The Story of the Drowned Village

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Hello! Today, I’m going to tell you a story. A story about a lake that wasn’t always a lake, a path that leads nowhere, and a drowned village.

‘Show, don’t tell,’ isn’t that what aspiring writers are always taught? Well, I’ll do better than that – I’ll show AND tell. Look, this is where we start – a narrow brick path, with old reed-roofed cottages on one side…

… and a flower garden and more tiny cottages on the other.

One of the cottages is now a tearoom. Maybe we can have a cuppa there later.

This used to be the path to the village of Beulake, but now it leads nowhere. Well, not quite nowhere – it ends at the water’s edge and brings us to the boat I’ve rented especially for us today. Please hop in. To get to the lake we need to negotiate a narrow canal first.

And here we are, on the Beulakerwijde – the lake that wasn’t always a lake. We’re not the only ones enjoying a lovely day out on the water.

It’s hot and sunny today, with a gentle breeze. Very different from that fateful day in November 1776, when rain and wind lashed the countryside.

Extensive peat extraction had made the area around Beulake vulnerable and a year earlier a heavy storm had broken the sea dykes in several places, flooded the land and driven away most of the inhabitants of the village. This time the storm was even worse. Fearing for their lives, the remaining 50 villagers fled to the church. They experienced the worst 36 hours of their lives, but survived to tell the tale. The village was drowned, however, and the entire area became a lake – the lake we’re on today.

The church disappeared in another storm, fifty years later, and… But wait, what’s that there in the distance?

It looks like, no, it can’t be, yes it is a… church tower???

A church tower complete with a bell and clockwork!

Well, actually it’s an artwork approximately in the spot where the original church of Beulake was. The small, uninhabited island behind it is called Kerkhof (church yard). It’s not hard to guess why.

The story of the drowned village of Beulake is the story behind one of the two versions of my Story Lines shawl.

The photographs were taken here, and I’ve been wanting to tell you the story behind it for a long time, but somehow never got round to it.

There is also a red version with ruffles along the edge, but the watery blue version ends with a row of droplets.

Well, it’s time to head back, along the reedbeds and water lilies.

We’re lucky – the tearoom is still open. Do you have time to stay a little longer? What would you like? Coffee, fresh mint tea, an alcohol-free beer? And carrot cake, a brownie or a slice of Dutch apple pie to go with it?

The Story Lines pattern can be found here on Ravelry and the blog post about both versions of the shawl here.

Our boat trip started from Natuurmonumenten visitor centre De Wieden. (Natuurmonumenten is the nature conservation organisation that protects and manages the beautiful and vulnerable wetland area of today’s story.)

A Monkey in the Forest

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Hello! Last week, besides needing some quiet time to myself, I was too busy finishing a monkey to write a blog post. Before he was to move in with our grandson, I took him to the forest at the end of our street for a photo shoot. First we walked through the part with the big old beeches, where we got a good shot of the way his tail peeks out from his dungarees.

But on the whole it was too dark under the trees, so we walked on to a sunnier spot. It’s one of my favourite places in the whole wide world – a tiny, perfectly round pool.

It’s probably an ancient cattle watering-hole and it is surrounded by a small patch of heathland.

The heather is in bloom at the moment. It’s mainly ling, but there is also some bell heather.

So, here he is, the monkey I knit for our grandson:

He was knit entirely in one piece, starting from the top of his head. It isn’t an easy knit, but the pattern is very clear and has photo tutorials for literally every detail. The only part that gave me some problems was the ‘frown’ – the vertical line between his eyes that needed exactly the right increases to get a neat result. It’s a very clever construction and I particularly like the shaping of the monkey’s back and bum that allow him to sit up straight on every surface.

I knit the monkey a pair of dungarees with buttons on the back, that you’ve already seen from behind. This is the front:

And a jacket that also leaves the tail free.

Even though it’s the middle of the Summer Holiday Season and there are many, many tourists in the region, nobody comes up to me here, asking what on earth I am doing. It’s quiet. Dragon flies are flitting across the pond, too fast for me to capture. A viviparous lizard is also faster than my camera. Fortunately the carnivorous sundew stays in place, allowing me all the time I need to photograph its treacherous sticky droplets.

We enjoyed a lovely couple of hours in the forest, the monkey and I. He has now moved in with our grandson and they are getting along very well. The monkey has already been dressed and undressed countless times, and also been thrown about quite a bit, but he keeps smiling and doesn’t seem to mind.

For the knitters among you, here are a few details:

  • Yarn: Sandness ‘Tynn Merinoull’ (monkey, 20 MC, 8 g CC); Dalegarn ‘Baby Ull’ (jacket and dungarees 17 g each, mouth small remnant); I used a fingering-weight yarn, but the monkey can be knit in any yarn weight
  • Height of monkey: 18 cm/7” from top of head to bum; 27 cm/10½” including legs
  • Knitting needles: 2,25 mm/US 1 for monkey; 3,0 mm/US 2½ for clothes
  • The designer’s website (in Dutch) with patterns and supplies for this monkey and other softies can be found here

The Dutch paper pattern booklet includes the jacket. There is a separate booklet for the dungarees and some more clothes. Designer Anita mostly uses colourful yarns like Schoppel Zauberball for her creations.

The digital pattern for the monkey in Dutch, English, German and French can be found here on Ravelry; the dungarees in Dutch and English here; and a dress here.

Because I wanted the monkey to be washable, I’ve filled it with synthetic filling. For weighting the hands, feet and bum I used plastic pellets encased in cotton tubular bandage.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this visit to ‘our’ forest with the monkey and me. Thank you for joining us! xxx

Small Summer Pleasures

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Hello! I know that some of you are on holiday, while others are off enjoying a fabulous weekend at a Fiber Fest. So maybe you’re reading this in front of your tent, on the veranda of your summer cottage, or in your hotel room. Or during your coffee break at home or at work. I like imagining all these different surroundings and look forward to reading about them on your blogs, Ravelry or elsewhere.

Nothing much is happening here at the moment. We’re at home, doing some work and just living our lives, and I thought this week I’d write about several of my small summer pleasures. First of all: rain.

We’ve had so much rain this week! Is that a pleasure? Yes, for me it is. After the hot and dry start to the summer, I love the muted light, the freshness and the wetness of it all. And our soil, plants and trees really need it.

The garden is perking up and another of my small summer pleasures is strolling through it, looking at the flowers, butterflies and insects. I’ve picked a few sprays of miniature roses for a small glass vase (top). We also have a tiny fuchsia bush, with flowers like elfin ballerinas.

In a recent episode of BBC’s Gardener’s World, there was an elderly couple who had dedicated their lives to growing miniature fuchsias. On the one hand, incredibly twee. What a thing to dedicate your life to! But on the other, so peaceful – there are far worse things to do with one’s life.

Speaking of peaceful, how can I ever swat a fly again, now that I’ve looked at this one from up close? With its veined glassy wings, its huge red eyes and its checkerboard-pattered backside it’s a beautiful creature.

My small summer knitting projects are also giving me a lot of pleasure. I just finished a pair of Welted Fingerless Gloves for our daughter, to replace a pair that was worn to shreds. They took 34 grams of Fonty’s ‘Tartan 3’, a yarn dyed using a more sustainable method than usual.

On my needles now is a small monkey for our grandson. More about that soon, when it’s finished.

We do not have a vegetable garden anymore, but we do have some vegetables in our garden. Rocket and spinach on last year’s compost heap. Rhubarb plants here and there. And one tomato and one cucumber plant against our tool shed.

The tomatoes are not ripe yet, but we’ve already harvested three wonderfully fresh and crunchy cucumbers – another small summer pleasure.

The other day we ate slices of cucumber with an Indonesian-style meal. (We have a large Indonesian community and their food culture has been an important influence on Dutch cuisine.) While I was cooking and laying the table, I thought you might like my recipe for Nasi Goreng and took some pictures. It’s an easy weekday meal and I’ve made it countless times over the years.

I don’t usually measure the quantities and sometimes vary with the ingredients, but I’ve done my best to write up a cookable recipe. My version is only slightly spicy. My husband likes it hot and adds lots of sambal.

Nasi Goreng

Serves 2

Ingredients

  • 125 g white rice
  • 1 tbsp sunflower oil
  • 150 g chicken breast, cut into cubes, or a vegetarian alternative
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 2 tsp ground coriander seeds
  • ½ tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp sambal brandal (a mild, fried sambal)
  • 1 medium carrot, finely diced
  • 150 g finely shredded pointy cabbage
  • ½ tbsp ketjap asin (salty soy sauce)
  • ½ tbsp ketjap manis (sweet soy sauce)
  • Salt

Method

The day before:

  • Cook the rice, leave to cool and store in the fridge (It is essential to do this ahead of time or you’ll get a very sticky Nasi Goreng)

On the day:

  • Heat the oil in a wok and fry the chicken cubes on high heat until lightly browned
  • Reduce the heat to medium, add the onion and fry until slightly transparent
  • Add the sambal brandal, ground coriander and cumin and stir for 2 mins
  • Turn up the heat, add in the carrot and cabbage and stir fry for about 3 mins
  • Reduce the heat to low, mix in the cooked rice and the two kinds of ketjap, and heat through
  • Add salt to taste

To serve:

  • This time we ate the Nasi Goreng with sliced cucumber, prawn crackers, serundeng (seasoned roasted coconut with peanuts) and fried egg.
  • Sometimes I also serve it with stir-fried bean sprouts, atjar tjampoer (sweet-and-sour pickles) and/or satay (peanut) sauce

Enjoy!

Spinning for a Community Project

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Hello! A slightly grubby street sign tells us that we’ve arrived at Schapendijkje (Sheep Lane). An apt name in view of why we’re here. So, where am I taking you today and why?

Well, we’re at a rather unusual place and I hope you won’t click away as soon as you know. We’re at the Noorderbegraafplaats – a large cemetery in the Frisian capital of Leeuwarden.

The reason we’re here is that it has a modern funeral space that urgently needs help from us, wool workers. (I’m using the word space instead of chapel because it is non-denominational.)

Come and take a look inside and you’ll understand why. With its white walls and wood-and-steel furniture, the interior is fresh, modern and spacious.

But the acoustics are terrible, sitting on the wooden benches for longer than five minutes is torture, and the atmosphere is rather bleak. The creative forces behind wool-rescuers’ organisation Pleed immediately saw possibilities and started the community project Aula in Blauw. In their words, the aim of the project is

‘to have a funeral space where people can feel embraced by
soft local woad-dyed blue wool.’

The plan is to improve the acoustics and atmosphere with felted wall panels, a hooked rug on the floor, long woven coverings for the backs and seats of the benches, and knitted and crocheted cushions.

Around sixty enthusiastic people showed up for the kick-off, and many more names are on the list of volunteers. I don’t feel comfortable placing pictures of their faces on the internet, but I think I can safely show their legs and feet.

For those of us volunteering as spinners, wool from the flock of sheep grazing the public green spaces in Leeuwarden was available.

I came home with two batts of washed (but still slightly greasy) and carded wool – 564 grams in total. The flock consists of Drenthe Heath Sheep, Schoonebekers and mixed breeds. I was told that ‘my’ wool is Drenthe Heath Sheep.

We’re asked to spin a fairly thick yarn and were given a length of blue-grey hand-spun wool as a guideline. My first two tries were too thin, but I think what I’m getting now is about right.

The 2-ply yarn I’m spinning is 10 wpi (wraps per inch), which amounts to a worsted-weight yarn. This is my wpi tool with its sunny smile:

The spinning needs to be finished by September, when the yarn will go to the next stage: the dyers.

Below, you can see my spinning set-up. My Louët S10 spinning wheel and an old kitchen chair. To the right a small basket for catching vegetable matter and unspinnable bits of wool. To the left a big basket of unspun wool. I’m spinning with a black tea towel on my lap, to protect my clothes and to better see what I’m doing with the white wool.

I’ve had some questions from another volunteer, so for anyone who’s interested, this is how I spin this yarn. I’m not saying this is the only way or the best way – it’s just how I do it.

I’m using a short forward draft, for a denser hard-wearing yarn. For spinning I’m using the largest ratio of my wheel (the largest disc). This will give the yarn the least amount of twist, which is most suitable for a thicker yarn. While I’m spinning, my wheel is turning to the right and I’m counting with every time I treadle: 1, 2, 3, let go.

I still get more twist than needed, though, because my hands aren’t fast enough feeding in the yarn. This is why I’m using the middle disc for plying. That will take enough of the twist out to make a stable, not overly twisted yarn. While I’m plying, my wheel is turning to the left and I’m counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, let go.

This isn’t the easiest wool I’ve ever worked with if I’m honest, and I was struggling a bit at first. But after I decided not to fight the wool anymore and accept its character we’ve been getting along fine together, the wool and I. I’m no longer trying to spin a perfectly smooth thread but aiming for a rustic yarn. Sounds good, doesn’t it, rustic? It’s a great lesson in embracing imperfection.

If you’ve discovered my blog only recently, here are a few related posts you may enjoy reading:

Thank you for stopping by and I hope to see you again next week!

A Yarn Shop and Sock Blockers

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Hello! As I said at the end of last week’s post, we added a couple of kilometres to the flax trail to visit a yarn shop. It is called Selden Sá! and is situated in Eastrum, a village of under 200 inhabitants.

For Selden Sá! to stay in business, either the people in Eastrum must be hugely prolific knitters eating up miles of yarn or there must be something about this out-of-the-way shop that makes people travel to it from far and wide. Let’s take a look around to find out.

Focused on flax, I spotted several linen yarns (e.g. Borgo de Pazzi Lino in photo at top). Lovely cool and summery. I also saw and fondled an extremely soft wool-and-cotton blend that would be perfect for a sweater for our grandson (photo below, to left of mannequins, third row from the top).

I’m hopeless at choosing things on the spot and regrettably didn’t buy any.

From people in my knitting group I’d already heard that Selden Sá! stocks many Scandinavian yarns and I recognized familiar ‘faces’ from Istex, Rauma, BC Garn and Holst Garn. There’s also a lot of Filcolana, a Danish brand I’m not familiar with but would definitely love to try.

For me, there is something so uplifting about browsing around in a yarn shop. All those colours! All those possibilities!

Don’t you just love it when a shop has lots of samples for inspiration?

A basket filled with swatches may not excite most people, but I could easily spend an entire afternoon studying them.

I wasn’t only browsing around, though, but also looking for something. What I needed was yarn for a pair of manly socks with an intricate stitch pattern in a light neutral, like solid grey or beige or something. What I left the shop with was a skein of hand-dyed variegated sock yarn in pink and taupe. Uh-oh, how unsensible! But very pretty, don’t you think?

I also bought a pair of wooden sock blockers – something I’ve been wanting to try for a long time.

I had just finished a pair of socks from a self-striping yarn and put them to soak as soon as we arrived home. To find out how much difference sock blockers make, I decided to block one sock and just hang the other sock to dry on the drying rack.

The socks fit my foot (shoe size 38) and the sock blockers were size 38-40. What I expected was that the sock would need to be stretched around the blocker. What actually happened was that the sock blocker disappeared completely inside the sock, hook and all! Upon drying, the sock shrank back a little, but still sat loosely around the blocker.

A bad buy? Well, that’s what I certainly thought at first. But when the socks were dry and I compared them, I could see a slight difference between the blocked and the unblocked sock. I don’t know if you can see it in the photo below, but the blocked sock (right) looked slightly neater, with more even stitches than the unblocked sock (left).

I expect the difference to be more marked in socks with a lace or cable pattern. I also suspect I need a pair of sock blockers in a larger size. Yes, I really think I need to pay Selden Sá another visit, for larger sock blockers, that soft wool-and-cotton yarn for our grandson and perhaps a few other things…

Do any of you have experience with sock blockers? Do you think they really make a difference? And do the blockers need to be larger than the socks or will that stretch out the knitted fabric too much?

I’d be grateful for your advice, but even if you don’t have any, I’m grateful for your visit. Bye! xxx

Follow the Blue Line

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Hello! Usually my writings are about woolly things, but today it’s all about flax and linen. My husband and I followed flax trail Follow the Blue Line last Saturday, and I thought you might like to follow it with us.

The 30-kilometre-long trail covers everything from growing flax to processing it, and spinning and weaving it into linen. Let’s follow it in the order we did, and we’ll see everything along the way. So, where are we? Well, we’re in the northernmost part of Friesland, with its open agricultural landscape.

Before we moved to where we are now, we lived in this area for 15 years and it still feels very much like home. We’re starting in the village of Blije, at textile hand-printing studio Kleine Lijn. Nynke prints all kinds of designs on cotton, silk and linen. My eye is immediately drawn to her plant prints. The top of this post shows a print of flax stalks with seedheads on linen. Here is some more of her work:

We’ve been following the trail for at least 30 minutes now, so high time for some refreshments in the adjacent tea garden, with its lovely mix of vintage furniture…

…and mismatched china.

Ready to continue the trail?

Before Nynke can print onto it, the linen she uses has a long way to go. It starts out as flax, a traditional crop in this region that is now making a come-back.

What I learnt on Saturday is that there are two kinds of flax: linen flax and oil flax. Linen flax has longer stalks to make longer fibres for spinning and weaving. And oil flax has shorter stems with more seed heads that produce more seeds for making linseed oil. There are several flax fields along the way and this is one of them:

In this field, most of the flax has finished flowering. But there are still a few of its lovely blue flowers to be seen.

Next stop: a potato farm with a high-tech farm shop. In addition to potatoes, fruit, veg and local tipples, it also has an unexpected product in its vending machine. More about that later in a separate post.

Now, let’s continue on to Mitselwier. Ah, the cool interior of the church makes a very nice change from the heat outside. There is a weaving exhibition inside, with demonstrations of weaving and flax spinning. Unlike wool, flax isn’t held on the spinner’s lap, but on a distaff. In the picture below, it is held in place with red ribbon.

The flax is pulled down from the distaff and spun into a thin linen thread.

The spinner frequently moistens her fingers with water while she is spinning. She tells me that after spinning, the thread is too sticky to be used for weaving straightaway. It needs to be bleached first – a process that involves covering the hanks of thread with hay, sprinkling that with wood ashes and then pouring boiling water over everything. Repeat that six times and the yarn is bleached. Phew, so much work!

Below from bottom to top: unspun flax fiber, spun linen thread and bleached linen thread.

Before we continue on to our final destination, it’s time for some cool, cool drinks and flax biscuits (with linseed).

A narrow lane brings us to flax museum It Braakhok in the village of Ie – on the right, where the Dutch flag is waving.

Here volunteers demonstrate how flax is processed to spinnable fibre.

I’m impressed by the number of steps and the amount of work it takes to make linen from flax.

Finally, we visit an exhibition about yet a different aspect of linen – its use for painting canvases. The exhibition tells us about a research project looking at the linen used by 17th -Century Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt.

It’s fascinating what linen can tell us about paintings and the artists who made them when it is examined and reconstructed using a 17th-Century weaving loom, X-rays and microscopes.

Flax trail Follow the Blue Line can be followed through early August. The exhibition Ontrafeld Bewijs (about the painters’ linen canvases) can be visited to September 30th. Admission to everything along the trail is free!

Next week, I hope to tell you about a yarn shop just a couple of kilometres outside the flax trail. I couldn’t very well pass that by when we were so close to it, could I? Hope to see you again then. Bye!

Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself

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‘There are two questions you should ask yourself if you’re thinking of taking up knitting as a hobby,’ writer and comedian Paulien Cornelisse said. ‘One: Do I love maths? And two: Do I love frustration? If your answer is yes to both, go for it.’

Paulien said this as a guest in a tv-show where she talks about knitting, Ravelry and the hand-knit sweater with the ‘bla bla bla’ yoke she is wearing – her young son’s design idea.

She also tells us how in the mirror ‘bla bla bla’ is reflected back at her as ‘old old old’. She really cracks me up! (Video here on YouTube.)

Paulien and her two questions repeatedly popped up in my mind when I was knitting a cardigan for our grandson. The pattern is from the Rico Design Baby Merino 01 booklet, and the yarn I used is the same Baby Merino used for all of the patterns in it.

I love the sweet 1950s style sweaters, jackets and socks in the booklet. But knitted shorts and bare legs with all those warm woollies? Hmm, not entirely sure…

So, what’s with the maths and frustration? Let’s start with the frustration. The yarn comes in 25 gram skeins and is a really nice and soft fingering weight wool. Only, several of the skeins had multiple sections like this, split and frayed:

Very frustrating to have to cut the yarn in inconvenient places and have all those extra ends to weave in. The other skeins were fine, though, and I hope this was just an unlucky Monday morning batch.

Next, the maths. On the whole the pattern is okay, although it could have been a little more precise. It’s mainly the sleeves I had problems with. Here the pattern says: Cast on 49 sts, after the ribbing decrease 3 sts evenly, continue straight with the resulting 80 sts and bind off.

Huh? 49 – 3 = 80?!?

Nothing about increases, and nothing about sleeve length either. Fortunately I love maths (not). And fortunately on one of my granny days, I also happened to have drawn a diagram of the machine-knit sweater our grandson was wearing.

So, I started counting rows and calculating increases. If you’d been there, I swear you would have heard my old brain cogs creaking and clicking. But they proved to still be up to some maths and I’m very happy and proud about the way the sleeves turned out. Ridiculous, perhaps, to be euphoric about underarm seams, but don’t they look nice?

I’m not entirely happy with the way the bottom of the button band pulls up – I should have picked up a few more stitches for that.

In spite of the maths and frustration, I enjoyed knitting the lightweight cable fabric and I’m pleased with how the cardigan turned out. It is filled with love and I hope our grandson will feel cosy and cared-for wearing it.

The colour I used is called ‘ivy’, but that it certainly isn’t. It’s a little closer to sage, but with more blue added in. It’s hard to capture in a photograph, but this’ll give you some idea.

Finally, I asked myself two questions. One: Would I use this yarn again? And two: Would I knit more items from this pattern booklet? My answer is yes to both, because I love maths and frustration the softness and dusty colours of the yarn and the style of the designs.

Wishing you a lovely and frustration-free weekend! Bye xxx

Summer Knitting Plans

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Hello! I hope this finds you all well. It’s been chaos and bedlam here. We were having some work done to our house, and everyone who’d promised to be here ‘in spring’, ‘sometime during the summer’, and ‘in September at the earliest’ descended on us in the same week. I’m glad the work is done, the dust has been dusted away, the paint is dry, everything is back in its place and we have uninterrupted electricity again.

So, back to life as usual, back to blogging and fortunately also back to more normal temperatures and some rain. It’s only June and we already have a very hot and dry month behind us. On one hot day, I saw a blackbird panting with outspread wings.

It seemed to be in distress, but hopped away cheerfully when I approached. I found out that they ‘sweat’ through their open beaks, and sunbathe to get rid of parasites.

I’m extremely worried about our increasingly hot summers and the worldwide problem they’re a symptom of. I’m trying to do what I can on an individual level, but it’s depressingly little. Getting depressed about it all isn’t getting us anywhere, though, so I’m doing my utmost to stay positive.

Some of the best ways for me to do that are outdoor exercise and knitting. And as for the latter, I’ve made A Plan! As it’s often too hot to have a large woolly project on my lap, I’m going to focus on small things during the summer months. There’s always a pair of simple socks on my needles.

Very nice, but I’d also like something more challenging. But what? Looking at my Knitting Wish List for 2023 for guidance, these are some of the things I wanted to do more of:

  • Norwegian knitting
  • Make things for our grandson
  • Knit more challenging socks

Socks are small anyway, and I’m certainly making one or two pairs of those.

When I think of Norwegian knitting, I first of all think of sweaters. But mittens are great small alternative. I found a few skeins of yarn brought back from Norway in one of my yarn boxes.

Things for our grandson are never huge, but can be even smaller than sweaters and cardigans.

So these are my plans for summer knitting. It feels good to have the decisions made and to have the materials and patterns at hand – things to look forward to.

My spinning wheel is also back in use.

And I’ve put my name down as a volunteer for and interesting woolly project. I’ll tell you more about that when there is something to tell. I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, but it’s something I’m really, really looking forward to being a part of.

We won’t be going anywhere until later in the year. If you’re staying at home, too, or if you’re holidaying somewhere and have some time on your hands, I hope you have some plans for things to make lined up, too. I’d love it if you’d drop in from time to time to keep me company. I’ll be blogging about my progress with the above and also hope to take you along on a few outings.

Whether your plans are big or small, enjoy your summer!

Flower Colours

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Hello! Here’s an update on my Seventh Heaven Scarf from left-over bits of sock yarn. The first two-thirds are finished – the green-and-blue part.

The part of the scarf with the greens of grass, leaves and reed, and the blues of sky and water.

Now it’s time for the flower colours. Time for thistle purple.

Time for ragged robin pink.

Time for calendula orange.

And time for flag iris yellow.

I’m adding just a small touch of yellow, in a yarn with oranges and pinks, but it’ll be a cheerful touch at the end of the scarf.

I took all of the flower and landscape pictures during a walk in the Wieden part of the Weerribben-Wieden National Park. All but one – the orange one. The orange tip butterfly didn’t show itself, and I had to look to our herb patch for a splash of orange.

June is a lovely time to be in the Wieden, with not just many beautiful and rare flowers and birds, but also lots of damselflies flitting and dragonflies whirring about and sunning themselves.

It’s been far too hot to have a warm scarf like this on my lap over the past week, and the heat doesn’t look like letting up soon. I think I’ll put my Seventh Heaven Scarf on hold for a bit, although I know that’s risky – no deadline, out of sight is out of mind etcetera. I do want to finish it, though, so will keep it in sight.

Keep cool, calm and hydrated!

Links:
The preliminary pattern of the Seventh Heaven Scarf can be found in this post.
For some more armchair travelling to the Weerribben-Wieden National Park visit this website.

Deadlines

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Hello! For today, my plan was to have the cardigan for our grandson finished and write about that, but as I’m writing this, the pieces are still drying on my blocking mats. In other words, I didn’t meet the deadline.

But hang on, who said I needed to meet a deadline? The word deadline popping up in my head made me stop dead in my tracks and set a whole train of thoughts in motion. It also brought back some unpleasant emotions that made me feel like withdrawing into a place like this…

… and spend lots of time on the bench opposite philosophizing about deadlines, getting things done and the meaning of life.

I photographed the house and the sculpture by Stephen Beale in the village of Houwerzijl. The sculpture is called Concrete Thoughts and is made from concrete and a patchwork of aluminium.

Back to deadlines. Why does the very word make me want to hide away? Well, for 30 years I worked as a non-fiction translator specializing in agriculture, sustainability, management and psychology. And whether I was asked to translate a grant proposal, a manual for a potato harvester, a research article or a self-help book, the contract always included a deadline.

For a long time I was fine with that. But over time the deadlines became non-negotiable and tighter and tighter, until they became totally unrealistic. When my work/life had become a race against the clock, I decided to quit.

No more deadlines EVER, I promised myself. Life is too short to let the seasons rush by without enjoying them. (It’s orchid season here now.)

One of the things I wanted time for was creativity and making things. I am fortunate enough to now have an undemanding job as a web editor. And with no children at home and no aging parents to care for anymore, time is not really an issue. But how to get things done without outside pressure and deadlines? I have given myself one deadline – publishing a blog post on Fridays. It’s a helpful deadline, that gives me courage and helps me overcome perfectionism, but it’s the only deadline I’m willing to impose on myself.

Some projects come with their own deadlines, like gifts that need to be finished before a birthday, or a child’s cardi that needs to be finished before it is outgrown. Writing this, I’m beginning to see that it’s especially creative things I would like to do just for my own fulfilment that I’m struggling with.

For instance, I have been working on a new shawl design for a long time, planning to publish it in January or February. But first I got side-tracked, and then kept knitting more and more swatches to tweak just one last thing.

At this rate I may be ready to publish this pattern for a nice warm shawl in July or August. Or November. Or never. Does that matter? In the grand scheme of things not in the least. But to me it does.

Having always been driven by deadlines, I am wondering about a more gentle way of getting things done. I do love making things, and there are many creative ideas I’d love to pursue, but somehow I don’t get round to them or I don’t finish them. Apparently love is not always enough. Do you struggle with this, too? Or do you find it easy to take time to just be creative? Do you ever set yourself deadlines? Do you have other strategies? Or are you fine with not finishing things?

I have no idea whether this is an issue for others, too. Anyway, thank you for reading this long and personal post!