Fiber Fool

Here I was all worried that I’d have no Project Spectrum stuff to show for April. But I don’t think it was a problem. In fact, I did much better this month than last month. I’m not sure if the increase of photos is my being better trained to see the colors around me or if I just have more orange and yellow around me than I do red and pink. If you click on that photo above it will take you to the Flickr page and there are links to the full version of each of those photos along with captions if you can’t figure out what all of those things are.
I didn’t make much of anything this month that is yellow and orange except the first sunshine anklet and part of the second. Though I guess I did do a fair bit of dyeing in PS colors at the beginning of the month, I just didn’t get them to finished object states. But I think that is okay given the amount of yellow and orange I found around me or ate this month!

How did you all do? Did you see much orange and yellow around you this month? You have to go check out the Project Spectrum Photo Pool on Flickr, there are some extraordinary photos in there and I am awed by the variety of objects that were captured.

On Monday we start the month of green. I *adore* green. It is one of my favorite colors. But, that shall wait until May!

This week we hit our favorite independent video store in town, The Village Vidiot. There had been a couple movies both of us had been bringing up repeatedly as movies we wanted to watch and this has definitely been a movie-watching sort of week for me. Partially due to higher than standard pain levels keeping me quite tired and slightly lazy (though I’ve gone to all water aerobics classes and cleaned the fridge anyway) and partially due to the cold and snowy weather we had at the beginning of the week.

The first movie we watched was Bride and Prejudice. On the off chance that I’m not the last one to see this movie it is a retelling of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice in a small rural town in modern-day India. It was made in what I understand to be a rather accurate Bollywood style by a British film maker, Gurinder Chadha, who also brought us Bend it Like Beckham.

I’m completely in the dark when it comes to Bollywood films. I’ve never seen one I don’t think. So I’m not positive how accurate the Bollywood style was in this film. In the interviews with Chadha she did often comment about things they changed or tweaked to make it appeal to the west, though mostly I think she was commenting about the music. It was a totally campy riot of color and dancing and music. I was little put off by the over-acting that happens in most of it. That said, now that I know to expect a bit of campy flare I think this would be a movie I would watch again. It would be a perfect pick-me-up film with the great costuming, fun music, and heart warming classic tale of romance. My only complaint - there should have been an extra feature on the DVD that taught some of the basics of the great dancing!
Now, if anyone has any recommendations on Bollywood films one should see, please pass them along! Both DH and I are up for exploring that genre.

Since we were on a bit of a foreign film start with Bride & Prejudice we decided to continue along that path and we *finally* rented Kitchen Stories. We had been recommended this film close to two years ago I believe.

It is the 1950’s in Sweden and Norway. The Swedish Home Research Institute has recently completed a study of Swedish housewive’s patterns in the kitchen and manage to devise a more efficient layout and thus saving the women from walking the equivalent distance from Stockholm to the far south of Africa to instead walking only to Italy. Following this research they embark on a study of the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelor farmers.

It sounds odd and doesn’t seem like a good film could come from such a premise. Especially when early in the movie you hear the instructions to the observers - don’t talk to your bachelor, do not in any way get involved in the daily routines of your bachelor, do not drink during your study period… But the movie is much more the story of human relationships as the observers all travel in caravan to the far north of Norway in the winter and set up their trailers where they are to live until nearly Christmas.

I don’t want to give away the plot too much. But I will highly recommend it. It is subtitled so there was no knitting going on during this one, but I think it is worth the hour and half of no knitting!

Speaking of knitting, there has been tiny progress on the second anklet as I’ve been spending a lot of time being a code monkey here on the blog and working on getting a proper gallery set up and looking similar to the blog. But, I think there will be some actual fiber/crafty content next week. I’ve also gotten my blog links moved over so just hit the “links” link at the top of the page to check it out. More links will be added over the coming days as well - KALs etc. I’ll be playing with the sidebar today too I think so thinks look wonky at any point, it’s just me rooting around in the back-end of the blog.

I’ll be back at some point over the weekend for a final Project Spectrum post for April, but until then, have a great weekend!

As those of you who are also on the weight loss train know, it is quite common to hit plateaus where you maintain a certain weight for some length of time, often despite a continuation to exercise and watch your food intake. Even though I haven’t ever been very strict with my eating, just watching portion size and such I have managed to loose about 40 pounds in a little over a year. Not a huge amount given the amount of time, but I figure in taking it off slow I’m making a life change rather than a diet.

Despite graduating to the next class of aerobics in January my weight has been at one of those plateaus. That was until about two weeks ago. I’ve since dropped about 7 pounds or so. Evidently it was a pretty crucial 7 pounds as I’m now into a new size that I haven’t seen in several years. It has also brought comments from DH about how my butt is firming up, LOL! When I showed him the above tags he said, “You’re doing so good! You must be at about the size you were when I met you!”

That isn’t quite right I was small a 18 with some 16s thrown in when I met him in March of 2000 and I was about 20-25 pounds lighter than I am now. But the two Lane Bryant tags were from when mom visited. She got me a nice linen skirt and a pair of cropped pants for my birthday. I wasn’t doing the new size happy dance then. I don’t know about the other big girls out there, but I often find Lane Bryants sizes to run a bit larger than others. Well, at least sometimes. It seems their sizes can be all over the board. When DH first met me, when I was an 18 and sometimes 16 in other people’s sizes I had some 14s ranging through to 24s from Lane Bryant. So, I didn’t let myself get too excited over the new weight loss and new firming after that shopping expedition. However, my swim suit is about to fall off and I’m not ready to shell out $65 for another chlorine-proof suit when I’m still loosing weight and they were all saying the cheap suits were in at Ross. So, yesterday after class I went to Ross. They had no suits in my size, but I did come home with three dressier outfits from $60. I opted for two sundresses and a skirt and top because at SnB on Monday we had a bit of a discussion about how much easier it is to still look good in a skirt or dress that is too big than in pants or shorts. Not to mention it is much easier to take in a skirt than it is to take in a pair of shorts. At least for me. Plus we have a high school graduation to attend at the end of May so I figured I needed some properly fitting less casual wear.
To celebrate the end of the plateau, DH took me (and Seraphim) out for an adult mini scoop of amazing key lime ice cream at the local ice cream shop. :-) Portion control! :-)

Now, I think I may also deserve this, no?

I’ve drooled over a copy at Barnes & Noble and I love it! There are several items in there I could see myself knitting. Oh, and have you seen their CafePress store? ROTFLOL! I *need* one of those shirts too or perhaps the coffee mug! Of course neither book nor cafepress merch is in the current budget at the moment, but I can dream…

Did you know that the Swedish consume the second most coffee in the world per capita? They fall behind only Finland. This explains a lot to me when I learned of this. Growing up it seemed the adults around seemed to always be drinking coffee. I didn’t understand it. It tasted bitter and the last thing I wanted to drink when the heat index was over 100 degrees was hot coffee.

I have a friend who recently got her Swedish citizenship and she was always talking about fika (pronounced “fee-ka” I believe) and from what I could gather it seemed like tea to me, but it seemed like she would partake in this activity many times a day. I never did ask her what it was. Then right before my mom’s visit we picked up a book from the Univeristy of Minnesota Press at a great local kitchen store called The Swedish Table. The first section of the books contains memories of the traditions the author partook in when she was growing up in the north of Sweden and in there she described fika as a break from your activities in which you drink coffee and eat a sweet. Wow, did that hit home for me!

I grew up on the old family farm where my great-great aunt Emma and her brothers Aaron and Karl lived. My paternal grandparents built a house across the gravel road just before my parents got married and my father moved down the hallway from a kid room to the master bedroom. When I was little and we had to hire neighbor boys and the like (well, young men really) to aid in farm work such as putting up hay. It was expected that all the workers would be provided not only lunch, but also a morning coffee and an afternoon coffee. I realized they were working hard and it was often quite hot and definitely stifling for whomever was in the hayloft, but it always kind of surprised me how much work they could get done when they were stopping all the time to eat and drink. Now, the young men usually had lemonade with thier cinnamon roll or cookies, but the older men almost always had coffee, no matter how hot it was.

Helene Henderson describes fika as “The most important custom in Sweden… The day begins and ends with fika, and it also happens many times between, while you talk about the weather, the all time favorite topic of conversation for most Swedes (in the north at least).” That is why everything in my home church in Svea (we pronounce it sa-veh’-ah but it should be pronounced svee’-ah) revolved around coffee and cookies, no matter the time of day! And that is why to this day grandma Irma has coffee and rusks at 10am and 2pm!

Fika can be elaborate with the requisite 7 kinds of cookies (a traditional measure of one’s housekeeping skills) and sweet rolls and the like, or it can be simple and just be coffee and a rusk as grandma Irma often does. Henderson said in her family fika almost always included a pastry called bullar, so we gave her bullar recipe a try and invited a couple friends over on a whim for fika on Saturday.

Bullar is similar to our cinnamon rolls. It consists of a yeast-raised dough that is slightly sweet. The dough is rolled out after the first raise, slathered with butter and sprinkled with a cinnamon, cardomom, and sugar recipe. Then it is folded in half and cut into 1-inch wide strips. You take the strips and twist them and then wrap them around your index finger. They rise for a second time and then you bake them. Traditionally they are washed with egg and sprinkled with pearl sugar, though we did not have any pearl sugar on hand so we opted for a powdered sugar glaze. They are lighter and less sweet than most American cinnamon rolls and there is of course that nice addition of cardomom. The recipe recommends fresh cadomom, but I’m not sure where we might be able to get some, so we used fresh ground dried at the amount recommended. We did decide we would up it a bit as it was hard to pick up on that nice change.

DH has decided he won’t mind partaking in fika on a regular basis as long as he can substitute tea. So we’ll be trying some of the other recipes for baked goods in The Swedish Table in coming weeks or until it gets too hot to bake. Once we’ve had an opportunity to try more of the recipes I’ll formulate a more formal book review of it.

Along with my greater exploration of my Swedish heritage and customs I’ve also taken on the goal of writing to grandma Irma weekly. I realized when writing her thank you for my birthday card last week that once you blow the font up 20pt and bold it that it doesn’t take that much writing to make a decent letter and as long as it is large and bold she can read it much easier than we can talk on the phone. I can also send along full-page photos so she can see what I’m up to. Last week I sent her some Chicken Soup for the Souls that I dubbed to tapes and two photos of me and my shawl. This week I’m going to send a picture of our bullar and ask her if she remembers great-great aunt Emma making anything similar.

I’m soo excited to be consolidating all my various blogs! I think it will be quite freeing and much less stressful. Plus, I think you’ll get a better, more fully rounded image of who I am.

I am still getting settled around here so there isn’t a ton to look at and the side bar content is likely to fluctuate a fair bit and there may be points when things look really funny as I goof around with the code and try to make the blog more personalized.

But thanks for popping in and checking out the new digs! Please help spread the word that I’ve moved and be sure to update your blogrolls to the new address.