The world's thickest wool socks

I used to love knitting and crocheting when I was younger, but after I started working I forgot about my old hobby. Luckily, one of my colleagues is great with all such things, and she rekindled my interest. So earlier this year I started knitting and crocheting again. It has to be said that my first attempt ended after a couple of minutes, instead of starting with something easy, I decided to make a hat for a friend's newborn... It didn't work out.

A couple of failed attempts later (for instance, I had to throw away what was to be a kitchen towel - it turned out zigzag'ed), my mother mentioned that she had received some felted wool socks, and that this was the warmest thing ever. Well, I'm an icicle, always freezing and my feet are especially bad. So, naturally I jumped on this idea, and wanted to make my own.

I had made socks once before, as a gift for a friend. All I remembered from that experience, was that I swore I'd never do it again because it was so HARD. Well, my aforementioned colleague came to the rescue, telling me about "square socks", which are easy to knit and doesn't require much sewing. Lo and behold, it was both easy and fun enough that I actually finished them! :)

The kitting part was easy. Putting the pieces together the right way was hard. Even with a photo documented "recipe", I just could not get them looking right. I actually had to turn to Marius, who just laughed at my attempts. He didn't laugh so hard, though, once he tried it. However, he did understand the instructions better than me, and in the end he was the one who succeeded. (Which I found totally annoying, but not enough to continue trying to make it myself).

I had previously thought that felting was very complicated and hard work. Instead, it turned out to be extremely easy - all you have to do is wash the knit work in the washing machine along with soap and a tennis ball and/or a towel. (I was given lots of different advice, some said I had to use a towel, others said a tennis ball, so I went for both just in case and that worked out just fine).

Here are the finished socks:


As you can see, I've worn them quite a lot. However, because I'm so extremely cold, I wanted more warmth. And that was the start of my quest - to make the world's thickest wool socks. Up until now, I'd only followed the instructions, now it was time to start experimenting.

I scoured the local store for the thickest wool and I used two threads - having only one wouldn't cut it, of course. :P In felting, it is the holes that make the result thicker in the end, so I made sure to get thick knitting needles as well. I love to use circular needles, because the work doesn't fall of them as easily.

I started this project about a week ago. Unfortunately, I'm prone to carpal tunnel syndrome (at least I think that's what it's called, in Norway we call it "mouse arm" or "mouse illness" because you typically get it from using a mouse too much. I must say I was disappointed when I didn't find a cool English translation for this, but carpal tunnel syndrome DOES sound impressive, though!). This means that whenever I knit, my arm hurts. So it's a slow progress on the socks. I hate that, I want to be able to knit and crochet as much as I want, it's great relaxation and it's fun to do while watching TV or listening to an audio book.

Anyways, here's a picture of what my "world's thickest wool socks" looks like at the moment. It's not much, but I hope they'll turn out warm enough even for me. :) So now you can all wait in anticipation for the result, I promise to blog about it whether I succeed or not!

Back again

Here I am, almost a year after my last entry (where I, by the way, apologized for being a lazy blogger - now that's the understatement of the year! :P). One of my friends reminded me that I did in fact use to write a blog, so I'll just jump right into it again.

A lot has happened in the last year, of course. So I'll just mention a few things that pops up in my mind.

I have started wearing glasses again. I'm not going to wear them all the time, only when working, reading or driving. This is because I have perfect eyesight. Only too bad that I only use one eye to see with most of the time :P (which gives me a lot of head aches when I work, for instance, as my eyes strain from staring at a computer all day).

We have bought a big house! It's in Lillestrøm, which is a town (officially, anyways, I think it's a big overstatement) right outside of Oslo. It takes 11 minutes by train. You can see what it looked like when the previous owners lived there from this ad. We moved early May, and moving was a lot of stress, but now I finally feel a little bit settled down and it is starting to feel like home. Oh, and the good thing is that we have a dedicated guest room (well, not dedicated exactly, it doubles as my sanctuary when I want to be by my self and rest - I love being able to just be me sometimes! :). So now there's really no excuse not to come visit! :)

We also have kittens! Our cat, Hekla, has three little furballs running around. They are ADORABLE! :) Unfortunately, it is now almost time to sell them, so they won't be staying that long. It's rather traumatic to think about, but we'll be keeping one or two, so I'll just have to console my self with that. If you want to see some pictures of them, you can look at Lettgaupe.no.

A couple of years back I bought a bike. I rode it maybe 5 times before I got a flat tire. Of course, I planned to fix it, but I somehow never got around to it, until now. But Lillestrøm is very flat, and there are a lot of great bike lanes around where I live, so I now I've started biking again, and it's a lot of fun! :) And speaking of bike lanes, on one of the routes, I only had to ride a couple of minutes until I was out in the COUNTRY. And I literally mean COUNTRY. Large acres of land and farms and stuff. So that's how outskirts I live now, crazy! :)

I've also taken up swimming again, unfortunately that's the one thing Lillestrøm lacks, a proper indoors swimming pool. Luckily, they have a great outdoors one, so I'm taking advantage of that as long as it's open. It is actually a large park with a pool in it, so you can stay there all day and sunbathe and barbeque. You can see some pictures of it here.

So, what else is new? I changed the template for the blog, I thought it was rather fitting to use the rain background as I'm currently on vacation in Bergen, where it rains cats and dogs!

Oh, and I just recently discovered a great music site - grooveshark.com. I've just started to try it out, but it looks really promising. No commercial, unlike Spotify (which I love), more songs, and it's supposed to have a lot of the same features as Pandora did. (and I miss Pandora! Wonder why they're not legal in Norway yet, we allow Spotify, so we should allow Pandora, too!) So I'm really looking forward to trying out this site a little more!

Okay, that's all I can think of for now, I'll try to write more often from now on! :)

P.S. I cheated a little, as I started writing this entry when I was on vacation in Bergen. I didn't post it right away, as I thought I'd add a pic of me with my new glasses. But now over a week has passed, and I realize that if I'll wait for that picture, this post will never happen.

So, at this moment I am back in Oslo, working again. And one of the kittens has found a new home, which is very sad, but also great because it's with a couple of friends of ours, and they will give him the most wonderful home ever! :) (except for ours :P)