Two Down!!

Well, since I'm not doing any Christmas knitting, really, I've not been too bad at getting my projects done. I finished the two tulip sweaters that I was doing for the two little girls. Hopefully I'll find out today if they liked them. Well, I'm sure the baby won't actually care, but you know what I mean. I guess I mean, I'll hopefully find out if their mom liked them.

Apparently the 3 year old met the baby (who came into the world on Sunday) and wanted to feed her, so that seems like a good sign. It was my desire in creating two of these things that the 3 year old would feel special too, since I imagine it will be hard for her to deal with a new sibling. It always is, right?

A note to those of you considering doing the tulip for the bigger kids: I made some modifications. Remember that I used the Coldwater Collaborative version of the pattern, rather than Dream in Color's. For some reason, CC thought that DiC's version was wrong - something to do with the shoulders, I think. So, change 1) CC didn't change the portion of their directions regarding the i-cord edging from that of the smaller version of tulip. In the smaller version of the tulip sweater, only picking up one stitch while turning the corner was enough, but you need more than that when you do the big one. This is probably obvious. And more importantly, 2) I changed the way that the sweater closes. I decided that there was no way that a little tie around the neck was going to be sufficient to hold that bigger sweater together, so I added a button band. I am glad that I did this, because I think it makes for a much more practical, warmer sweater. However, it wrought some havoc with the look of the sweater in that the connection between the i-cord edging at the neck of the sweater and the edging around the sides of the fronts was a little awkward and not as pretty as I'd like. But, it's not so bad that I'm going to undo it and/or be unhappy about it.











Last, proof of how cold it has been around here (gratuitous shot of cats):












These guys (all of them, actually) have been huddling together more. It's pretty darn cute.

Oh, and proof that I'm not the only crazy knitter: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119766934184930123.html?mod=blog

I had seen buttons for this but didn't know what it was. How freaking funny!!

Fall has come late to Chicago!! Somehow there are tulips involved as well....

I can't believe that as I write this on November 13, there are still leaves on the trees. I don't think they normally last anywhere near this long. In fact, my mother maintains that they are usually gone by Halloween. Weird. Anyway, here is some badly shot proof of the changing/falling leaves in our area. I really didn't do that great a job capturing how bright and wonderful the leaves are. They're just electric right now. It was hard to shoot, though, because of the position of the sun, my laziness (not wanting to leave my porch), and the fact that I didn't want our SUPER paranoid neighbors across the street to think that I was trying to photograph their house or something....
If you click on them and blow them up you can sort of see how pretty they are.







Of course, the fall tulips I spoke of in the title are the ones I'm knitting. I speak in the plural, but you can only see one here. This is the 6-9 month version. I am awaiting now the kit from Coldwater Collaborative that will bring me the 6 year old version. I am finishing the current sweater for a baby that is due in December and the bigger one will be for her big sister so she can feel good too. Hopefully they will both get some use out of these sweaters!

A note on the size: I do have the 6-9 mo pattern, but I have knit it in smaller gauge. As far as I can tell, no baby in the plains is going to need a sweater from June to September, so I think making it available now is a good idea. Of course, since I don't know what size newborns are, or more importantly, what size this one will be, my choices in making it smaller are definitely arbitrary. I've got my fingers crossed. If nothing else, hopefully she can wear it in the spring . . . so long as I haven't made it too small . . . which I don't think I have. But we won't know until December, will we?

So, here it is:












It's going together nice and quickly, which is encouraging since I have to make a much bigger one soon. And hopefully I will have learned from my mistakes. Heh.

Here is a blurry close-up of the i-cord bind off. I was pretty nervous about that part, but it was super simple and it's kind of a fun way to finish!








I made a couple mistakes as I went a long. Big surprise. I have to admit that for the first time, I didn't really fix most of them because most of them were not big enough to notice. I hope. I did do something that is noticeable, though, and that is that the parts that I picked up on the insides of the cardigan front are not equal -- that is, the seed stitched parts on the left and the right front insides of the cardigan are not equal because I didn't go as far up in picking up stitches on the left side. Hooray. I would have fixed it, but I would have had to undo so much at the point where I discovered it. I am hoping very much that when I do the i-cord around the neck, along with the i-cord strings for tying the sweater, I will be able to hide that somewhat. And of course, there's always that deeply delusional hope that I will be able to block out the difference . . . . Ha, ha, ha. Man, I hope so. If it's horrible in the end, I'm sure I'll rip it all out. I don't like having messed up stuff to give out as gifts, that's for sure.

Two notes about the pattern, both of which may have been obvious to smarter knitters than me:

1) when I picked up stitches for the cardigan front panels, the instructions said to pick up three stitches for each four rows. At first I thought maybe I should do this with the outer-most stitches, but those were slipped and I didn't quite know what to do, since they didn't represent the number of rows and it would have been hard to count. I tried it for a second and found that the stitches were waaayyy too loose and looked terrible for picking up the stitches. So, I quickly moved instead to picking up stitches from the column of stitches just inside of the slipped/outermost column. This worked much better for counting and for the tightness and visual appeal of the sweater. It is probably obvious to some that this is how to do it, but I had to think and try it before I decided to change my approach, so it's possible that someone else could have the same problem.

2) in the first row of color change, my instructions say "slip 1st stitch purlwise, k1, p1*, repeat from *...*." I wrongly slipped, k1, p1, all the way through that row because I assumed (though perhaps the "1st stitch" part should have given it away) that the ** would include the whole thing -- I had to make something up since it was unclear. Later I looked at the top of the instructions and for some reason that part is repeated up there. THAT one had it correct: slip 1st stitch purlwise, *k1, p1*, repeat etc. Don't make my mistake.

Lastly, this week, I'm going to give you a gratuitous shot of my cat Bobcat strutting down our street because it's such a lovely shot. Enjoy. :)

Happy Halloween (a day late)!

As usual, it has been a long time since I last wrote. We have been on a whirlwind tour of the U.S. Well, not exactly, but we were in Southeastern Wisconsin three weekends ago (to celebrate our first anniversary), then we were in Northern Wisconsin the weekend after that (for my dad's birthday), and last, we drove to the Atlanta area for my aunt's surprise b-day party and then onto Jacksonville, FL to see Andrew's family. In the Atlanta-Jacksonville trip alone, we put 2400 miles on the car!! All trips were pleasant, though, and worth the effort.

Weirdly, I managed not to take any pictures of most of the things we saw/did. Well, maybe the Europe trip was weirder -- the fact that I got so many pictures. I am not so good at taking photos of stuff -- it doesn't come naturally, I have to force myself to do it. Anyway, this blog entry will probably be photo-light (especially compared to those from Europe).

Here is a picture of us having lunch at the freezing cold cafe in the cool new wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum:
Very exciting photo, no? If you want to see a weird image of the new building, click here. It is strange looking because the "wings" of the building can move and this photo shows the wings in their different positions moving from up to down or vice versa. Normally the wings are just in one position and quite lovely to look at. Anyway, it is a really neat building and worth checking out if you're in the area. Besides being freezing when we were there, it was a nice place to see art and it also gave one a very nice view of Lake Michigan (and the Milwaukee marathon that happened to be going on at the time we were there).

I don't have any photos from Northern Wisconsin. When I say Northern Wisconsin, by the way, I'm talking so far north that if you went any further, you'd fall into Lake Superior! Here is a fun link to the history of Washburn, WI (the town we were in). It's amazing to see how much industry used to be there, given how small the place is today. You can see from the top photo on the page's frame how pretty it is up there.

A week after returning from cold, cold Washburn, we headed to considerably warmer Atlanta. Here is a picture of all of us (this includes immediate family and lots of friends -- including some who had flown in from Baton Rouge, LA just that day solely for the purpose of surprising my aunt!) waiting for my aunt in the foyer of my cousin's house.
The door is open because my aunt has just come in. I wish so much that I had a picture of her face when she saw us. My cousins and uncle truly outdid themselves with this party and there is no question that she was surprised. It was wonderful! It probably took her the length of the party before it all sort of sank in.







So, did I knit for her? You bet I did. Unfortunately, I flaked out and forgot to get a picture of what I did. :( I knitted the Not Pedestrian Peds -- thank you Stitchnsnitch! I got the link off of Ravelry. I'm so mad I didn't take a picture of the finished product, but I do have a photo of the yarn:
There is great significance to this yarn, you should know. Not only is it a color that my aunt happens to like very much, but waaaay more important is the fact that it is called Mustang Sally (by Blue Moon Fiber Arts). Why is that significant? Because my aunt's name is Sallie, of course!! I told her that even if the color had been horrendous (not that BMFA makes horrendous colors), she would have gotten socks out of it anyway because of the name. It is particularly pleasing that it happens to be a color that she really likes.

Other than that, I haven't been doing much knitting lately. Truth be told, I have been going through a bout of morning sickness (I can say that now that our family knows!) and was not feeling up to par or like I had the energy to do anything -- including knitting, if you can believe that! I am doing much better now, though, as I am beyond the first trimester and so I have begun another gift project.

Ta da!
I am knitting the Tulip sweater (scroll down on that page) that is so popular right now. I am making it for someone's upcoming baby. I think it will be really cute. I have already screwed something up of course so I need to rip back a bit, but overall I am pleased and am looking forward to making this thing. I am particularly looking forward to completing a second project in a month's time. I feel like I haven't been finishing anything lately!

Oddly, this is my first baby sweater! It is fun to make something that I think will go together quickly. Normally, I make blankets (see previous entries!). I will keep you up to date on how it goes.

That's all for now! Who knows? Maybe next time I will have cast on for my own little impending being. It all seems so unreal right now, though, so that's not likely.

Last European Vacation Post: Paris!

Say it isn't so! I cannot believe that it has been a month since I last wrote. I've gotten really bad about this. Uff.

This is my last post about the European vacation we took this summer. I wonder how much better I'll be at posting now that I don't have a million photos to pour through every time I want to write. Ha. As if it's the photos' fault that I've taken this long!

So, last I wrote, we were in Amsterdam and Utrecht. From there we took a train to Paris, our final stop. Our hotel was near-ish to the Eiffel Tower and the first thing we saw in Paris was just that! As we walked to our hotel from the Metro (subway), we saw it looming in the distance. So, we grabbed dinner and then walked toward the light. Here it is in the evening (quite beautiful, if I do say so myself):

Sometimes -- I think it was every hour, on the hour -- the Tower just starts to sparkle all over, with the background lights going off and only little lights lighting up (and seeming to move) all over the tower.








The next day, we went to Notre Dame. Incredibly (to me), Notre Dame took nearly 200 years to build!! According to Rick Steves, much of the work on the cathedral was done (for free) by the parishioners themselves. You would recognize it if I were to post a picture that looked like this. I have to laugh, because I am probably the only person in the whole entire world who comes back from Paris with only a picture of the back of freaking Notre Dame!! How did I do this? I don't know. Truth be told, though, I think the back is almost more beautiful. A very lucky thing that happened to us as we were touring Notre Dame is that there was a choir practicing while we went through. I felt very lucky having a chance to hear the church used that way -- a non-touristy way. It gave you a sense of what it's like to worship there, not just be a tourist there.

From Notre Dame, we wandered around the Left Bank area and walked by a very famous book store (Shakespeare and Co.) that Ernest Hemingway wrote about in "A Movable Feast." There is so much history in Paris -- so much art (visual and verbal) history -- that there is always something exciting to see just around the corner, it seems.


Another way that we got to see some architecture (especially getting a close-up of the bridges) was on a boat tour. Our tour was not so great in the sense that, as I said of the one in Copenhagen, there is little room for the narrator to ad-lib when they have to present in multiple languages, so we learned only very by-the-book info about the stuff we saw. It was still nice to give our weary legs a rest, though, and to see the city from a different perspective. We saw all the usual stuff on the tour, but we also saw this:

I know it's not very good paparazzi-ing, but this is a shot of some big Ratatouille shindig. It looked quite swanky. It was along the river and it was a perfect night for just such a soiree, it seemed to me. I have no idea if anyone famous was there or not, but it was clearly a big, expensive party -- unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of the gigantic cake they had.


On our way home from our boat ride, we stopped by the Louvre. We walked home from the boat and it was a verry long walk. Still, it was nice to see the Louvre all lit up at night.

I think one of the most shocking things about the European museums is how unbelievably large the buildings that house the museums are!! This place was HUGE. It used to be a palace. Note the, um, interesting pyramid from (I think) I. M. Pei in the middle.



We went another day to see the inside of the Louvre. We did see the infamous Mona Lisa. She is small. But, I'm glad we got to see her. I really, really wish we had been able to get into some of the modern museums, but our timing was off for that while we were there. I am actually a much bigger fan of modern art than of the old classics. This is not to say that I don't appreciate the older stuff a all, but I just don't get quite as excited over it as I do the newer and Paris has an incredible, gigantic collection of art from every age!

From high art, we went the next day to Montmartre, where many famous artists have spent time doing some very not high minded things along with their art that eventually became known as fine art. We are talking here of Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Van Gogh (briefly), and many, many others.

High atop Montmartre is the Sacre-Coeur. It is an amazing church that looks like it is much older than it is. Not only is the outside beautiful, but it has gorgeous mosaic all throughout the inside. I am a nut for mosaic, so I enjoyed the inside of this church more than even Notre Dame. Please note: BIG freaking hill.

After climbing the BIG freaking hill to get there and walking through the place, my husband naturally thought it would be a good idea to walk to the top of the church.... Yes, we walked hundreds of tiny steps to the top of the darn church. We even climbed around a little bit outside on the roof, to follow the path to the top. Yes, this was kosher. We paid an entrance fee to do this. So, basically, we paid to climb. Oy.

Then we walked around a much more profane space: the market place at Place du Tertre.
I kinneared a shot here, basically. All around there were current, active artists selling their goods, painting, and playing chess! It was great! It was very moving to think that years ago, it could have been Picasso, or one of his colleagues, that was selling here. I thought that was pretty cool.




Two more images from the area:
The building on the right is the Lapin Agile (Agile Rabbit -- named for the picture of the rabbit jumping out of the stew pot painted on the building). It is another place on Montmartre that is famous for being an artist hangout. Specifically, Rick Steves mentions Picasso, Renoir, Utrillo, Modigliani, etc. Quite impressive!




Lastly, at the end of our trek around Montmartre, we saw the infamous Moulin Rouge, which means, by the way, Red Windmill.
As it turns out, there had been lots of windmills in the area. This one just happens to be the famous one because of the cabaret that was associated with it. The can-can was started there, I believe.






On our last day of Paris, we finally made it to the yarn store. Yes, our last yarn for the trip and the blanket. The store we went to was La Droguerie. Apparently there is also a yarn store at Le Bon Marche, a department store in Paris, but given my experience with the yarn store at Stephen's Green in Dublin, I didn't even want to take a chance. Here is a photo of the outside of the store:
Why only the outside, you ask? Because the people inside wouldn't let us take one of the inside!! Seriously!! I have very mixed feelings about La Droguerie. They had some really wonderful embellishments and good stuff for sale there -- beads too! A person who likes that kind of stuff could get lost there forever even though it's not that large of a place.

So, what's negative about it? Well, mostly the vibe, I thought. The first thing that happened was that we were told not to take a photo. They certainly have the right to say no, but it was kind of a turn off. Then, their yarn selection was kind of limited. Well, not exactly. I mean, they had a wide variety of colors and a couple of different blends, which was great, but they only carried one brand of yarn -- presumably theirs (it had no labels or anything on it).

So, I looked through the yarn and decided to get something very neutral, because, once again, I had forgotten to bring my clippings from the other colors that I had. Fine, so I took them off the hooks and walked around the store to look at all the other goodies. All around us there were shiny objects just begging to be touched, but all of them had signs on them saying not to touch -- a salesperson would help you. As I was sitting with Andrew, fondling my yarn, taking it all in, a very polite and quiet saleswoman came up to us as asked if there was anything else we needed. I said no, thank you. At which point she explained to me that at that store, you weren't even supposed to pick up your own freaking yarn!! There were no signs to this effect on the yarn, but I guess I was supposed to know this somehow. It was very embarrassing. :( I handed over my yarn and she took it back behind the cage (where the crabby no-photos lady stayed to complete the sales transactions for everyone as they checked out. It was kind of weird and definitely not the happy, fondle-our-yarn experience that all of the other yarn stores throughout Europe were. I know a lot of people like this store and I can understand why, but I was apparently having a culturally inept day and it kind of turned me off. Oh well. Here is our yarn:

Despite how uncomfortable the experience was, I did enjoy shopping for yarn in Paris and think that the store is a really unique place. On another day, I might have fallen in love with it. By that time, we were both pretty tired from travelling and about ready to get home and I'm sure this colored the experience.



So, at the end of our stay in Paris, we got on a plane and jetted off for the U.S. We had a great time, got some wonderful yarn, and were pretty happy to get home, too.

Amsterdam

From Copenhagen we went to Amsterdam. We went via train, then boat, then train again. But, here's the amazing thing that I've never thought of or seen before:
I don't know if you can tell, but this is a picture of the train ON BOARD THE BOAT!!!! Can you believe this???? I had no idea. Wow.










Here is a long-distance photo of another one of the boats and I don't think it really gives you any idea of the size of the boats, but I was impressed (especially because my train was on board the boat I was on!):
Not so clear.








We got into Amsterdam late at night so we didn't do anything but go straight to our hotel. We did manage to pass a few red light windows, which was sort of interesting, but we kept walking. Then, with our back packs on our backs and waaayyyy too much yarn in hand, we encountered this:

which we had to walk up.










This set of stairs led to this:
which we also had to walk up. I thought I was going to lose my mind when I saw these, but once the back packs were off (after we were at the top of the stairs in our room), the stairs weren't quite so scary. Still.... Whoa. I don't think these photos do these stairways justice!








It's hard to say what we did in Amsterdam, exactly. No, this is not because we were hitting all of the coffee shops and imbibing in all those things that aren't legal here in the U.S. It's because we were there for a short time and we mostly did the Rick Steves' walk again. We had a nice time.
Amsterdam is a pretty city











and there is a lot of interesting history there. I particularly liked learning about the Dutch resistance to the Nazis. It's just too bad the people in the Netherlands didn't wake up to the threat the Nazis posed until after they had taken hold of the country!

We went to the Anne Frank House, too, which was very interesting. It's always a unique experience to have something physically in front of you that you've only read about. You get to walk about the whole house and it brings the book to life. Oh, and you should definitely follow Rick's advice: go later in the evening. In the earlier part of the day, the line is really, really long. For some reason, it becomes much more manageable later on and you can walk through the place without feeling claustrophobic.

Besides the historically significant stuff, we just enjoyed walking around. Among the random things we took in was the Amsterdam Tulip Museum, which was surprisingly informative and enjoyable for being so small and not being something we were looking for.

Also near the Anne Frank House was the yarn shop De Afstap. Their site is entirely in Dutch, by the way. This site has a very brief English description -- plus the address! Franklin, of the Panopticon, wrote about this place and was quite excited. I, however, was less so. I am sure that this is at least partly because I was looking for Dutch wool. De Afstap sells Rowan wool exclusively, basically. That's great, of course, if that's what you're looking for. I wasn't. And I couldn't really fathom going to a shop that sold only one brand of yarn. It was a cute place, though:
This second picture is of the inside (with me posing painfully for the camera). In the lower right hand part of the photo you can see the wool along the wall. The frames to the left are for all of the needlepoint, which is located upstairs.






Other random stuff we saw:
lots, and lots of bicycles!








A funky flower that lots of people were growing:









And many tilting buildings!
I don't know how well this photo conveys this, but they were all leaning to and fro. It was pretty strange to see. Apparently it has something to do with the water.






The highlight of my trip to Amsterdam, though, was seeing a dear friend of mine whom I haven't seen in a number of years. She moved to the Netherlands from the U.S. about 10 years ago! She looks as fabulous as ever and it was as if we had just seen each other last week when we got together.









On our way back to our hotel from meeting Jasmine, Andrew met the woman of his dreams:
There were a bunch of metal lizards crawling around the grass in this area (the Leidseplein) and he couldn't resist her.










Lastly, on a whim, brought about by Jasmine, we went to Utrecht the next day on our way to Paris. It was a lovely town -- a college town -- and would have been a lot of fun to check out if we hadn't been rained on. However, before getting too wet, I did get this shot:

Jasmine also showed me the shop where she gets her yarn and that is where I got ours for our blanket. Amusingly, despite my unwillingness to get the Rowan while at De Afstap (where I would have gone back if Jasmine and I hadn't had a discussion about yarn the night before we left), I ended up buying Rowan at the place in Utrecht instead! I can't remember the name of the place, but it was probably Modilaine. There is not much Dutch yarn in the world, as it turns out, so we had to settle on something else. We got Rowan Felted Tweed. I have a photo on a card in a camera that isn't at my house right now, so I can't show you, but you can imagine. It's not too exciting (here is a picture of someone else's).

The store was cute and I'm glad that it provides my friend with a nice place to get her yarn. :) I will warn you, though, that the woman who was there when I was (I think she was the owner) didn't speak English at all. Now, this is perfectly reasonable, given that I was in the Netherlands and all, but it's easy to get used to finding English speaking people all over Europe, because so many of them are excellent at it. I'm sure you can handle a yarn purchase in Dutch, if you have to, though, right?

From Utrecht, we set off for Paris...

Denmark! (Copenhagen)

Well, I've finally located a camera that I can use for getting pictures of the yarn that I bought in Denmark, so we can move on!

We arrived late at night from Sweden and walked all of about a block and a half from the train station to our hotel and promptly crashed.

The next morning, we set out to do as much as we could, given that we were going to be there only for a couple of days. In fact, if I remember correctly, we were only there basically for one day (not counting the days of travel as complete days).

So, we went first on the Self-Guided Walk -- "Stroget and Copenhagen's Heart and Soul" from Rick Steve's Scandinavia 2007 book. To do this walk, we started at the Radhuspladsen (City Hall Square). There we saw the Radhus (big surprise) -- City Hall. It is a beautiful building and I could show you image after image of little details on the building.

As a side note, I think that of all the places we went, Copenhagen surprised me the most. I had never thought much about it, but it turns out to be a very beautiful city and I would love to go back.





From the Radhus (where there is, of course, a big statue of Hans Christian Andersen (you can find the text of a lot of his stories for free here), who is Danish), we looked across the square to see the Weather Girls on what is now the Phillips building. Here they are:
They are meant to predict the weather and when it is nice out, the girl on the bicycle is supposed to be showing and when it is going to rain, the one with the umbrella should be out. As you can see, they are somewhere in between in this photo. Apparently, they have been stuck there for quite a while. In other words, years, I think. It's almost nicer this way, though, because despite the fact you can't count on them to tell you the weather, you can see them both better this way!

From the Radhus, you can also see the Tivoli Gardens (if the link doesn't show a page in English, look for the tiny English flag in the upper left hand corner of the website). It is a rather large park and it would have been wonderful to see what was inside, but alas, we didn't have enough time!

According to Rick Steves, "In 1843, magazine publisher Georg Carstensen convinced the king to let him build a pleasure garden outside the [former] walls of crowded Copenhagen. The king quickly agreed, knowing that happy people care less about fighting for democracy." (pg. 56) Well then! Sounds like a reasonable assessment, I think.


From the Radhuspladsen, we walked on to the Stroget, which is a pedestrian shopping mall. What this means is that it's along a street (so it's not like a mall in the U.S. -- one huge building, but it's also not a strip mall) that is closed to car traffic, which allows pedestrians to spill into the "street" and walk all over the place, while window shopping (and shopping for real, no doubt).

Here is a picture of part of the Stroget. The people are all standing in one place because they are watching a street performance (break dancers).









Besides tourists, there was an abundance of bicycles. I don't have any good photos of them, but wow were there a lot!!

At a few points along the Stroget walk, we wandered off the main drag and found some other cool things to look at. One of those things was the Copenhagen University. It had some beautiful buildings and a wonderful interior. We couldn't imagine going to school at a place that looked like this as you walked in to go to class:









Here is an outside photo of one of the University buildings (I think -- or it was right near it at least) and I thought it was magnificent. Like so many of the other buildings in Copenhagen, it had all kinds of wonderful little details on it, but I can't bring myself to upload the bazillion photos I have of the details, so we'll stick with this:

Sadly, it doesn't tell you much. It's a cool photo, though, right?







Near that building, too, we saw Niels and had to take his picture for my father-in-law, since he's a physicist. Niels was apparently a faculty member at Copenhagen, but he fled the Nazis and that's how he ended up in the U.S. If you don't know who Niels Bohr is, join the club, but I can tell you that he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922. I can also tell you that he worked on the atomic bomb . . . .
I can also tell you that he wasn't real pretty.











From the Stroget portion of the walk, we ended up walking over to the Little Mermaid.

I'm sure you can't really tell this from my words, but we walked a LONG ways. Rick recommends doing this on bicycle, if I remember correctly, but we didn't have a bicycle and we are very stubborn, so we carried on.




Here is one of the things that we saw near the statue of the Little Mermaid:
Why do I have this photo? Do you see the windmills in the background? There were a LOT of windmills in Europe and Andrew made me photograph all of them. So, here is one of those photos. Exciting, no?





On the way back to Nyhavn where we took a boat trip, via a really old, but functioning army barracks, we walked by this gorgeous thing:
I have better photos of the structure, but you can't see how pretty the grounds around it are, so I settled on this. Anyway, it's a church, pretty clearly. All I can tell you about it is that it's an Anglican church built entirely of flint.








From there we went on a boat tour that departed from Nyhavn:

I forget our tour guide's name, but she spoke 4 languages. Yes, really. Crazy, huh? It wasn't the best boat tour ever (we took a really good one in London a few years ago), but I think this is because the woman couldn't really ad lib at all, since she would state something and then repeat it in three different languages. You pretty much have to stick to a script in that situation, I think


On our boat tour we saw some interesting buildings and some interesting people:
I suspect he's one of the inhabitants of the liberal, alternate-reality outpost in the city called Christiania.

That's just a guess though . . . .





Okay, so I think I've gone on plenty. I will leave you with this. The next day, before boarding the train for Amsterdam, we went to Sommerfuglen, which was a terrific store. It looks small, but they had some delicious stash and the women who worked there were great.

It was the best yarn shop I saw while we were in Europe -- hands down. They had a great variety and lots of good stuff knit up. Should you need it for some reason, they also have English-Danish translation for knitting patterns on their website! (Click on "Tips and Advice," then "Glossary.")



For our Danish yarn purchase, we got a kid mohair/merino blend and it soft and beautiful! And, no, I still don't know how this is all going to go together, especially given the different weights of yarn, but we'll see:

I couldn't get a picture that showed the colors too well, but I think this is the best one I have.






Wow! That was a long post!