Can't show much

Not a lot of blogging going on at the moment. I am sorry about that, but my mood is spiraling a little bit too fast sometimes:) Hard to keep the mood up when it is raining almost every single day. Add to that the passing of the nine month 'anniversary' for my unemployment. Jippi....

Rainy days do lend themselves to crafts. Remember me showing you this earlier? I can't show you the whole thing as they are gifts to some blog readers, but here are a little bit of them.
It is called Hardanger. It is an old tradtional Norwegian embroidery, named from the area where they also use it on their bunads, or folkdresses.I love doing the woven bars. It is yet another thing that you can do while watching DVDs. These ones were made while re-watching season three of X-files. The truth is out there....

Having all summer off, I can choose to wait for the sunny days to go outside. Hehehe. Something, I guess.

Purple, not green!

Nice one, isn't it?
Yepp, nice and green. I spent about an hour on this, and when I was admiring my work, I realised that it was not supposed to be green. It was supposed to be purple.... Sigh.

I guess I can just switch place with a purple one, but it is going to bug me forever to not have a correct historical copy of Dear Jane.

So I made this one instead. I could not face making the same one twice in one day. This one IS the correct colour, though:)

Not idle!

I have just realised that the content of my blog isn't necessarily living up to its name. But I haven't been idle, at all!
I have, among others, been knitting. This is a gift, so I can't show you more at the moment. I spend my time on this when it is not too hot to knit.

I have finished another nine of these. I found the ninth just after I took this picture:) I have another four whole ones to make before I have gotten the size I think I want. I might make it bigger, just need to see how it works out.

And then I have some plans for this! It is flax - flax fabric and flax thread. A nightmare to sew with, truly, but it makes for beautiful embroidery. We shall see.

But this is where most of my hands have been kept non-idle:) I just passed 100 blocks. So 125 left. Getting there, getting there.

Divine

Norway, Sweden and Denmark share a lot of commonalities. We share history and language, but differ in small ways. My Norwegian language, bokmål, is a bastardisation (or so they say) of Danish, a result of being a colony of Denmark for 400 years. We were the farmers, they were the culture, education and high society. But.. we have forgiven them:)
One way we differ are church architecture. While many, though not all, of our churches are made from timber, stones and bricks are typical for Denmark. A practical reason, I guess. Norway have a lot of woods, while Denmark... not so much.

This church we found on our way through Fyn. I love the mediveal look of it. Not sure how old it was, but it was magnificent.

You can see the church bell high up there.
The church was built on a slope. Denmark is extremely flat, so you get a tremendeous view whenever you get up a little ways.

Getting to the beach

It was not that easy getting down to the beach, as it was quite steep. I am not used to this kind of 'cliffs', just pure sand that the ocean had worked on for centuries. Though it would have been a soft landing had I tumbled down here,

I preferred the stairs. It doesn't look so steep from down here....

but it was!

To get my mind from the exhausting of walking up these steep stairs I took pictures of the plant life up along the stairs:)

With all the rain that week the snails were out, too! Love the swirls on their shells.

PS. I forgot! I have one year anniversary for this blog:)

Dream lights

We drove all the way up north in Denmark and reached the beach just while that particular rainshower of the day stopped. So this is how it looks at 9 pm in July after a rainstorm.
I think the ocean looks wonderful after a storm, much more interesting than during blue sky and sunshine.

You can almost believe a ghost ship comes around the cliff.

These beaches are very different from what we find in Norway, with just sand all around and the sea washing away more and more. There was a farm lying close to the edge of the cliffs. I wonder how far it was from the sea when they built it decades ago.
The big 'rocks' are left overs from German bunkers during the second world war. Now they are just big pebbles on the beach. Nature takes care of itself:)

Whizzing by

I have just spent four days driving through all of the main islands of Denmark on the back of a motorcycle. I think we planned to do too much, safe to say. On the map Denmark looks so small compared to Norway! So at the end of the weekend we had driven about 1500 km! In addition to three ferries. We saw Denmark - whizzing past. It was fun:)

Motorcycles gives a sense of freedom, even if you are not the one driving:) You sit higher on the road than in a car, so you get a very good view all around you. You get to see over the fences on the brigdes, among others.

Ok, so the leather doesn't hurt either:) At my age, it is about the only time you can wear leather and not be viewed as crazy. Hehe...

This was one of the few times I did not wear the rain gear, as we had rain showers throughout the day, every day. We started the day without the rain gear and ended up putting it on during the first hour, not bothering taking it off for the rest of the day.
We did manage half hour now and then with blue sky, a good time to enjoy lunch by the road side. Some very blissful days. I can still feel the wind:)

Abundance

I have been cleaning out my camera so that I have an empty card to fill on my weekend trip coming up (watch this spot next week:)) when I found these two incredibly beautiful flowers. I remember taking the picture at the garden of a famous Nobel author of Sweden, Selma Lagerlöf.
These were all over her garden. I am infatuated by the fullness of the flowers. You would think there would not be room for that many petals on one flower!

This one had less petals, but the bee almost drowned in it anyway. He was literally drunk when he tried to lift off:)

Childhood gardens

I wish I could say I grew up in a place like this:). It was, however, one of our summer trips as children. It took about three hours to get there, so we had to get up early in the morning. Ugh. But the garden was worth it. I loved the statues, as I showed in the previous blog, but there were lots of other stuff to see there, too.
The mansion with the mirror lake.

The pagoda. Don't you just love the way she 'languishes' in the pool.

And then the waterfalls..

The flowers...

Take a trip down the lane and see

Love the red!

Heavenly blue.

I was too early for the roses, unfortunately. I might go again:) It has been too hot to quilt now for days! I miss it.

Cast in bronze

I love statues. The old fashioned 'what you see is what you get' kind of statues. I went to a Swedish garden yesterday, filled with flowers, trees, mansions and! yep! statues. Just look at them!

Look at that little baby and the look in her face.

How they can make something so wonderfully peaceful and poignant with so few lines. I love cats in any shape and colour:)

And the smile on this little one.

Beautiful little girl playing with water:)
And this one - when I first saw it there, placed under a wheeping willow, I was sure it was called Grieving or something. However, it is called 'After the day's work'. Can't you just feel her exhaustion? She is just sitting there, with the last sheaf of wheat still in her hand. Wonderful, and sad, in its own way.

Tomorrow - flowers! And maybe a mansion... we shall see.