Tag Archives: life

around here

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I skipped a week of these “around here” posts – which is in large part bacause I’ve been out with several colds in a row (ugh!), and days have been filled with a lot of resting, and not much else.

Moving on, this week, I’ve been enjoying spoils from our trip to Italy. We brought several pommegranates back (who knew no-one at the airport would bat an eye at pommegranates?!), as well as fig jam from a neighbourhood farm. Yummy weekend breakfasts! I’ve also in earnest started my second new job, which is a sewing/tailoring/alterations gig (at least for now – this has the potential to lead to some very exciting things!), so lots of suit jackets for me this week. It’s located in a building built in 1930, and it has a lot of art deco-style details, which is a lovely thing to see every time I work there.

Suddenly it’s winter, but being on the fairly mild west coast, it mostly means rain. Sometimes freezing rain, sometimes windy rain, and later in the winter I suspect, a couple of days of real snow. In the meanwhile we try to take advantage of the clear days, maybe go for a short bike ride and take a picture of the city at dusk (which is at 4.30 pm now, yikes!), and then make a fire to sit by and mend mittens and knit. My current choices include stockinette in green, simple lace in blue, and more complicated lace in green and blue.

soap

In my teens, I was really into vanilla soaps. I’d buy them whenever we were travelling, as little, usable souvenirs. I’d receive them from my friend whose aunt made them (and always knew to pick out the vanilla-y scents). Though, living at home I wasn’t in charge of the soap, and sharing apartments with fellow students meant that there was usually a cheap bottle of liquid soap (bought along with cheap toilet paper from the bottle recycling money we’d collect after parties). My vanilla soaps belonged to some swanky future of grown-up me living in my own apartment.

Moving to John in Chicago and setting up our first apartment together was it – I brought my entire collection of 5 carefully curated and saved bars of vanilla soaps with me. We finally did use them, and the bathroom always had a soft scent of vanilla associated with it in some form or another. We travelled to his sister in Vermont and came across a farmers market stand with giant bars of locally made soap that smelled better than any bar of soap I’d ever sniffed. So we bought some of those too, and thought of summer in Vermont for months and months to come whenever we used them.

When we moved to Norway last fall, I brought back at least one bar of soap that had gone unused for three years. This fall we also came home from a family visit on the East Coast with beer soap from a favorite brewery (and now has the top place for awesome-ly smelling soap), and several bottles given to us by an aunt that runs a gift shop. Most recently, in Italy, we stopped by the neighbourhood winery to grab some bottles of wine, and were awarded a bar of soap (made with wine of course). I think it was because we’re foreigners. These soaps have started a new timeline; they’ll become the soaps belonging to Norway, the soaps that we used in our cute little cabin-like apartment overlooking the city.

Beer soap from Dogfish Head Brewery, and wine soap.

When I carefully picked out a brown, smooth, vanilla scented bar of soap in Germany ten years ago, I didn’t know that Soap would become a way to tell time, to keep memories, a litmus test (using the vanilla soaps? We must be grown up!), a constant reminder of travels and experiences… but I’m glad it did.

around here

Blogging doesn’t always take the top priority in my life – in fact, it’s one of the first things to go when my days are busy, overwhelming, incredibly rainy, or when I simply don’t feel like I have anything to share (and I’m happy with that priority). At the same time, I think I’ve made the threshold for what I share here higher than it needs to be. Often I feel like the only things I *should* be sharing are completed, successful projects, and the past nine months have seen very very few completed projects, so what to do?

I’d like to take a leaf out of Elise’s book blog and do a weekly “around here” style post. I’ll probably mostly use my phone camera (to make it easy), and share little snippets of what I’ve got going on. And this week, that has been this:

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I celebrated my birthday with a three-day-weekend, going to an art exhibition opening, being treated to a wonderful night out to my favorite restaurant, macaroons,  and adorable wine-cellars I never knew existed, and then a lazy Sunday with dinner at a friend’s house. I also got lovely gifts – sewing patterns, egg-warmers (hello Sunday morning breakfasts), bottles of wine, and a textbook from the 60s on household cooking. My mom has the same book at home, and I’ve always loved paging through and seeing the absolute wealth of information there – putting up, canning, bread-baking, and jam-making, to mention a few things. It’s crazy to me that this was a textbook for 15-year olds, and yet as adults now we know how to do just a portion of all this.

I’ve also had an unexpected week off, since I’m between jobs. It’s been lovely to finally catch up on a lot of things, not the least doing the dishes! I’ve enjoyed having clean counters every morning, so I’m hoping I’ll keep it up.

My sewing corner in this new, tinier, apartment is behind two bookshelves, and it’s a little dreary back there at the moment. We have to get a proper light up, but in the meanwhile I’ve started covering the particle-boards with patterned papers and magazine-clippings. I’ve also decided that the yarn I bought to make my Geithus lace knit top sample is all wrong. New, right yarn has been ordered, and a new pattern has been found for the beautiful green yarn. Not surprising, it’s a cardigan. I love cardigans!

I also love that out aloe offsprings are growing and doing well on our kitchen window sill, and that the view over the city is so lovely.

through the window

It is most definitely not summer here in Bergen anymore; howling winds, daily downpours, rainboots everyday, and you break out the *big* umbrella (not the little one that lives in your handbag). Right on schedule!

I just had a picture I wanted to share! John took it earlier in the summer, as I was plugging away at a wedding dress while at work. This is actually what most of my summer looked like (except the part where I’m being photographed sneakily through windows, which is only creepy if it isn’t your boyfriend doing it).

I’ll soon be back with a wardrobe post, as soon as I take the time to photograph the last sweater!

outfit: colors and views

First things first, we’re settling in to our new apartment, and it is *magic*. This is our view at night:

Also, I went for a run the other night, and it was perfect – I was so completely reminded of what made me fall in love with this city, and I’m thrilled to be back in the heart of it. Just thrilled!

On to the outfit! During Me-Made-May I used one necklace in particular a whole lot. I got it from John before we were even dating, so it’s obviously special! It sits a little high on the neck, and I’ve found I don’t like that with a lot of the necklines I tend to wear (like low scoop necks, or deep v necks), but with the addition of an extra chain, it’s just right!

I really love the color of this necklace, and I’ve been loving pairing it with a bit more unexpected colors, like maroon, or grassy green, and today, olive yellow and a dusty lavender (or is it wisteria? I should add browsing wikipedia for colors as one of my favorite pasttimes).

The same color turns up in all sorts of places, like this chair – with a kimono draped on it at the moment (this is a random picture that happened while I was trying to take a picture of myself, but it fit right in today!):

And let us not forget nail polish, which is also now decorating my housekey:

Love that color. On a side note, I’m getting on very nicely with my fancy new phone. So much that I used the silly thing to take all these photos! I’m not really planning on making that the rule, but between not sharing things and sharing things with smartphone pictures, the blurry fake-old stuff wins. And that’s ok.

corners of my home, pt. 4 – my sewing corner

Breezes are coming through open doors and windows, it smells like fresh cut grass, and an enthusiastic game of soccer is happening somewhere out there, out of sight, but making up the noises of summer.

While I’m enjoying a week of vacation back in my home town, my sewing corner as I am showing it to you, is soon a thing of the past. We’re moving apartments in a week, so things are looking a bit more like this corner of my home post from six months ago – boxes everywhere!

Still, I wanted to show you where I’ve had my little sewing nook in this apartment. The bedroom is a long room, so we stuck the mirrored wardrobe in the middle, and created a walk-in-wardrobe slash sewing space.

A thrift-store table, recovered chair, a lamp, a shelf for my patterns, boxes filled with notions and supplies, and jars for my spools of thread, and some hooks for my scissors. It’s not much, but I’ve been very pleased with having found space for my sewing stuff. And… how can I forget those boxes on the floor overflowing with fabrics and projects! Very stylish, I know.

My favorite part must be the hooks for the scissors. I didn’t realize my scissors matched so well – or, that they happened to be organized by size that day!

(From the left is my super-heavy paper scissors, a pair of 10″ KAI scissors, my 9″ all around Ginghers, and another KAI, 8″. Um yes, I love my KAI’s. Best scissors ever.)

I feel like you get into this strange little bubble when you take apart the home you’ve made for yourself in one place, to pack it down, carry, and reassemble in another space. It’s a little stressful, but I’m looking forward to setting up in a new apartment with (spoiler alerts!) a view, daylight, and hopefully soon, a little kitten too!

outfit: I bought stuff

So, here is the deal: my day-job is to alter wedding dresses, which can be intensive, time-consuming, and stressful,  especially now that we’re in the height of the wedding-season (but of course, also very rewarding when we’ve done our job well and the brides are beaming in their dresses!).

Funnily enough, I haven’t been running straight for my sewing machine when I get home in the evening, and thus, I have had nothing newly made to show you guys on this here blog, and thus, I’ve had nothing to say.

Yes, it is July. Summer in Bergen for the most part requires an umbrella, and often also pants.

So I’m popping in to say that this Sunday it is raining; I’m wearing my blush silk top along with two of the three gray things I bought on sale last week (I know, how boring! I’ll declare them all wardrobe staples, and put more pressure on myself to make colorful and printed stuff); and why yes – I do buy stuff new every once in a while. Sometimes I even buy cheap stuff I should probably have left at the store. Like the cardigan, which is already pilling a bit, had a hole mended this morning, and a button re-sewn. Hmm. But the jeans are nice, even if they are the skinny skinny kind I swore I’d never wear.

Ok, don’t look too closely at this picture, or it will look like I have crazy eyes. Look at the other picture large instead, and enjoy my neat hairdo and my two-tone hair color. All natural, I swear.

I will get back into sewing, but I fear it would feel like a chore at the moment, and that’s not cool. I am, however, making some headway on knitting an alpaca sweater and some nice wool mittens! What, seasonally inappropriate? Pfft.