Anna's this and that

Thank you, Mary Kathryn and Cheryl! :)
Nath - Je m'en vais passer tour chez les Helvetes histoire de visiter mon p'tit Suisse de neveu fin aout, mais je serai de retour sur Varsovie tard le 9 septembre ! Je me languis un petit peu de revoir mon minuscule chez moi, va savoir pourquoi ! :)


Indeed not being able to stitch was part of the initial desastrous mood I had LOL! I remember the first evening, I sat down, looked sadly and said to H.: "Heh? What am I going to do? I can't work, I can't stitch, I can't type, I can't help at home, so WHAT am I going to do all these weeks? Heh?" But you know how it is, we humans learn to cope with everything if we have to. A few days later I was typing with 2 fingers of the right hand and the left one, just that work took me three times longer, was much uncomfortable and involved shoulder pain, but so what. I learned how to do most things with the left hand and I swear that if it had to last longer, I'd have learned to work and stitch with the left hand. I even tried once :) but it went too slow to my taste. Once in a while I picked the needle in the right hand and put in a few slow stitches by making lots of weird large movements with the cast in the air. H. looked desperated and asked: - do you reeeeally have to? - yes I do! - was my happy answer. I guess I as a stitcher needed my cross stitch (drug) fix because after a few stitches I went on to house chores with a broad smile! :) But I swear that after seing me stitching with my cast, H. lost the last hope he had that I am normal. You should have seen his face and his rolling eyes! LOL

Now... Now that I can stitch, I intend to do a lot of that :)

Norwegian (the airlines) had a nice 2-day promotion this week for a few destinations which included Oslo, Geneva and Warsaw and we jumped on the occasion. It was a tough job to coordinate all that but within 2 hours I communicated with my brother in Switzerland at his office, H. checked his work obligations in September, and we played fast with the dates which had promotional prices (19 usd! all costs included). We weren't able to get all the segments for that price, of course but all in all, it was a real bargain. So here's how it goes. On August 28th I fly to Geneva for a week and back to Oslo on Sept. 4th, H. stays here to take care of the furry part of the family, then I return to Warsaw on Sept. 9th with The Queen, and H. will do a fast 2 days trip to Warsaw with the rest of my luggage and Happy. I will only be flying with minimum luggage to protect the hand. That'll be a lot of travelling very soon, because as soon as I am back home, I should travel to see my aunt and father, in two different towns, as well. Busy, busy!


Okay, now to stitching. I am almost done with Awake the Dawning Day, just that I received one wrong color of WDW with the kitted chart, so I'm currently waiting just for that skein to finish the two birds. I decided against posting a picture because it will look much nicer once the birds are there :)

I have one Bent Creek project waiting for the finishing part to be done since June, I'm working on it and I'll post details later. Plus several WIPs which I should put the last stitches on but somehow don't feel inspired to right now.

Today I started LHN's "The Sampler Lady". I chose a lovely piece of dusty pink Lakeside Linens in 40ct and I'm so happy with the choice. The original on the cover page was done on Light Examplar but I put the threads on several pieces of fabric and really loved the way they looked on this old' pink. It should take me a week, I think. I'm doing it with one thread over two. Lovely, lovely, lovely this chart! I had to order it as soon as I saw it :) I often wondered why I don't see it being done on many blogs.

Here is the start as of today:

The colors are distorted in artificial light but the general idea is shown :)

Oh, not that that's the news of the millenium, but I forgot to mention I'm in a cooking/baking period of mine and fresh bread is served regularly for breakfast. Here's two I baked yesterday, the left beeing a darker flour variation of the right one. They are soo good! :) Nothing beats a homebaked bread, I tell you!

Yesterday we had coffee after dinner with a Norwegian specialty, lefse and Namdalsgomme, a sort of sugary spread with cinammon which you can also see on the photo.

From Wikipedia: Lefse is a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread made out of potato, milk or cream and flour, and cooked on a griddle. Special tools are available for lefse baking, including long wooden turning sticks and special rolling pins with deep grooves. There are significant regional variations in the way lefse is made and eaten, but it generally resembles a flatbread, although in many parts of Norway, especially Valdres, it is far thinner.

If you want to read more, click here.

And here's what Happy meant to say about it:

And today I baked a yummy banana bread per Mary Kathryn's recipe. H. is not so fond of cakes in general and when your man swallows one slice after another like he did today, it sure makes you smile, doesn't it? :) Anyway, one hour later over half of it was gone! My version looked different from MaryK's photo, it was brownish in color but what do I care? It was YUMMY and that's all that counts. I had to work a bit on the cup to metric conversions but it worked. The main problem was when I asked H. to get me a pack of baking soda one day after work with the daily shopping. A pack of what? Baking soda. Whazzat? (sigh) You don't know what baking soda is? No. I think I heard about it but I am not sure. Okay, right. Baking soda is baking soda, right? :) Multiple dictionaries later I was able to tell him that baking soda is 'natron' according to the wise authors and success! The next day I found 'natronpulver' in the shopping bag, proudly brought in by a very smiling H.. He deserved his treat today, me says! :)