December 29

Happy Birthday” to wake me up, a fancy cake for breakfast that J and M had made …

IMG_0160… followed by two hours of reading and knitting in a lovely café.

IMG_0162Afterwards, all three of us went to watch Alba Berlin play basketball (sadly an ugly game due to fouls, trash talk, and whippings. Alba won though).

© Alba Berlin
© Alba Berlin

Finally at night, we had dinner at a tiny Italian restaurant …

© Trattoria Bocca Del Buon Gusto

… with a handful of extraordinary friends: the professor who mentored my master thesis in American Studies and her husband, a devoted basketball fan; my lively and charming Belgian friend, photographer and mother of 5 boys, with her sharp-witted Swiss husband, and J‘s former basketball coach, a very gentle young man from India who grew up in France and will go back to India next week to work with “sports without borders.”

Quite an experiment as they had never met before but we hit it off right from the start! I don’t remember having so much fun, so many interesting conversations, so much friendship and warmth at a long table in a long time.

I am inspired, grateful, and a year older! Thank you all 🙂

 

Coffee Cup Cozy

We went to my parents’ house for Christmas and somehow I thought I might survive those three days with neither needles nor yarn. Mistake! BIG mistake! So I grabbed what was there and knitted with little left over bits and pieces of yarn.

There has been a partner for the red cozy too, but as I knitted my sister’s name and a heart on it you may guess where it is now … My favourite picture is the one with the grey cozies and the silver spoon. Very state-of-the-art 🙂

Coffee Cup CozyCoffee Cup CozyCoffee Cup Cozy

And for those of you who strive for more: try Eline’s hearts cup cozy:

A Cowl for the Goddaughter

A third cowl. Yep. This was a “cowly Christmas” – at least in my house. And guess what! The presentees were perfectly happy.

J is modelling again (in his toy story pyjamas … please ignore that :)). I like to add that the beautiful “90% llama 10% glamour” yarn is pure fun to work with and available at Jessica’s little online store. I used less than two balls for Teresa’s cowl.

knitted cowlknitted cowl

A Cowl for my Sister

And here is the cowl I wanted my sister to have. I may redo it though with different yarn. Even though the color is beautiful the quality is not at all what I wanted it to be. It seems to wear out way too fast.

Again, there is J modelling:

knitted cowlknitted cowlknitted cowl

A Cowl for Anouk

Feels like I didn’t blog in weeks (which is probably true). Instead, I have been knitting like crazy to get ready for Christmas. And – despite force of habit – about every other time I would even forget to take pictures before wrapping and making knitted things a present.

Well, here’s a cowl though, that I knitted for Anouk (9). It’s another “Before & After” with J modelling:

Zitron Nimbus

knitted cowl

knitted cowl