Not what it looks like

Yesterday I tryed something new. If you look at this picture...

... you might think it has something to do with beans and food?? But actually it has nothing to do with food at all!! Those are green things on the picture are seed-pods of Lupina-flowers. I wanted to find out, what happens if you dye wool with them. I was not surprised at all, when the wool became yellow - it is a very mild, light but of course: natural colour. I like it and it is quite easy to get because we have so much Lupina in Iceland :-)

If you click on the pictures, you can see them bigger and you can see
the colours much better:

Another experiment I made was dyeing with the root of the Lupina-flower. It was a very time-consuming process to get colour from the roots but I wasn´t really expecting anything else. The colour is a very light brown-yellowish, it´s nice but I don´t think it´s worth the effort since it´s not always easy to dig out the roots. But it was very interesting like always. Thanks to "Hespa", who gave me some really good tips on facebook, the colour became a bit stronger.

Saffran-dyeing

A few weeks ago, Rodprjonar and G. gave me some Saffran they bought in Spain, because they really wanted to now if it was possible to dye yarn with it. I was really happy with this gift, and excited to see the result of the dyeing. I used mordant and then I cooked the yarn with the saffran. You wouldn´t believe how very yellow the yarn turned out :-) The colour reminds me of easter, IKEA and the swedish flag! I really like the colour and I LOVE the fact, that the wool smells like saffran!

The saffran starting to cook, not looking very impressiv

wool and mordant

wool and saffran united

Wool and saffran united - a closeup

rinsing the wool

Aeolian Knit-Along - done

I finally finished our (Rodprjonar and Gummi) “little-knit-along” Aeolian-shawl. One of the practical things about our Knit-Along was that everytime one of us had a problem we could ask the other 2 people who where working on the same project for advice. It was also very exciting to see, how different one pattern can turn out, depending on the knitter and the yarn. It was so much fun doing this, and I hope we´ll repeat this with another project in the future. Rodprjonar was the first to finish his really beautiful shawl - you can see that here.

Details on mine:

Pattern: Aeolian shawl size, wide edge

Yarn: einband, colours: my own (2 different kind of lichen; brúnir tónar: skófir; guli: hreindýramosi)

Needles: 3.5 mm

- Began knitting with a 2 stitches garter stitch tab on a provisional crochet cast on.
- 7 loops nupps

Me and Gummi made:
- 12 repeats of the Yucca chart (R. made 6).
- 2 repeats of the Agave chart (R. made none).
- 1 repeat of the final Agave chart (R. made 1).
- 1 repeat of the edge chart (R. made 1).

My shawl is really HUGE – I couldn´t believe how huge it was when the blocking was done!! But I LOVE exactly that about it and everything else too – the colours, the pattern and the fact that it was made in our own little knit-along! I also couldn´t agree more with Rodprjonar when he says on his blog: "The transitions between section look amazingly pretty and in harmony and the edge is breathtaking".
I can´t wait meet G. and R. to see with my own eyes how there shawls look like!!

CafeSigrun

CafeSigrun.com is a blog full of healthy and great recipes. Ever since I read this post from Barbietec I´ve been wanting to make "orkuhnullungar". For those of you, who can´t read icelandic, this is not interesting, since the recipe is in icelandic :-( Sorry about that! I didn´t have all those healthy organic things you are supposed to use, and instead I just used what I had at home. But I´m sure those cookies would taste even better if you only use everything super-healthy and organic... I only used dates (döðlur) and no raisins - but I´ll probably use both next time. I didn´t have enough sesame-seeds, so I added a bit of sunflower seeds (I roasted the seeds together with the nuts in a pan) . I also used the double amount of cinnamon. I really like the result - they have a strong, special taste of the roasted seeds and nuts, a mild taste of chocolate and the spices... I´m sure those are going to become a favorite of mine and I´m going to keep on experimenting with the recipe.

Our own little Aeolian Knit-Along

The other day, when knitting with Rodprjonar and G. we were talking about how we all wanted to knit the Aeolian-shawl - and that´s when we decided to make our own little Aeolian-knit-along. The interesting thing about our knit-along is to see how different one shawl can look, depending on the yarn, implementation and knitter! I just can´t wait to see how R. and G. shawls look like! Here you can see Rodprjonars version.
So far, I´ve learned a lot by knitting this piece - for example nupps... they look really pretty but I hate making them... knitting those 7 stiches together is so hard to do!
I´m using my own hand-dyed yarn in 2 brown shades for the main-charts and 1 yellow/brownish shade for the edge-chart (dyed with 2 different types of lichen). I love the way the colours look - they are quite uneven and alive... really hard to describe and you can´t really caputure them on pictures. (If you click on the pictures, you can see them fullsize)

A new salve, saffron and rhubarb

Remember THIS post about a skinproblem-salve for a dear friend? Well, I finally made the salve yesterday after waiting for almost 2 weeks for beewax (they didn´t have it at the store). Like I planned, I used lavender-ssential oil, because I didn´t really like the smell of it before. I´m happy with the result, since it makes your skin really soft and hast a really nice scent. My friend got it yesterday and was excited to try it out - I´m excited myself, to see what effect it has on her skin.

The herbs:

the salve:

Yesterday I met some really nice knitting-friends. I was so happy and really surprised when Rodprjonar and G. gave me some saffron they bought in Spain and some rhubarb to dye my wool with - what a nice thing of them to do! :-) Now I just can´t wait to try to get some colour out of those things! I love the scent of saffron and how nice would it be to make something out of wool, that might have the smell of that spice and reminds me of a really nice evening with some knitting-friends?

Growing your own chilis

The other day, I found a dry chili in my fridge and decided to open it up and put the seeds in the earth, in a mini-greenhouse I bought in a "Tiger-store" for almost nothing. This was something I have really been wanting to try out, since me and B. (my husband) LOVE chili - and if his mother could do it in West-Africa, why shouldn’t I be able to do it in my kitchen-window in Iceland? ;-)

We didn’t have to wait for a long time for first green leaves to come out of the earth. The best thing is, I really didn’t have much work with it, because my mini-greenhouse did all the work for me (even the watering). When the small plants were big enough, I put them in some bigger flower-pots and then they exploded! I still can’t believe how big they have grown in such a short amount of time and the whole family is waiting impatiently for some chili’s to show up! This is so much fun - the next thing I´m going to try out in my mini-greenhouse are orange- and lemon-stones!

The first green leaves:

the first 2 leaves:

Today: