I purchased this lovely red yarn cloth with white polka dots to make a dress for Tamara in the end of April. I was feeling very bad about the fact that I haven’t made anything cute with it yet. So my brain was working hard last few weeks and the idea was ripe today.
As Grasswire and Tamara went out to do some shopping I set to work. I had something very simple, yet cute in mind. I relied on some ideas from a Japanese sewing book I got from Chie. The little dress was done in less than an hour and I am very satisfied with the result. It’s not perfect, of course, but we have no weddings to attend, so I guess it will do for this summer.
Here are photos of the work in progress and the final product (I added two red buttons on the back after the photo session):
Filed under: Living in Europe | Tags: brun, friendship, genser, jam, jordbaer, Norge, norsk, Norway, ost, strawberries, syletetoey
I have spent a year studying Norwegian in Norway, actually paa Birkeland. It’s a small village in Southern Norway and I can’t say that I had the time of my life there, but I’ve learned a lot of new things and most importantly met some really nice people and made friends with them.
So when I think of Norway, I usually think about my Japanese roommate, Chie who is a wonderful person and I admire her for her courage and determindness. Then I also think about Celia, my classmate from Bolivia, who is so different from Chie (and from myself), but holds a very special place in my heart as well.
Then I think of things truly Norwegian – besides Norwegian pullovers (norsk genser), beautifuly rough Norwegian nature, high prices and candles, jordbaer syletetoey og brun ost are on my mind. This is what I’ve had for breakfast so many times during my stay in Norway and every time I go back I want to have some more of it. Delicious combination of traditional Norwegian brown cheese with strawbery jam on broedskive (a piece of bread).
As this is the season of strawberies we have decided to make some strawbery jam to enjoy it in the months to come. No brun ost to combine with it, unfortunately.
This weekend we attended a wedding – it was my co-worker who got married at a small castle here in Kamnik. I must say this was one of the loveliest wedding we’ve been too. Not pretentious, but not too simple or downgraded. A wedding with style, I must say.
Two weeks ago we attended another wedding, my cousins and that was almost a prototype-horror wedding for us. It took forever to come from one location to the other and frankly, it was not very well organized. Of course there were all my relatives and somehow I had a strange feeling that we don’t belong there. Not that we were too classy for their wedding, I think the wedding that they organized for themselves was too classy (in a way) for them. But when somebody would ask me, what was so classy, I could hardly name three classy things. Maybe just the subtle unease of everybody wearing the clothes they were not used to? Maybe it’s just that guests didn’t act as they belong there, to that scene in front of the church, searching for a shadow to hide away from direct sun at three o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe it was just a feeling that the newlyweds thought only about themselves and not about their guests?
I relaized it is very important to understand why and for whom you are organizing the wedding. If you do it for yourself, than you should not invite other people. If you invite friends and relatives, think about how their day will look like and how do you want them to feel, there, with you on your wedding day.
That’s why I didn’t feel strange on my coworkers wedding even though I knew only a handful people there.
When I entered the knitting blogosphere I started to learn about designers, designs and the fact that (obviously) some people make a living out of knitting. To me this came not as a total surprise, but it was all the aspects this community that provoked me to think more about it and develop a sense of magnitude of this issue.
As I mentioned in one of my older posts, I learned to knit from my mother who has a very ‘basic’ attitude to knitting. Patterns come from her head and she can play with them in her mind, no need to write anything down or read it from a magazine or book. Of course, she is limited by her knowledge of techniques, so her patterns (or ideas) will be repeptition of the stuff she knows and the stuff she saw somewhere else. Of course I inherited much of her attitude and for quite a long time took it as ‘normal’.
I learned quite some things from books, knitting included. And I must say I always considered them as a helpful resource, as a starting point for my own ventures. I also made quite some projects from knitting magazines (mainly in high school, I was buying Burda and Sabrine and similar German do-it-yourself publications).
And now I stumble across people selling their patterns on-line, some of them offering them for free but quite a lot of them considering them as something private, something they own, because they created it. There are big names in the knitting world, important bloggers and people who should be respected for their ideas and contribution to the world of knitting. Some of their work is truly amazing and every credit should be given to them for those things. But as it is in this world, some of the patterns of those big names are, to be honest, very basic and very simple and not that special at all.
So, I started to wonder, is it wrong if I make a cardigan which is very similar to a cardigan designed by Kim Hargreaves? Is it wrong if I make a scarf using a combination of seed stitch and wine-leaves pattern just like they suggest in xy book? They certainly did not make up the seed stitch nor the wine-leaves pattern, since they have been around for quite some time, several centuries, at least.
It’s not only me who has these doubts. Just a couple of days ago I read a post on this theme on the Half assed knit blog and quite samo time ago Dances with wool also had a post related to it.
Where is the limit between creativity and copyright?
I have some opinions about it, and I’ll be happy to hear any of your ideas.
(Tthis post will be continued in couple of days…)
