White and red

More snow! Yay! :D



It's getting pretty deep! The rescue people in Helsinki has actually ask everyone to help clear the roads etc to make their work easier. I think that's a bit strange, since they should be used to this kind of winter. We live, after all, in Finland, not in Spain. And even though we haven't had this much snow in many many year, you would think they'd manage to organise the plowing anyway. But perhaps everyone has forgotten what a real winter should be like. Hopefully this winter will wake them up again.

I also finished another scarf, this one is for myself and is knitted from pure wool. And it's almost the same colour as my naalbindning mittens and my elephant beret, so now I have a matching set to wear :) "Never forget to be elegant in every possible situation"

Winter wonderland

I think the pictures below speak for themselves. This winter has just been so lovely. I can't remember the last time we had such a winter wonderland, at least not in Helsinki. Helsinki is located by the sea, so usually we don't have that much snow over here. But this year it's different. I know that some people are already getting tired of the cold weather and wishes the winter to be over soon, but I just can't help wishing that it'll last for a bit longer. It's just so beautiful. November and December are usually so dark that it feels hard to be happy, but in january and february everything changes, the sun is shining a lot more. The other day, when it was almost -20° in the morning, I didn't mind the cold at all. In stead I was very pleased with the sun shining from a clear blue sky and I could feel it warming my dark blue jeans while I was waiting for the bus. And that's what I love the most about this season: the contrast between the blistering cold and the gentle, warming sun.

The following pictures are an attempt to catch on camera at least a small fracture of the winter wonderland in Finland this year. The first one is from Turku and the other ones from Virkkala where my parents live.

Lovely winter!

Warning, there's a lot of pictures again! :D

Today the weather was so nice that I couldn't recist going out for a walk. The sun was shining from an almost clear sky and it wasn't even that cold, only -4°. And the landscape was so incredibly beautiful with all the snow. Unfortunately, I didn't take my camera with me outside, but tadaa! Thanks to my new phone, I still had a camera with me! Yay! :D I have to say, I'm very pleased with the quality of the pictures taken with the camera on the phone. Not bad at all.

Well, here's what I saw:

It seems like this car hasn't been anywhere in a while...

I walked through the Central Park in Helsinki since it's close to where I live. I love it when the trees are covered in snow! It gives it a sort of a mystical look.

And since I was so close, I had to go and say hello to the horses too. Hope they had a nice Christmas and weren't too scared by the fireworks at New Years.

Here's a close up of one of them. They always seem to be hungry since they follow you around while you walk, hoping to get a treat :)

A sculpture in the forest.

I felt like going ice skating too when I saw these people. Maybe tomorrow?

Oh no, a road block! :D Which actually was much bigger than it seems here in the picture...

I really love the winter this year. It's for once a real winter! And now the best of it even lie ahead: january and especially february then the sun is shining more and more but there's still (usually) a lot of snow. I hope there'll be more beautiful days like today. I don't even mind the cold weather. Of course it felt cold when it was -20°, but in the same time it felt so amazingly refreshing! It was as if it purified my whole body, including my head. I felt like a new person. Nothing felt impossible!

But I'm sure I'll appreciate the summer too... :)

Elephants marching home...

This is another thing I finished a while ago. It's an elephant beret. The pattern for the beret itself I found from this wonderful knitting blog Jatta Soheltaa but after searching and searching and searching the web for a nice elephant chart, I gave up and designed it myself. And I have to admit that I'm pretty satisfied with it :)

What else? Nothing, actually... Same old stuff... I've almost started to miss Paris, especially the spring over there. The weather in Finland is just so dull. It's dark and cold, but still not cold enough for snow. So in stead it's just raining all the time. I'm sick of it! But at least you have a good reason for sleeping 10 hours per night and stay at home, drinking hot chocolate every night. And watching movies! :)

Some finished handicrafts

I don't know if you remember that I earlier showed you a picture of a scarf I had started knitting. Well, now it's finished! And looks like this:

Oh, what a lovely autumn day it was when we took that picture... There were still a lot of yellow and orange leaves on the trees. Now it's just dull outside.

I also finished another scarf that I use when I'm working, because it's always so cold in the museum. And where we sit when we don't have any guided tours etc, there's the air-conditioning right above our heads, so all of us guids who's been sitting there, always have a stiff neck and shoulders. Anyway, that one looks like this:

I don't like this one that much... There's too many errors :) But well, it was my first lace-scarf, so I guess you have to start somewhere...

Then I also managed to knit my first mittens ever! Yay! (No, I didn't even knit mittens in school. I know it's strange, but it's true. It wasn't compulsory for us) I'm actually very pleased with the result, even though they turned out to be a bit too big for me, so I'll give them to my mum in stead. Maybe the next pair I'll make will fit better.

Ok, there was a lot of handicraft-news this time. I hope you, who aren't interested in handicrafts didn't mind. But for you guys I have one thing to say: You don't know what you miss! Doing handicrafts is just so relaxing. And you feel so pleased when you've successfully finished something. You should try it! :)

Busying myself

As I said in the previous post, I've found knitting again. But the funny thing about knitting is that it's both relaxing and stressful at the same time. I mean, I like just sitting down, perhaps with a cup of tea beside me, and knit for an hour before going to bed. But when I make a mistake... Well, that's when I get very angry with myself and I can't just let it be, in stead I waste a lot of time trying to fix or at least camouflage it somehow. Then there's also the thing with new projects and ideas popping into my head. There's just so many things I want to do, it feels like I'll never going to have time to finish them all! And the projects I work on at the moment, sometimes they just never seem to end! Aaargh!

...but knitting is still mostly relaxing. And I like it.

Here's one of the project I'm working on right now:

It's a lace scarf with leaves that I'm doing for my grandmother as a Christmas present. I hope she'll like it once it's finished :)

I was over to my best friends place yesterday and she told me she's started crocheting too, so we actually decided to start having some handicraft-evenings along the autumn. But knowing us two, I'm afraid it's going to be more trying to organise these evenings than actually having them. But if there's someone reading my blog who would like to join our little attempt, you're very welcome! ;)

Since we quite often have some friends over to our place, and since those friends for some reason very often tend to have a glass of wine (the only way to stand our furnishing? or perhaps our company?), I figured it was time to make their life a bit easier as our guests. That's why I also made these:

They're decorations for wineglasses to make it easier to recognise your own glass :) I've seen them in a lot of places but I've never bought any since I think they're usually way too expensive for such an easy thing. So then I came up with the idea of making them myself. And then it was just to dive into my stash of pearls and other related stuff and try to be creative. Don't know if I managed or not, but I least I have a few now. And luckily they're easy to take to peaces again and start all over again once I get tired of them. I even tried to think geeky to make some suitable decorations that Hene could use when he's having some of his geeky-engineer-friends over, but I guess I didn't do that well. When I showed him my best attempt (that is the four coloured ones on the left) he just laught at me and said "Oh dear, it's nice you try but there's something you have to understand: you can't become a geek no matter how hard you try, you're born as one". I'm gonna take that as a compliment.

New old hobbies

Long time, no see! I've been home in sweet, sweet Finland for almost two months now, so what have I actually been up to during this time? Well, mostly work, actually. I'm still working at the same museum as before I went to Paris, but now there's a new exhibition so that meant a lot of studying for me in the begining. Apart from that, this is what I've been up to:
I finally finished the hat I started in Paris. I call it the happy bonnet :)

Then I got a new, dark green sofa, so it needed some new pillows to make it nicer.

The light green one I found in Indiska, but then I didn't find the kind of violet I wanted for the other pillows. For a few days I was a bit sad about it, but then I happened to look inside my stash of small pieces of fabric I have left from different works. And there I found some violet fabric. It's not exactly the shade I wanted, but it's better than nothing. They'll do for now until I find something better :)

I also found knitting again. I remember I liked it very much in school, but then I've never really had time and inspiration for it until now. I brought all the yarn I had left back home with my parents, bought a big, new basket for them and filled it almost directly with different colours.

There they are, waiting to be knitten. And they will be. Very soon ;)

...and yes, I wanted that picture to be exactly like that :P

Portrait

Here's something I made a while ago. I think this was like the first time in two years I drew anything, and it really felt so relaxing! I just forgot everything else around me and sat there by the tabel with my pencil. Sooo nice! :) It's not perfect, but that wasn't the point either. The point was to do something I really wanted to do...