2017 PHOTO ALBUM

In 2016, I made a giant (actually, it was really quite small) album for the whole year. It can be pretty time consuming to make these albums, but breaking it up and basically updating it each month helped a lot. I also chose to only use photos from Instagram, which made the process a lot quicker too, as the sorting out the photos, organizing and editing is already done. But for my 2017 album, I decided to simplify it even further and made a photo book based. I used Blurb as a) they're my go to for photo albums, b) they were one of the few companies that could print up to 440 page books and c) they have a program that connects directly with Instagram. There's a couple of limitations as to what you can do format wise using this tool, like how you can't edit the layouts or do two-page photo spreads, but for my simple plan of having one photo per page it was pretty perfect. I updated the album monthly and it probably took me about five minutes each time. 

And whoa, I love this album. I love the fact all our favorite photos are in physical print and that you can just sit and look through them. I've probably already spent way longer than I should have flipping through it, and there's just so many pages that instantly make me smile. It contains our whole year, and everything from everday photos around the house to photos from our travels. And I absolutely love comparing the photos at the start of the year with the end of the year and seeing how much Oscar has grown. He's gone from being a baby to a kid, and it's so awesome. I mean, when I was taking photos for this post, I ended up ear-marking 48 favorite pages that I just had to include. I manage to narrow it down a bit further than that, but sorry, this is still a pretty photo-heavy post haha (which meant that Blogger crashed about a million times when I was trying to post this haha).

However, first a bit of a disclaimer: the album you see here is actually my second attempt at a 2017 album, as I just wasn't happy with the first album that got printed. The photos came out blurry and grainy and I just wasn't happy with the quality of it at all. Such a bummer. I ended up contacting Blurb customer services to complain, and I was really just hoping for a refund (as obviously an album of this size cost a few bob!). Mainly though, I was just so sad that I'd been looking forward to flipping through the album for a year, and expectations just did not meet reality. I know, this is an album based on photos from Instagram which automatically reduces the quality, but I guess I was just expecting that a program specifically made for making albums from Instagram photos would either somehow magically take that into account, or at least produce some sort of warning as you're making the book that the quality isn't good enough (as that's normally what happens with their other software). Anyway, I did not get a refund. I was told they'd give me a free reprint, but that I'd have to go through and probably use the original photos for the quality I was looking for, and I'd have to reorder within a month. AKA, sort through thousands of photos (probably not even an exaggeration haha) and organize and edit them--exactly the part of the process I was hoping to avoid. I don't even think I have all the originals anymore, nor did I have any idea how I'd find the time to do this. Eventually I decided to go through the album and just change the layout of each page, hoping that might help. Instead of full-page photos I opted for one large photo on each page. I figured that as they were covering the cost of a second album, I might as well give it a shot. And I'm so glad I did, as the second album is exactly what I had in mind the first time around. Lesson learnt.

The finish album is my biggest photo book yet, 360 pages total. It's divided into twelve chapters for each month, and at the end I did a quick written summary of the year at a glance so that the album will still make sense to me 20 years from now. The photos are not necessarily in chronological order beyond being in the right month--chronology is not a priority for me. I used photos from both mine and Graeme's Instagram account, and kept the whole book super simple and uniform. As a change from my previous photo books, I chose a printed hardcover this time, and I'll probably do that again for future albums too.

And, yes, duh, of course--I have already started the 2018 album. And I'm already very, very excited.

FOX COSTUME

Last week they had a day of dress up in Oscar's nursery for Fastelavens, and on that occasion we decided to dress him up as Mikkel Rev from Dyrene i Hakkebakkeskogen. Graeme sourced the clothes, while I sat down and made a fox tail and a set of fox ears.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about: Mikkel Rev is a much loved character from the stories of Norwegian author Thorbjørn Egner. I grew up with these stories myself, and they've recently had a bit of a revival as they've been made into a stop motion animation (looks like it's also been translated into quite a few languages?). It's really cute and Oscar is a big fan. (He also has a fox teddy which is his favorite, and was actually the original inspiration behind the whole fox costume idea.)

Now, of course we could have just bought the costume online, but I thought it was kinda pricey and mainly, where's the fun in that? So after doing a bit of research around pinterest and the web, I decided to make the tail out of yarn. It's a pretty simple technique, where you essentially just make a bunch of yarn tassels and then brush them out to make the yarn look more like fur. I was a bit sceptical of how it was gonna end up looking, but I'm so happy with the result and it was so much fun to make haha. I mean how cute is that little fox butt? I used the same brushing technique for the ears and then used a ton of hairspray to make them a bit sturdier and sewed them onto the hat. Hey presto, there's your fox.

Wonder what other animal costumes I could make using this technique? Or maybe Oscar will be going as Fantastic Mr. Fox for next Halloween? Haha

And lastly, of course, a couple of photos of the costume in action:

FEBRUARY STATUS REPORT

It was starting to feel a little bit heavy on the project posts, so thought I'd break it up a little today and do a little post with what's been going on around here. Might make these kind of posts regular? Anyway, here we go!

drinking my coffee out of my new favorite mug that Oscar gave me for mother's day which is today here in Norway! It's pretty much the greatest mug of all time.

reading Station Eleven and Little Fires Everywhere. I like reading more than one book at a time so I can change it up a little depending on what I feel like.

working on a photo heavy blog post about an album I made for all of 2017. Spoiler: I love it.

laughing while playing hide and seek with Oscar. Yesterday I hid behind the curtains, and he couldn't find me until I couldn't take it anymore and burst out laughing. Sitting upright on the couch under a blanket also proved to be a good hiding spot haha.

attempting to complete the Apartment Therapy January Cure (yes, in February, I'm a bit behind). Mostly I've just been buying myself flowers. I also cleared out and organized a junk drawer.

eating fastelavensbolle, as today is also fastelavens! Graeme surprised me with some fastelavensris on Friday. In his words "I bought you some birch sticks with feathers? I don't really get this tradition, but I thought you might like it." I certainly do. Well played, Graeme.

knitting two projects right now: the No Frills sweater by Petit Knit for myself, and a Hipster Hat from Petit Knit for Graeme as he's always complaining I never knit him anything.

ANKER'S SWEATER

The funny thing about this sweater is that it was supposed to be so much bigger. Basically, long story short: I knitted this sweater for Oscar in a size 4-5, thinking this would be a sweater he could fit into way in the future, but accidentally chose the wrong yarn, resulting in a much, much smaller sweater fit for a one year old. I only even realized when I was far too into the project (I really dispise undoing my knitting and would rather give it away to someone else than start over), and basically held my breath as I finished it up and tried it on him. To my great surprise, it fit him perfectly!

The pattern is from Petit Knit, and it's called Anker's Sweater. I love the ribbed yoke detailing. Mette from Petit Knit has so many awesome patterns, both for kids and adults! I knitted it in Sandnes Garn Tynn Mernio, though I should really have just used regular merino, hence the sizing getting all messed up! Luckily Oscar's gotten plenty of use out of it and it still fits him now, though he is very close to growing out of it. It was a pretty quick and easy knit though (yay for kid's clothes!), so maybe I should knit him another one?