Gleðileg Jól

All the chaos and business of the last several days has finally died down, so I have a chance to post. We’ve had a nice lazy day today and the kids have been using the computer all day.

Ingi took a picture of the finished dress, but you can’t really see the detail because this camera doesn’t work well with a flash, it needs natural light. So maybe I will post photos of the dress itself later.

The pattern is the Regency Gown from Sense and Sensibility Patterns. She also offers her patterns as e-patterns (PDF downloads).

I made modifications to the pattern based on her instructions to make it a maternity dress, although having worked on it late at night I made a few mistakes, like forgetting to gather the top of the skirt before sewing it to the bodice, so it’s not as nicely fitted as it should be. I also had miscalculated the amount of fabric needed, as well as having bought all the rest of the fabric that was left in this print (so there was no going back for more fabric), which would have still allowed me to have a proper-length dress if I had done the adjustment correctly when cutting out the skirt pieces (since the pattern is designed to fit women of any height)… but one of the pieces was too short when I shortened it, so I ended up with a little too short of a skirt. Finally, I made the buttonholes too small, and had to dig through my buttons to find ones small enough to fit. It all worked out in the end, though.

Here is a picture from the other morning, with the nice snow outside and our Christmas lights showing outside.

Getting Ready

I am making sugar-free cherry sauce for the rice pudding tomorrow so that I can have some, sewing the wings on felted angels, and finishing sewing a dress for tomorrow. When I was younger, I felt like I needed a new dress every Christmas. Now I am over that, but I don’t have a nice maternity dress… so I decided to sew one, and start it this week. It’s not Christmas without me doing crazy crafts things at the last minute. Ingi and B went out to the bookstore to get last-minute gifts for K (we talked B into the fact that yes, he really DID need to buy something for his sister).

Last year when we were in Iceland, I saw some really neat Christmas decorations at IKEA, including this, which I liked to call the Jellyfish Light. When we came back, I got it here on crazy cheap clearance, along with another thing that is like a circle of electric candles. It was fun to have brand new Christmas decorations when we got them out. Also, because I have the best husband ever, Ingi went out to IKEA yesterday to buy one of these, in red of course, because he knew I have been wanting one. I came home from work and saw it in the window, it was so sweet of him to do that.

Now I am back to my sewing and cleaning and cooking and we had better get the tree decorated soon.

Snjór

We are having our first big snow storm of the year. According to the news, we had 10 inches of snow yesterday (25 cm). Everything looks beautiful and white. I love these storms when I don’t have to be out in them. (Now it’s just lightly snowing, and we are supposed to get more sometime tomorrow). I got off the hook from the outside obligations I was supposed to have today, so theoretically we don’t have to go anywhere (although I have to go grocery shopping at some point or we won’t be having supper). This is great, because there is quite a lot to be done before Christmas here. Somehow, the house has managed to get messy again since K’s birthday party last week (maybe it has something to do with us having to use the dining room as an office right now). I have to finish assembling a few gifts, and I am hoping to make time to sew a dress for Christmas Eve. And of course, I want to do some Christmas baking that I could actually eat (no wheat, no butter, no sugar). I think I will make pepparkakor with spelt flour and maple syrup instead of sugar.

Since I haven’t had any knitting content in a while, here is something I finished a while ago and never had a chance to blog about:

I used this pattern. I didn’t sew the little circles on… I thought about doing something more unique, but I may just leave them off.

Well well

In case anyone was wondering, we did get our well fixed the next day. I had left a message with a local guy, but he never called me back, so I called a big company to come out and look at it. The next day, Ingi was home, and the local guy called and he just assumed it was the big company, gave directions, and the guy came. He had started fixing the well and left to get a part when the big company showed up. Ingi sent them away (I guess we will be blacklisted from using them ever again) and the local guy came back, and ended up fixing the well by just cleaning out some parts. So it wasn’t too expensive. We are sure those other guys would have charged us for all new parts.

Also, our living room wall is done, finally (both of these things were done in time for company on Thanksgiving). He did a really nice job.

The trim colour is the one B picked out for his room (that’s next). I also have a really great closet in my bathroom finally (the old owners had these flimsy metal racks that fell down all the time, and they finally ripped out of the wall and I’ve had my bath stuff in boxes in the hallway, and our towels in a basket in our room.

I finished my Big Basin socks with birthday present Hjertegarn a while ago, but now that I’ve worn them a few times, I finally got a picture:

It’s one of the Six Sox Knitalong patterns. They are peeking out from the bottom of the maternity corduroy pants that I sewed, but there is no photo of the pants since they are pretty basic. Still, they are more comfortable than most store-bought maternity pants. For some reason, the waist on those comes right to the wide part of my belly, which makes them slide down all day long and drive me crazy. I could have made the waist panel tighter on mine, but at least it’s high enough.

Hlýr

Before:

After: