like shawls, collars and squares make the most perfect on-the-go-projects. It´s just one hook, one strand of yarn and you can easily choose a pattern that´s just a constant repetition... you can therefore easally work without counting and making mistakes all the time AND it fits into most handbags. 

Because of this, I started making my first crochet shawl during a campingtrip this summer. It´s the wonderful pattern "Kría" from the beautiful book "Þóra heklbók" by Tinna Þórudóttir Þorvaldsdóttir.
Making this shawl is totally addicting - once you´ve started, you can´t stop and now that I´ve finished one, I can´t wait to make another one in different colours!! Crazy! What I really like about this shawl is, that I was able to use my leftover-natural-dyed-yarn... it´s so hard to find use for leftover einband (lace)... and the strange thing is, that no matter how many colours you use for this project, it will always look nice (that´s not the case for knitted lace shawls).
I added a scalloped edging (5dc each) and I´m so glad I did - it makes it even more pretty!

My new shawl reminds me this wonderful summer I had with my boys, all the fun campingtrips, nature and sun... thanks to all those memories and the warmth of the colours it will keep me and my soul warm on cold, dark winterdays.

Details: 
Yarn: icelandic einband (lace), dyed by myself with many different plants
Hook: 3,5
Repeats: 62 since I like bigger shawls 
Modifications: I added a edging
Resumé: love this pattern, love this book!

amazing and surprising how the combination of many different colours really works for this shawl

love the size...

so warm and cozy!

love those colours... 

scalloped edging

natural dyed wooden beads

I´ve seen people write about their experience with dyeing wooden beads (ólakkaðar og ómálaðar tréperlur) with natural dyes, on different blogs. Inspired by those blogs and some pictures on Pinterest I decided to give it a try!

I got some wooden, undyed beads (Litir og Föndur, Skólavörðustíg) and let them cook together with some wool in Alum - I don´t know if it makes any sense using Alum... but I did it anyway! :-)

I then tryed out the following dyestuff:
1. Curcuma (Túrmerik)
2. The liquid from pickled Red beetroot
3. Grounded chili and paprika
4. Cranberry Apple Zinger Tea from Celestial Seasonings
5. Loyd´s Blackberry&Blueberry-tea

How I did it:
I poured boiling water over the dyestuff in different jars. I put the jars out in the sun on my balcony and let the beads soak in the liquids for 2 days and 1 night - I occasionally shook the jars a little bit.

Result:
I was really amazed and at the same time disapointed by the result - only 2 of the things above gave some colour:

1. Curcuma: great result; wonderful, mustard-yellow
2. Loyd´s Blackberry&Blueberry-tea: an interesting purple-brownish... I kind of like it...

I expected that the beetroots would give the best bead-dye (pink) - but I was really surprised and disapointed that my wooden beads didn´s soak in any colour at all! I wasn´t really expecting much of the chili/paprika-blend and the Zinger Tea...

Other natural bead-dyes I tryed out: 
I also tryed boiling the beads together with some wool with different plants that normally give you a strong colour like rhubarb-leaves, madder root, red and yellow onionskins - but none of those things worked out as a bead-dye (no colour at all).

Now I´m wondering:
1. Can you think of any other possible well-working bead-dye-material I could try out?
2. Should I try getting a different kind of  undyed wooden beads in another store?

Me and my older son love the result - we now fight over who get´s to wear them... I´ll have to let him make his own... ;-)

Curcuma-beads... yummi, love them!

Loyd´s Blackberry&Blueberry-tea-beads - nice...

My roots

It has been a dream of mine for some time now, to dye with rhubarb-roots (rabbarbararót). It´s not easy to get this dyematerial, so that beeing able to make a strong dye from those roots has only been a dream of mine... until last friday! The thing is, that day my cousin G. called and told me he knows somebody who is getting rid of rhubarb in their garden and if I wanted to and could go there right away, I could get some rhubarb-roots. 

I drove like a mad person to Garðarbær and was expecting to get 1-2 roots... but never in my dreams did I imagine that I would drive back home with 2 big garbage bags, filled with roots! Wow... what an amount of roots... and how much beautiful colors could I possibly get out of this dyematerial!! 

Now I just have a really tiny problem: how to dry this amount of roots without filling up every empty space in our really small 3-room flat? We´ll see... wo der Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg... 

Thanky you so much cousin G. - you made me really happy and I can´t wait to make a strong rhubarb-roots-dye! 

 A huge root... gigantic!

shades, texture, sweet smell...

  cutting the roots so that they´ll dry faster and better

beautiful from the inside... 

 

so much dye-material - love it! 

Another thing I wanted to share with you are 2 dyeing-experiments I did the other day:

I dyed some kambgarn (wool) with the roots of Rumex acetosella (hundasúra). I had read on the internet, that it should give you pink or grey color.  I used Alum and then dyed with the roots, and got a pretty brown colour out of it. Even if I washed it out with a small amount of salmiak spiritus, it only got a slightly different brown shade. It´s quite similar to the brown colour you get from coffee - and coffee is so much easier to get than those small and tiny roots, so I would prefer coffee to get this brown shade. 

kambgarn dyed with the roots of Rumex acetosella

The other thing I did, was dyeing einband and kambgarn (wool) with horse-tail. I had read that it should give you a pink or a grey shade - but the only color I got was a pretty, even yellow.  Well, yellow was not the color I was expecting and aiming for - so hoping for a miracle, I tryed dyeing it again with Rumex acetosella (the leaves and flowers), since I had heard it should give you a green tone. And once again, I just got a deeper yellow... really anoyed I threw the wool into water mixed up with salmiak spiritus - and the color I got from that was just wonderful: a golden mustard but really the most pretty one I´ve ever gotten! 

I DO love this golden mustard 

The story of a mitten

On my daily walk the other day, I found a beautiful, handmade, old, torn mitten lying around on the street. I felt so sorry for it and just couldn´t leave it there all alone... I guess nobody wanted it anymore, since the poor thing was in a really bad condition. 

But what´s it´s story? I wonder who spent a lot of hours, knitting this beautiful thing? Did the knitter make it for her/him self or for someone special? Was it a birthday present? Who has it been keeping warm and where has is been? Why did it get so torn up (beyond repairable)...

                             

Traditional icelandic/skandinavian pattern, maby soft and cozy kambgarn

 

  the back... poor thing - so far beyond repairable!

 Love the pattern on the thumb - very inspiring...

I also wanted to share a few wonderful moments with you... 

my big boy on a walk this weekend - wearing the lopi-sweater I dyed with flowers and lichen

he loves talking a long walk and helping me pick plants for my salves and yarndyeing

 

I used horse tail for dyeing...

Like usual we found some beautiful things on the beach like...

... feathers

... beautiful blue flowers growing on stones...

... crabs - dead and alive

... seaweed and an amzing view on Esjan (mountain)

... birdwatcher´s house

lucky me, living only 4 minutes from this place

 

our beach

isn´t it amazing how nature provides us with those colours??

Boredom-can (leiðindadós)

There are days, where my boys are soooo bored and everything I think of, no matter what: they only stick with it for 2-4 minutes and after that, they want something new... does this sound familiar to you? Well, to me it does and that´s why I made the "boredom-can" (leiðindadós)... 

What I did: 

I covered an old cocoa-power-can with pretty owl-paper (keypt i Tiger) and wrote small notes with different acitivities my boys can do on their own like: lego (small), lego duplo, listen to a story (CD), puzzle (big), puzzle (small), paint, play with knights, read books, play football in the garden, Playmo... and whatever I could think of and they like doing on their own. 

The rules of the Boredom-can are really simple - in fact there is only one:

1. Draw a note and do whatever it says for at least 15-30 minutes, or even longer, depending on the activity.

The boys take their turn on drawing a note and until now, they always do what to note tells them to do and love it every single time... and the amazing thing is, most of the time they only have to draw 1-2 notes, and after that the boredom is gone and they start playing like they usally do... 

Keeping my boys busy was really important to me this week, since I´ve been dyeing a lot of yarn (einband, kambgarn and léttlopi) - with madder root  and lichen. Next week I´ll do green-dyeing: lupina flower and "deschampsia caespitosa" (little bit of salmiak afterwards)...

kambgarn, madder root (first dye)

 

 einband, lichen (first dye)

On the 17. june, the icelandic independence day in the city center of Reykjavík

a picture taken in my favorite part of Reykjavík (west, 101) - I grew up in this neighborhood... some day I´ll move back there...