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.