Frozen Beach

Frozen Rope.

Frozen Jellyfish (with man-sized hand for comparison)

Frozen Jellyfish.

Dress-Dreamin'

OOOOhhh, how I want to make a beautiful dress.  Here is my situation as a seamstress: I want to sew absolutely everything I wear, and never shop again.  BUT, I have not yet learned how to sew a darn thing meant for the human form.  How have I gotten to the age of almost-thirty without acquiring these skills?  I have no idea.  I was sewing clothing for my Barbie dolls when I was a kid; I remember sitting on a lounge chair on the back deck of a cottage in Maine and trying not to drop the pins between the floorboards onto the pine-needle carpet below.  I remember licking the end of the thread and twisting it to ease it through the eye of the needle.  I remember getting frustrated that I didn't understand exactly how all the parts of something should go together to make something flat into something 3-D.  And then I remember my Mom telling me that sewing is not something you should do when you're tired.  "Why?" I asked her, truly baffled.  Sewing looked so simple-- you sit there with a little thing in your hand, whip the thread through some loops, cinch it up--tada!  Clothing.  Birds and mice make ball-gowns practically by floating around the space of a dress form in Disney movies.  Why should sewing things, and especially small things, be difficult?  Or even take very long?  To this, my Mom answered simply that small things like Barbie clothes were, to the contrary, much harder than regular, people-sized things.  I remained mystified, but eventually ceded to her suggestion that sewing was not for when you are tired.

Since that day, I have been tired or something like it for about twenty years!  And in the meantime, I have settled for a lot of not-quite-what-I-really-meant off-the-rack clothes, and resorted to charmingly childish fixes for my tailoring needs.  Ten years ago, I found a fantastic vintage aqua blue Liz Claiborne dress for $3 at a Goodwill.  I cut the horrible shoulder pads out no problem, but then the sleeves ballooned in a bit of a funny way without the support, so I twisted them a bit, turned them under, and pinned them in place with safety pins.  They looked so cute and blousy!  I always meant to sew them properly, but was also a little afraid to make my alteration more permanent, lest I fumble it.  I still have that dress, but sadly know the fabric itself has suffered under my care.  Someday when I am not living in one polar extreme or other, I will unpack that dress from storage and make something new from what workable fabric remains.  Maybe I can make a blouse that fits properly.

On the other end of things, here is the situation in my closet: the current contents could fit into a backpack and come with me around the world.  Awesome!  Living like a snail: a former goal realized.  Sparse living has some real benefits, namely the simplicity of a limited wardrobe, and the satisfaction of using everything I have.  Also, polar latitudes generally maintain slim sartorial margins for the entire community, so there is little in the way of social pressure to stand out.  For exactly these reasons, however, I sometimes find I can get an enormous lift out of the simplest fashion-related frill.  I found a lavendar wool pencil skirt at the Bruktikken the other day which has been in high rotation lately.  It makes me feel like I am breaking some kind of rule, my knees braving the elements with only a thin layer of long underwear between them and the polar wind.  I enjoy these little rebellions of personality amidst my otherwise strictly functional wardrobe, but function always wins in the end.  On an especially blustery day, I will be wearing my snowsuit and my Ugly Duckling bright yellow wind layer, and that is that.  And these practical clothes take a beating with so much repeat wear.  When Tyler and I completed our twelve month stretch in Antarctica, literally every piece of my clothing had holes in it.  Do you believe I am still using the same distressed cardigan that saw me through that long year down south?  I am.  It still keeps me warm.  At least it's not in a landfill.

But someday, I will be back in a land of moderate climate and the variety that comes with it, and I am so looking forward to having more of the fun of clothing back in my life!  If possible, I would like to jump straight to the fun of wearing the things, and bypass the gruesome ordeal of shopping.  Thus, my plan is to use some of my quiet, arctic winter days to begin fussing with some fabric and patterns and see if I can learn some new skills.  In this spirit, I recently ordered some outrageously beautiful fabric:

 It's a Liberty cotton lawn, which is to say that it is sumptuously soft and richly colored.  I saw this fabric for the first time in a shop in Portland, OR about three years ago, at which point I really couldn't afford it.  And then, thanks to the internet, I found it again!  I have a very clear idea in my head of what it will be someday, but I have not yet found a pattern approximating that image.  Perhaps it will wait another three years until I have acquired some drafting skills and can design the dress of my dreams.  This is okay, as it might be about that long before I have a good occasion to wear the dress of my dreams.  In the meantime, I am downloading a different dress pattern, and using an old sheet from the Bruktikken to make my very first muslin for my very first dress, which will eventually be made out of some slightly less precious fabric.  I really hope this turns out to be a story of triumphs; but one cannot triumph if there is no struggle to overcome, so I also anticipate a steep learning curve at various points... wish me luck!

Waning Daylight

 The other day, my mother asked me how much daylight we still had each day.  I said I thought we still had sunlight between 7 am and 7pm every day, but now that I am paying attention, I know that I had already totally lost track of the progression of things.  The sun didn't quite make it over the eastern mountain peaks to light the other side of Isfjørden until 9 am today, at which moment my boss called me over to the window to look at the lovely scene, and I watched the reverse happen tonight at about 5:30 pm. As it gets darker, waking up early for work becomes harder, of course; but the consolation is in being one of the few to see the slow, extended sunrise.  Lately, on clear days, they look like this:

Some days, of course, aren't as brilliant, but many are.  At Bakehuset, we are blessed with several massive windows overlooking the ISS building and it's brilliant beyond.  The machine where we clean our sheet trays is super old and noisy; Petter warned me when I started working to put ear protection on or it would sound like the grinding was inside my head.  But the machine is also right next to the window, so sometimes when the world is especially beautiful outside, I put on the earmuffs and feed some trays through the machine and stare at the mountains and feel lucky, even despite that wretched, mechanical whine.

Outside of work, there is also lots of time for contemplating the beautiful.  One of my favorite ways is just by sitting at the table in our cozy little house, working on tiny sewing projects and glancing out at the changing light.  As far as the sewing goes, I have a few more ambitious things planned, but for those I need to gather supplies and work out some realistic goals.  I started by purchasing just basic needles and the only thread I could find in town (polyester, amazingly, instead of cotton... no idea why, but I got red because why not), along with an iron and an extremely mini ironing board.  Maybe I should take a photo of that for one of these posts, it's really funny!  Anyway, after the success if my innesko recycling effort, I decided to do another simple sewing experiment with some repurposed fabric to make some napkins for our sweet little kitchen table.  Fancy, shmancy white linen napkins, nonetheless!

Posing with a bowl of apple fennel cabbage salad... yum!

Inside the hem.  These are very handmade, no secrets here.

The fabric came from a white linen summer skirt that I found at the ever-awesome Bruktikken.  I was on the fence about whether this project was going to count as truly worthy repurposing, or would fall short of that into the cutting-up-useful-items-to-make-smaller-items category of the less-than-earth-friendly.  But two things finally swayed my choice: some slight stains on the skirt meant that while it wasn't unwearable, it certainly wasn't going to be anyone's dream find, and the fact that it was a summer skirt lying at the bottom of a bin of clothing in Longyearbyen, Svalbard on the eve of mørktid... well.  It will be many months before anyone finds an appropriate venue for wearing a white linen skirt up here, and by then it may have been so scuffled and jumbled among the other clothes in the bins that it won't be much of a looker.  So.  Linen napkins for us!  (I am hoping to find a use for the bit of leftover fabric I have from the lining of the skirt-- it's only some cheap chintzy stuff, but it might be useful for making a mock-up of something or using as a liner layer for something else.)

These napkins were really easy to sew up, of course-- linen presses so nicely, so I just cut out squares (fun fact: I used the copy of Annemarie Sundbø's Norsk Vottar og Vontar I still have out from the library to trace for my square), pressed double-folded hems and sewed them down with a running stitch of red thread to give a little character.  And also because I bought red thread, like I said.  No hiding that stuff on a white field...  The final size of the napkins is pretty small for a table napkin-- it doesn't really cover your lap, so it wouldn't pass in a fancy restaurant after all.  But they are big enough to be functional, and they look rather sweet.  They make me think of tea-time actually, which might be why I suddenly wanted to make scones one Sunday morning.  

Lemon scones with blackberry jam.

Just about a week ago, things really started getting colder out here.  The river of glacial meltwater that runs through town is dwindling and starting to freeze:

Even so, last week it still looked like this around here: 

But this week, we got our first real snow, and just like that, everything is white:

White beach.

Brushing off snow after a walk through the big, fat flakes.

A fat little sandpiper...

The sandpipers are still flitting about the shore, despite the crust of ice on the sand above the tidal line.  Tyler keeps reminding them they better think about flying soon.  They are eating and eating like crazy, getting ready to fly their chubby little selves back to the fastlandet.  We spied some late-lingering barnacle geese through the snowfall the other evening, so there are still a few birds to make the journey south.  My hunkering down, therefore, continues in earnest.  Tomorrow I will be going to the Bruktikken again, this time on a mission to rustle up some fleece layers for my legs, maybe some socks or a hat or ski mask, man-sized anything for Tyler, etc.  So far, I am going remarkably well compiling a functional winter outfit without actually buying any Gear.  I wonder how far I can make it... all the way???  Fingers crossed!  The next thing on my knitting needles is a pair of thick, wool liners for inside the boots I also got for free from the Bruktikken... so more on that soon!