Hey.....Where Did He Come From???

Ok... when I come back home, Kermit will go into hiatus until the Christmas decorations surface once again for the holiday season.

Simply could not resist this limited version of Kermit created by the Brazilian artist Romero Britto - I grew up with the Muppet Show, and Christmas is my favourite time of year - next to travelling that is :o)

No Words Needed

The 8

Book clubs are unfortunately rare here, so I often have very big ears when people starts to tell about books, they have been reading. "The 8" by Katherine Neville is one of those books - and it was a co-worker telling another co-worker about the book, that caught my attention.

Think Dan Brown's books with Robert Langdon - only that this book were written 1988 - where past events must be understood to unreavel a secret/secrets in the now (in this case 1972) and you will know the genre of this book. I have grown up with a chess board - my dad and my brother used to play chess a lot - so I know the basic rules of the game. Not a requirement to get the most of this book, but it certainly helped lure me into reading this book :o)

A computer expert, Catherine Velis, is suddenly involved with the search for pieces belonging to a Charlemagne chessboard set that have historical strings to the past involving Charlemagne, a French abbey, the French Revolution, a Russian zarina, Napoleon de Bonaparte and many more. She is sent to Algeria by her employer - nothing is what it seems to be and who can she trust in this country far away from home.


You can almost feel the sand in your shoes, being too hot due to the burning sun, smell the spices of the local food..... Katherine Neville's way of describing the scenery takes you deep into the book, as where you standing next to Catherine and experiencing the same events as her. That is a true gift and I can not wait to start reding the sequeal that was not published until 20 years later.

A Dark and Stormy Knit

In the middle of the night, somebody decorates all the parking meters on Plum Harbour's Main Street with knitted cat covers - a yarn bombing attack where the Knit Kats becomes prime suspects. But who are the Knit Kats?

A body is found wrapped in stiched - yarn covered - and everything points in the direction of the Knit Kats. Everything gets a lot closer to the Black Sheep knitters, as Phoebe, Maggie's assistant, is identified as a Knit Kat and suddenly becomes one of the police's suspects.

"....you could be charged with interfering with the investigation" ..... ."And defacing public property...and littering"

Defacing public property and littering??!! Seriously? That type of "grafiti" is so harmles, as knitting will hardly ruin anything it is attached to - if wet it will often get misshaped so it looses it's purpose, and you can easily cut it off with scissors without the property it is attached to getting damaged... What it will most likely do is create smiles on people's faces when they discover that a known thing(property) is suddenly covered with colorful yarn that is easily removed again.

I have only participated in yarn bombing once - not cloak and dagger - but a public event, where we were encouraged to decorate an area of Copenhagen, and I remember all the smiles on walking passers-by when they saw our work. I have also encountered random yarn bombing while walking the streets of Copenhagen and none of these were ruining the object they were attached to. So vandalism??!!

Olympic Knitting

Well I am not sitting and watching the Sochi Winter Olympics, but a clip from a Danish news station made me laugh and smile big - see for yourself here

The Wall Street Journal gives an explanation here, why a Finish snow boarding coach were knitting.

Happy Chinese New Year - Welcome Year of the Horse

Happy Chinese New Year and welcome to Year of the Horse

Did you know, that the Chinese call it Spring Festival and not Chinese New Year? Well I knew and have confused a lot of my colleagues by calling it Spring Festival until they read this. Yes, you are right: I am not Chinese, but I have experienced the festival in China some years back and I have friends from Asia.

A quick search to get a little inspiration brought me to Ann Wood's paper horses where she shares the patterns used for her many wonderful horses - did not take long to decide, that they should be an interpretation of her horses using gold gift wrapping paper on cardboard instead of paint and brads instead of buttons.

Decided to make a little extra decoration for this month's Friday bar - usually we have only used themes at Halloween - and since this once was on Chinese New Year we opted for some Asian beer as this month's special beer: TIGER BEER and TSINGTAO.

Along with fortune cookies from a local Chinese grocery shop, we decorated with these horses and the sign for the horse - found some golden cardboard to make the signs and a few of the horses.