Goodbye Geese, Hello Winter

Yesterday, Tyler spotted a flock of geese flying south.  We've noticed some small groups of geese practicing their V-formations, but this one looked... different.  They were in earnest.  And there were so many of them; a long line that snaked a bit while we watched them fade into the distance beyond one of the mountains.  Like a wispy trail of smoke... A few minutes later, another group flew over ahead, and then another.  I had the distinct feeling that I should probably go pack my things if I was going to catch the last train out of town...

But retreat was never part of our plan.  Instead, I walked home with a new set to my shoulders and a firmness in my gate; I felt resolved, as though I'd agreed to be the one to keep an eye on things until the geese return.  And winter is coming soon... Those birds definitely have an uncanny sense of timing.  I'll be darned if we didn't wake up this morning to frost on the rooftops, the puddles all frozen and smashed to shards where cars had driven over them.  And this evening, I walked home from my Norwegian class in the blue light of a gentle snowfall, and almost slipped on a slick spot beneath the fresh white dusting on the road.  I need: a warmer hat, and thick socks for inside my boots. Better get knitting quick!

Images of the approaching darkness...

The glacier glistening in the moonlight.

Sea-shore surprises.

Yesterday evening, I was pulled away from the table, where I was listening to some radio and sewing a pincushion, by the lovely purple light that was coming through the window.  Not a spectacular sunset, like the one I posted a couple days ago, but a very muted lovely late-evening twilight peering around some clouds on the horizon.  I walked down to the shore, and was surprised to find these lovely scallops.  They all have such fancy hats on!  I don't know that I've ever seen bigger barnacles.  It was amazing how the red and pink and purple colors of the shells and the seaweed were glowing through this evening light... there was a rusty-red jellyfish washed up on shore that was still pulsing, which was both a bit creepy but also fascinating.  And then a juvenile glaucous gull came over and tried to see what I was up to.  He was kind enough to pose for a picture before waddling on... And to think this bit of ocean will be frozen over in a few months time, it's really quite astonishing.  I have to remind myself that there are seals and whales and fish and crabs and coral and sponges and all kinds of things living out there... and they don't migrate for winter, they just find a way to deal with it!  How truly amazing. 

The colors of fall...

Blue: The harbor on a Saturday morning bike ride.

Silver: Rain-slick roadway.

Yellow: Grass, with some late-summer puffballs wilting in the rain.

I thought that I would be missing fall, around here.  I haven't had a proper New England fall, with apple cider and red maple leaves and Halloween in... years!  My last few falls have been spent either in rainy Portland, OR or frozen Ross Island, Antarctica.  At some point in the season, I usually decide I feel a little nostalgic for the benchmark moments of autumn as I remember them from my youth.  But this year, surprisingly, Svalbard is delivering them to me in subtle new ways!  There are crops of mushrooms growing all along the hillsides around town.  So far, I haven't remembered to take the camera along and photograph them, but there is a huge variety of mushrooms for a small area-- and the browns and whites and blush-reds of them are as good as an autumn leaf-pile any day.  The entire landscape is also changing quietly-- the grasses are changing color from green to rusty orange and yellow, and as I look across the valley I see the same sea of autumn colors that I would once have spied from the Hundred-Mile View on Hogback Mountain, VT.  The difference is that the color spreads more like a moss across the entire landscape, instead of puffing and bursting from individual tree-tops.  And I can also view this color-scape right from sea-level, instead of having to climb to the mountain-top to get the whole spread within my sight-lines.  Tyler and I started our Sunday morning today with a lovely walk past the dog yards, where there is usually some great bird-watching.  The last hold-outs of the season are still around: barnacle geese, purple sandpipers, terns and glaucous gulls... no doubt, most of them will soon be headed south.  The sun is low on the horizon, and the shadows fall longer every day... I can't wait to see the colors of winter!  White snowscapes under blue moonlight, and ghostly green auroras... cozy firelight... it's all coming soon!

Innesko: Part 2, A Bruktikken Success Story!

Remember these?  Well, I have more to say about them.

They also have red leather soles!!!

In my last post, I gave you the story of why it felt important (pun intended!) to have a pair of innesko for the coming winter in arctic Norway.  Winter is coming, by the way... woke up to the first proper dusting of snow this morning!  Lovely.  Much has melted off during the course of the day, but not all.  Anyway, soon enough, we will be in all white, and I will be sporting my innesko a lot, enjoying cozy indoor activities.  I wanted to make sure my innesko would last a little longer than the first few weeks of the season, so I knew I wanted to give them some leather soles if possible.  ...But how could I make that possible?

Well, again, I could have tried to search for a piece of hide for sale.  Skinnbode would be the local go-to for buying seal skin, reindeer pelts, or an entire musk-ox with horns and skull cap if you like... but this was about not buying things outright where possible (not to mention the prices are a bit out of my range, even working at Norwegian wages).  SO.  Could I hunt down my own prey, tan the hide, and make the soles from that?  The unsurprising answer is: sorry, no.  Certainly not in time for that fast-coming winter, and probably not personally for a lot longer than that.  One could do those things here in Svalbard, it must be said, but I am ill-equipped and ill-inclined towards such an endeavor.  Besides which, lining the bottom of a pair of slippers seems a flimsy excuse for shooting and killing an entire animal.  Surely, the respectable hunter would also be feasting on the meat, maybe using the antlers for something clever, and tanning and treasuring the hide for more than just a couple scrap pieces of leather for trodding on.

So what is a good piece of leather to use for scrap?  How about a piece of leather that was going to end up in the garbage?  Like this here lonely leather glove, missing it's mate and a bit worn in the finger tips anyway...

For a sad little glove, she's got a lovely hue!!

This little baby came straight out of my first shift at the Bruktikken, Longyearbyen's treasure trove.   When I first arrived in Svalbard in early June, temperatures were still a bit crisp with spring chill, and Tyler and I were heading out on an eleven day expedition around the wilds of the archipelago by ship.  I expected that I would need a decent pair of waterproof, warm pants, but did not have any in my thriftily packed bag.  I was reluctant to spring for a new pair of waterproof bibs for nothing less than 3000NOK (roughly $500USD) partly because the price was steep in comparison to my wallet, but also because, as I explained in my last post, I had no idea if I was just going to want to unload them eleven days later when I got off the boat (the bakery job, with it's paycheck and promise of several more months in an arctic climate, were still only hazy loomings in the future).  Anyway, imagining that there might be other travelers who had fallen into such a trap themselves and then had wanted to unload their basically-new outdoor gear, I started asking around at the hotels to see if anyone had left behind a pair of waterproof pants, maybe in my size, which the kind person working as a desk clerk might just like to gift to me, a shameless mooch of a tourist.  ...Uh, yea right.  BUT!  It never hurts to ask!  One kind man did do me the honor of not immediately judging me a lunatic, and let me in on a local secret: there is a little grey shack in downtown Svalbard where you can go to hunt through bins and bins of other people's unwanted things, and take them away to a new home for free.  Not just tax-free, totally free... I found it, and they had snow pants!  A little bit big, but warm and cozy nonetheless.  

Ever since I first found the Bruktikken, it has been my one-stop shop for all our little hopes and dreams.  I also scored an immersion blender, to Tyler's delight, which has resulted in the making of some scratch curry pastes and other delights to which I am thrilled to be a party to.  But my red innesko soles are my personal favorite score to date.  First of all, there is the basic fun of getting something you need easily, and for free.  Second, how perfect is that color with that little bit of red in my innesko???  I couldn't have matched it better if I had ordered swatches off the Internet.  Chance wins again!  Merce Cunningham and John Cage would be so pleased!

But I really do especially love the third point in my list of awesome: this glove was otherwise basically only fit for the trash bin.  And now it has a second life!  I can't save all unloved things that come into the Bruktikken, but saving a thing here or there feels nice.  It's a great reminder of what is possible when you just stop and think "wait a second... what can be done, here?"  I am so tickled by the success of this venture, and I am really excited to think of other ways I can use the Bruktikken not only as my personal free-stuff boutique, but my personal free craft-supplier.  More stories will hopefully follow in the coming months; but for now, let's look at what I did with the glove:

Time for a makeover, sad little glove.

First, I unpicked all the seams.  This was made possible by a seam-ripper I found inexplicably included in a random box of tools in my pastry area at the bakery.  I don't know how that will ever come in handy at work, but boy am I glad to have it at home!  Unpicking the seams is not only pretty fun, it also yields a much broader volume of material when you unfurl hems and un-cinch elastic to reveal the broad, flat original pieces of the item.

Flat feet.

Then, I placed the innesko on top of the two largest pieces of leather I salvaged and traced around the outer sole.  When I cut the pieces out, I added a generous quarter-inch seam allowance all the way around. When I sewed them on my innesko, I gently rolled this under before sewing down the soles with a somewhat barbaric-looking primitive catch-stitch.  I am not ashamed; sewing through leather by hand is hard enough without perfection on the brain.

And after that, I took a look at my scraps and thought, surely there is something I can do with this other than throw it all out...

Something of a dream come true in only fifty minutes...

 Ah-hah!  I made myself some leather thimbles I have been coveting for quite a while.  Leather is a perfect material for a thimble, because you can still feel what you are doing in your fingertips through the material, but you stand some protection from sudden needle jabs and so on.  These two little thimbles are for my index finger and thumb, and I also cut a little rectangle from another bit of scrap just to use as a gripping aid, should I decide to use my metal thimble for anything, and need a little tool to grip the needle in when trying to pull it through while stitching.  I find the entire aesthetic of handwork incredibly charming, right down to the tools, but I have never before had tools for handwork that I made by hand!  I am so pleased.  That said, I didn't think through the design in a very complex way, and having the seam run right along the fingertip on that one thimble is proving to be problematic, as the needle sometimes jabs backwards right between the stitching.  But there is someone else who has thought this through extremely well-- this is the pattern I will try if I decide to go back and redo this little mini-project (and hey, guess what! she even recommends using a sad, lonely glove for your scrap leather!).

Finally, look what was waiting for me outside when I finally looked up from the table:

Oh, thank you, Earth.

Innesko, eller "fotvottar" ...Part 1

So, I arrived in arctic Norway purposefully a bit underprepared for the elements.  I had no idea, when we arrived in early June, whether we would spend fourteen days or fourteen months here, so I didn't want to overpack.  This has turned out to be a very, very good idea, on many levels.  Since the moment it became clear that Tyler and I were really going to stay here closer to fourteen months, I have been busy thinking of ways to make or scrounge up all the missing pieces of my life.  There are stores here, so procuring things in a conventional way is certainly an option, but most people will tell you Norway is expensive.  This is... true, and not so true, since I am making Norwegian wages now, but nevertheless, I am finding that it much more fun to see if I can work my way around the trappings of traditional commerce.  Necessity is the mother of invention, right?  It seems rather a first-world problem to have to willfully side-step the store in favor of inventing yourself a solution to something like needing a pair of slippers... but this first-world girl really does love the gleeful feeling of having made a thing-- and so I made myself slippers!

Innesko, as they are known in Norway, are indoor shoes or house shoes-- really something more than slippers, as it is not only a comfortable fashion, but a true custom.  Even at the hotels and the public library, visitors are requested to leave their shoes at the door (which people do in quite an appallingly haphazard manner, but that's really neither here nor there).  I am thankful that my socks don't have any embarrassing holes in them, but I still found myself coveting other people's innesko while I padded around the hotel lounge, eating breakfast in my hiking socks.  But did I fall for the tilbud sign next to the innesko display at the butikken?  Nei! Jeg har strikket meg noen!

 A teeny little model of my innesko-to-be.

Oops, they're a little big...

Just kidding!  They fit perfectly!!

I followed this pattern, and it worked like a dream.  The instructions seemed so easy that I actually wasn't sure... but then again, it was too easy not to try it, so I did!  I made that little paper model by cutting out a hand-drawn copy of the pattern and taping it together along the seams, so I could see in 3D how the final product would sew together.  I used that information to create a stylish striping pattern along the insoles.  I had just a little bit of dark red wool left over from Tyler's vottar that I used for embellishment, so Tyler calls them fotvottar (norsk-lish for foot-mitten).  The whole thing, both feet, only took me about a week to knit up-- it's all garter stitch, so you barely have to think as you go.  

So how did they go from big to small?  For anyone who isn't familiar with felting, this is a knitting technique where you use a hot water wash to purposefully shrink your wool-knit creation.  This results in a fuzzy, dense weave, which is perfect for something like a slipper that you want to be really warm and a bit durable.  It's also a bit like a magic trick!  I love this.  I have never felted anything before, as I am usually not a big fan of the aesthetic I associate with felted hats, jackets or jewelry-- I prefer the look of traditional knit for most things.  But now I kind of want to make innesko for everyone I know (and then maybe write a Dr. Suessian rhyming book about it), now that I have tried this fun, simple trick.  But you should try it for yourself, if you are reading this, because it's so fun!  Also, the plus of felting your own slippers is that you can pull them directly out of the wash and put them on your feet when they are still damp, and they will form perfectly to the shape of your foot.  More magic.

I will add that I did a little bit of research on the Internet on the general technique of felting before I threw them in the wash for the final stage, and found the following helpful tips: place the item to be felted in a pillowcase that you can zip, tie or pin shut, to keep excess lint from clogging your machine, and throw a pair of jeans or a towel in with the wash as well.  Something about the extra bulk helps with the process I think?  I was felting in a front-load European washer, which are rumored to be trickier to felt in, but this was no problem for me-- maybe I got lucky, or maybe wool just shrinks in hot water no matter how you load it... try it and see!

Baaaaaking... ah, what a lovely way to wait.

So, for my day job, I am lucky enough to work as a baker.  Someday, maybe I will post some photos and braggings about how awesome it is to make my living this way, for I do truly, truly thank the fates for bringing me around to such a rewarding profession.  I like baking so much, in fact, that sometimes, when I am done with my day job, I come home and bake some more!  Often, I find that something I am making at work reminds me of another thing I would rather be making (and eating!) than whatever I am in the middle of at the time.  On that kind of a day, I arrive home really excited to make the thing I am craving, but what I find is most sweetened is not my pallet, but the acute sense of freedom and enjoyment that comes from having a humble, achievable goal in sight for the evening.  Plus, now that I have finished Tyler's vottar, I like to have pleasant ways to contribute to our daily menu without discouraging him from continuing to do as much of the actually substantive cooking as he desires... (mmm, lucky me, there was curry waiting for me at lunch time today!)

Recently, I found myself inspired in exactly the above-described type of moment, to make some oatmeal raisin cookies.  Oh lord, I love oatmeal cookies.  I like raisins in them, I also like butterscotch chips in them, also coconut or banana and chocolate chips (but less frequently, because usually I am partial to a classic chocolate chip cookie once we start adding chocolate).  My mother taught me how to make oatmeal cookies when I was still small enough to do things like stick my knee through the rung of my crib on purpose so that someone would have to come help me.  She would measure the ingredients and let me "help" by dumping the contents of the measuring cup or spoon into the bowl at the right moment.  It is doubtful that she expected to really teach me at that age, as I am sure most two-year-olds wouldn't be expected to actually retain a multi-step process like cookie-making, particularly when it involves advanced motor skills, strength, and a literacy for measurement than the child has not yet acquired.  But maybe this is one of those examples that would remind us to rethink our own ideas about learning and teaching, because I distinctly remember the steps of cookie making as illustrated in my brain by memory-images of our kitchen in my earliest home.  I am not claiming to be a child prodigy--I'm quite sure I was probably the comparatively mature age of ten or eleven before I attempted to make cookies unsupervised, so the lesson had a lot of reinforcement in the years following my first exposure.  And furthermore, I think there is probably no real mystery in what was really cementing the experience in my brain at the time: butter and sugar, plain as that.  What more compelling  argument for paying attention is there?

 Step 1: creaming the butter and sugar

All good dough cookies start with creaming the butter and the sugar.  When my mom first taught me how to make a cookie, she obviously did all the hard work on this step; I would get to watch as she strained to beat a bit of softness into that cold butter.  The creaming is only done when all the butter chunks are smoothly blended with the grainy sugar.  We always used a little white and a little brown sugar, which we poured and plopped respectively on top of the butter.  I used to love how this looked, particularly when the brown sugar, which we would pack into the measuring cup with the back of a spoon so that it was level at the top, would retain the shape of the turned-up measuring cup, lying stiffly on top of this soft drift of white sugar.  And there is a first wonderment I can recall: why does white sugar never stick together like brown sugar does?  How are they both sugar, and yet they are so different in appearance and behavior?  

We always blended our butter and sugar by hand, with a wooden spoon.  I couldn't have imagined using a machine to mix cookie dough until sometime in middle school when I made cookies at one of my friends' houses.  I think it was actually the day I made chocolate chip cookies with Lizard* at her house in sixth grade.  We used her mother's mixer to blend all the ingredients in stages, which meant that no wrists or elbows strained one twinge in the making of those cookies... an utterly novel experience for me.  We proceeded to make a very tiny batch of "normal" cookies for sharing, and then wickedly used the rest of the dough to make two gigantic "chef cookies," as we termed them, which were naturally meant solely for us.  Those two cookies took up one entire baking sheet, and were easily as big as my face at the time.  They also took foreeeeeever to bake, and we spent the long wait lying on the kitchen floor and watching through the oven window, playing our own guard dogs.  Suffice it to say, making cookies with a mixer was still a total blast, but I was strangely reluctant to give up the ritual of struggle associated with hand-creaming cold butter and sugar.  I still am, and even when I have a mixer at my disposal, will choose to use a wooden spoon and elbow grease if I am making a home-sized batch.  Ergonomically speaking, it would probably be a smarter choice for me to chill out on the grunt-work, but that is honestly a bit of the fun to me.  When you have spent a couple minutes laboring to work the butter into forgiveness, and then you reach the moment when you can crack and egg on top and add a splash of vanilla, the blend suddenly transforms into this perfectly stir-able thing, and the relief is just wonderful!

*A fond nickname of yore, which will serve here in lieu of a proper name, to preserve the anonymity of my long-lost pal of old. 

 After all ingredients but raisins have been added: cookie dough!

 The raisins in Svalbard come all the way from California, just like the handsome Tyler J. Krul.

Beautiful cookies! 

Oh gosh, yum!!

I am incredibly proud of how these little cookies came out on this particular round.  I made them again a couple weeks later, and had somewhat disappointing results, perhaps because my measuring tools are not exact.  Professional baking has opened a whole new world of liberation to me, and I do encourage all home bakers to go ahead and wing it sometimes.  Recipes are really only ratios, so I don't feel hindered by the fact that I don't have any formal measuring tools or a scale in my new home kitchen of now.   For this recipe, I consulted the Smitten Kitchen oatmeal cookie recipe for my ratios: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2009/02/thick-chewy-oatmeal-raisin-cookies/.  When measuring, I use a mug and an actual teaspoon (like from the table setting) and eyeball everything.  I sometimes decide I like a little dose extra or a little bit less sugar, sometimes decide I want to cut my white flour with a bit of wheat.  I throw in cinnamon like it's going to add years to my life, and somedays I will be more or less careful about how even or round my cookies are.  I had a baby-sitter once who showed up to our house with her own very clean baking sheets and measuring tools to make cookies.  She insisted we make even balls of dough and make them as round as possible. At the time, this sounded like a form of lunacy.  Did she not know that most of the fun of that particular stage of the recipe is trying to pry the little clump of dough off the spoon with your finger, so that at least a little bit of dough stuck to you so you could lick it off later?  It's the licking it off later that is the fun part, hello!  I think she was also against eating dough with raw egg in it.  I don't want salmonella either, but I think only very, very... willful people can resist cookie dough on the fingers.  Anyway, wherever you are now, dear, I am here to show you that yes, I can make nice, round cookies!  Sometimes.  The second time I made them up here, like I said, things looked very different, which would have been fine if it was purely aesthetic, but since the cookies didn't spread at all, they stayed a touch too thick and doughy in the middle, which is much less pleasing than these: nice, flat, bit of crisp on the edge with a pleasant chew all the way through... The Smitten Kitchen recommends chilling the dough ahead to get a hearty, chewy bake, but I absolutely adore the flat, slightly lacy and yet still chewy feel of these unchilled babies. Personal preference.  For next time, I will be a bit more careful with my measuring, and perhaps attempt to recreate the orangey oatmeal cookies that I made for the galley in Antarctica.  For those, I will add a bit of orange essence or plump the raisins in orange juice ahead of time, and also add some orange zest to the mix.  Ooooo, or someday, it might be nice to make some candied orange peel and add that... Hmm.

Anyway, I can confirm one recipe wing-it risk that I took in making these cookies, which was to add a dollop of vanilla yogurt as a replacement for the vanilla extract that I haven't been able to bring myself to pay Norwegian prices for.  I will say that the vanilla extract is probably worth the cost, easily... I think being surprised by the high price of tropical fruit and other exotic ingredients in the arctic is going a bit too far in the name of globalization.  However, I already have this addiction to vanilla yogurt, and since I had it in the fridge already, I thought, why not give it a shot?  The answer is, it works!  Wonderfully.  Just a little dollop, and there is a lovely, penetrating vanilla aroma in each bite.  Fantastisk!  I used the same substitution to equal success in a peach cake I made as well (and there is also proof positive that I don't mind paying up the big bucks for exotic fruit in the arctic when it is just screaming delicious summer at me from the fruit stand).

 Ferskin Kake med Iskrem.

Again and again and again, please... I am remembering when Brook Lee won Miss Universe by answering "I would eat everything -- twice."  Right on!

Vottar med søte, søte gjess

Sweet baby barnacle geese!

Norsk-knit vottar!

The first thing I wanted to make when I arrived in Svalbard were some traditional Norwegian-knit mittens.  I originally planned on searching Ravelry for patterns, but I was in the local library and found an entire book of traditionally inspired patterns... in Norwegian! Norsk Vottar og Vantar by Annemor Sundbø has been translated into English, but who knows how long I would have to wait to get my hands on a copy up here.  No, clearly I was going to have to take the challenge.  I got out my norsk-engelsk dictionary and started translating.  

Well, what presented a secondary challenge is that I have been studying, like most beginners, bokmål, and Annemor's original is in nynorsk.  There were a lot of words I couldn't find in my little travel-sized dictionary, so I had to make a lot of guesses about the actual content of her patterns.  However, I am delighted to be able to say that my combined knowledge of knitting and Norwegian allowed me to make some educated guesses that actually turned into a pair of mittens!!  Yay!!

The first photo above is a picture of some baby barnacle geese, taken along the edge of the fjord past the dog kennels beyond town.  Tyler and I love to go bird-watching, and when we first arrived here, we were told that the dog kennels were the place to be.  Apparently, many of the birds have discovered that the hustle and bustle around the dog kennels provides an unlikely source of protection from predators like the fox and polar bear.  I don't know how often a polar bear would bother with such a tiny morsel as a baby bird, but this is where they nest.  Here are some other lovely birds we spied in that corner of Adventdalen:

 Male common eider.

 Eiders crossing the road at their assigned crossing area.

Red (aka Grey) Phalarope

Ivory Gull, chewing on some tough-looking something... but look at his beautiful blue beak!

I am pretty sure all of these photo credits go to Tyler, who was down around the dog kennels looking at birds just about every day for an entire month between June and July.  I should really leave it to him to talk about his own passions, but he does truly love bird-watching an enormous amount.  He might be the only traveler to Svalbard to have arrived with an entire ornithology textbook in his backpack, carry-on weight limit be damned.  Anyway, when I brought the mitten-pattern book home, Tyler immediately fell in love with a pair of mittens featuring some very sweet ducks, which I gleefully agreed to make for him...

...before I realized they were actually sized for a child.  Oops!  It took three tries, after knitting a swatch of fabric to get my guage with the yarns we had picked, and then attempting to redraw the pattern (by hand, on graph paper... just like grade school) at an appropriately man-sized proportion before both the pattern and the guage were working out to be something that fit.  Finally, success!!  And along the way, I also learned how to properly carry the second yarn along behind the knitted pattern on long stretches in between switching colors, and how to pick up and knit a thumb hole seamlessly... fantastisk!  I love learning new skills.  And since Tyler kept making us these delicious dinners, while I just sat back and worked on his mittens, it hardly felt like a delay of any kind to be working and reworking the pattern... it was pretty much just fun.  See what cooking an awesome dinner will get you?

 Make me enough of this...

 and this...

or this...

...and I will make you something like this.