tea towels inspired by the eras tour

i was chatting with my sister and my swiftie friend on our group chat and we decided that my next weaving project should be tea towels inspired by the eras tour. so i ordered up a bunch of new weaving yarn in new colors. it arrived right before i went to the states. last weekend, i got started on seeing how the colors i ordered play together.

i made vikleprøver/yarn windings to play with the colors. i think i'll start with lover, which is the one at the top. followed by 1989, which is the one at the bottom. i need to adjust the colors for midnights (on the right), as the brown doesn't work and it needs some burgundy. the one on the left is reputation. that one, i want to play with a more graphic look. 

we're going to make the warp for lover this weekend. i'm even going to put that sparkly yarn in there, together with the purple, so that there's a little sparkle to them, even though that's not necessarily traditional in a tea towel.

the planning is actually becoming part of the fun for me! that's not normally my core competence, nor something i like all that much. i'm learning how to achieve the look i'm going for. and even learning what i like and what i don't. i think it's going to be a fun exercise. and with all those eras, it should keep the loom occupied for a few months to come.

 

glorious spring and some random thoughts

the weather has been completely glorious for the past few days. it was 21°C when i got home from work today around 5. i changed into running pants and decided to go out for a nice walk, maybe with a little intermittent jogging. i ended up talking to the neighbor for like half an hour since she was out in her garden when i went past. we talked about a little of everything, including the spray-tanned satan wreaking havoc on the world. she said she wished someone would "do something" about him. me too, sister. 

interesting that my 85-year-old neighbor in denmark seemed more informed and interested in what he was doing than many of the people i encountered while in the us a couple of weeks ago. she's pretty plugged into the local scene as well - telling me that the field across the road will be potatoes this year rather than corn. i think that's good. last year's corn crop was pretty dismal.

* * *

the one thing i like about daylight savings time is having the light at the end of the day. it's 8:30 p.m. as i write this and there's still a glow. i wish we could just stay on this time and keep the evening light. 

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i don't know if you are on tiktok, but i've started making some knittok videos the past couple of days over there if you'd like to check them out. i did my first wip wednesday, which is a thing on knittok. on wednesdays, you just show and talk about all the projects that you're working on. and today, i did a yarn haul video featuring all of the yarn i bought in minneapolis. i'm not a great editor, as you will see, but everyone's gotta start somewhere. i think i'll do one with knitting hot takes next. it's also a thing over on knittok. you know what a sucker i am for joining a new community.

speaking of tiktok, it sounds like it might go away again for the americans, but perhaps trump is too busy inflicting tariffs on remote australian islands inhabited only by penguins to remember it should be turned off. they say the tariffs were calculated by chatGPT, so i guess ai really is going to be the end of things. 

 

🏜 arizona :: maybe for the last time 🏜

(this is a substack that i just published)

i just spent nearly two weeks in the united states. i was very conscious the whole time that it might be my last trip there. our daughter is moving back to europe this summer to continue her studies in portugal. without her in arizona, i won’t really have any compelling reason to visit there again, despite still having some friends there. i still have family in the midwest, including my sister, but with the situation being what it is, i have to wonder if there will be a united states to go back to a year from now.

what struck me most during my visit was just how normal everything seemed. people were driving their cars, doing their shopping, picking up their coffee at the starbucks drive-thru, dining in restaurants, enjoying happy hours. just going about their lives as if there wasn’t a circus being performed from the whitehouse. as if the entire post ww2 world order wasn’t being torn asunder by a merry band of unqualified, unserious nitwits and the world’s (formerly) richest man and his minions.

i looked on in fascination. and i did all those normal things too - drank margaritas at happy hour, ate delicious mexican food, stopped by trader joe’s for those new light pink strawberries everyone on tiktok is talking about, got a new tattoo, shopped at the gap and old navy, went antiquing, picked up starbucks and ordered the best breakfast burritos ever from door dash. i even celebrated my birthday while i was there.

and it all felt so normal. it was just a really nice holiday in sunny arizona.

is everyone just avoiding reality? i honestly don’t know. i do my share of protecting myself from the daily deluge of the news, as i just can’t take the pace at which it’s coming. but i do follow along and know what’s going on. i do know that those clowns shared classified battle plans on a friggin’ signal chat, on which they included the editor of the atlantic (and any number of russians who were surely listening in as well, since at least one of them was in moscow at the time). i know that trump continues to threaten to take greenland and to insult denmark for being a “bad ally.” i read today that the european union is advising everyone to have 72 hours of food supplies laid in (that doesn’t really sound like enough if you ask me).

how can any of us think this is normal? how can we go about our normal lives, drinking cocktails and eating chicken & waffles for brunch? how did i do that? i honestly do not know.

🍹 drinkie poo - just a few things i drank on the trip 🍹

unicorn mimosa at hope breakfast bar in edina, minnesota

bloody mary with a beer sidecar at the lowry in minneapolis

exsw margarita with tahin rim at palma, phoenix

desert cactus margarita and blood orange margarita with tahin rim at papi gordo's, arcadia neighborhood, phoenix

cold brew coffee at hula's modern tiki, phoenix

a very spicy bloody mary at hula's modern tiki in phoenix

mango margarita at hula's modern tiki, phoenix

pickle bloody mary at the attic, arcadia neighborhood, phoenix

board & bottle at the original postino's in phoenix's arcadia neighborhood

cider flight at six byrd cider co. in phoenix's arcadia neighborhood

oyster shots at casey's moore's in tempe on my birthday

so many great happy hour experiences. not pictured - whole bottle of bubbles at sun bar for bunch on my birthday, all the starbucks drinks i got - the blackberry sage refresha with coconut milk was so yummy, a black & tan at casey moore's on st. paddy's day and loads of bubbles at ruby's parents' house in scottsdale on sunday. 

if this was indeed my last trip to the us (which i consciously thought about the whole time i was there), at least it was a good one. 

🧶 yarn candy 🧶

i had a couple of days in minneapolis at the beginning of my trip, so i made it my mission to visit yarn stores. funnily enough, they had a lot of the same yarns and patterns that we have here in denmark. the danish knitwear designers and yarn companies are clearly hot all over the world. i knew that from knittok, but it was fun to see it in reality. this store, bewoolen, had a lot of hand-dyed yarns that weren't scandi, but they were very pricey and i didn't see anything that i couldn't live without. 

i do just enjoy seeing lots and lots of beautiful of hanks of yarn though. i don't think i'm experienced enough to be able to see the potential in them and think that they would be perfect for one or another sweater that i have in my ravelry queue. i'm not honestly sure that i'd really like hand-dyed for sweaters. i think the variegation can yield weird results. but maybe one day, i'll just see the perfect hank and have to have it.

i did get this cute little bundle of minis, though. the color combo just appealed to me and wasn't one i'd have thought of on my own. that's the best part of visiting a yarn store - getting inspired. i don't know what i'll make with it - i was thinking of using it in some colorwork socks, perhaps. they also told me it would make a nice winter hat.

i'd been seeing lots of talk about japanese noro yarns on knittok, so it was fun to see some of them in person. i got these two to make another sophie hood, so it's not entirely true that i'm not inspired by variegated yarns. i also got myself some of the famed chaiogoo needles - just 3 pairs in the sizes i seem to be using most. i don't feel worthy of the full $200 set of interchangeables as of yet on my knitting journey. 

i went back to the store a second time with my sister (she knitted that sweater she's wearing, by the way, and even made up the pattern herself!). we didn't end up buying anything the second time around, but it was our last stop that day and we were getting a little bit hangry by the time we were there. sometimes there can be so many choices that you end up not choosing at all. 

i got some beautiful yarn to make a bella blocking sweater at another yarn shop - dandelion fiber co. here, they had some of the danish knitwear designers and knitting for olive and other scandi fibers, but they also had yarns from some american manufacturers. the yarn i bought was from tumalo fibers in oregon. 

i got enough yarn to make the bella blocking and with two skeins of lucky tweed by kelbourne woolens, another american yarn maker, i can also make the vest no. 1 by my favourite things in the same pretty mustard yellow tone.

one more basket of inspiration - someone at bewoolen has an eye for this color combo, it's very similiar to the small hanks above. i had to snap a photo to remember it for future projects. 

🌵 i love cactus! 🌵

i spent the past week or so in arizona. if it is indeed my last trip there (sabin is moving back to europe in july), it was a very good one. i'm still processing it all, but i wanted to share my favorite arizona thing - some cactus! i love saguaros and the prickly pear were absolutely gorgeous, all purple and pink. i want to make tea towels in a color palette inspired by them. 

i have much more to say, but the jetlag is currently getting in the way, so i will just leave it here for now. 🌵🌵🌵

 

drama at sea

i can't stop following this story of the collision between the stena immaculate (a product tanker, not an oil tanker, as all the news reports keep saying) and the solong (a smaller container vessel) off the east coast of england yesterday. it's in the area of immingham, where i've spent a lot of time filming ships, so when i first heard about it yesterday, i rushed to the report to see if a dfds ship was involved. it was not. 

i am inordinately fascinated by a shipping accident and kept refreshing the bbc app all day yesterday, as well as following the string of rescue and firefighting vessels that converged on the scene in my marine traffic app. the product tanker was loaded with 220,000 barrels of jet fuel and sitting in an anchorage off immingham when the solong came along and rammed into the side of it at 16 knots. the crew of the stena immaculate abandoned ship within about 30 minutes because it turns out that jet fuel is quite flammable. there were reports that the container vessel was carrying containers of sodium cyanide, but those were apparently false. they had some containers on board that had once had that substance in them, but which were currently empty. 

the captain of the solong has been arrested for "gross negligence manslaughter "(one crew member of the solong is missing and presumed dead). it will be interesting to know more of the story. the crew of the solong was russian and filipino and it was americans onboard the stena immaculate since it was chartered by the us navy. 

both ships are still smoldering today, but expected to remain intact. there were rumors that the solong would sink, but they've been debunked. it has disappeared from marine traffic, but someone probably turned off the ais. it will be very interesting to learn how they could have missed a large product tanker at anchor in an official anchorage, but i guess that will come out in the coming days. and i will be glued to the news, ship geek that i still am at heart.

you can put the girl in the kitchen, but you can't take her off the ship. or something like that. 

added - this guy does a good early analysis using marine traffic.