Britt-Arnhild's House in the Woods

While waiting.......

Tomorrow is the 1st of December, and my advent basket is ready to be unpacked. After very long working days, I came home early today. Marta was also home early from school and was waiting for me. We had  planned to start our Christmas workshop today.

So with beautiful snow outdoors, and still daylight so we could enjoy the birds busy eating from the feeder, the woodpecker and the squirrels were especially busy, and are very beautiful to watch, we were creative indoors.

Marta's wish was to do papercraft. So that's what we did. A Christmas tree basket, a snowman, a paper napkin ring. And both of us filled with ideas of what to make next.

Marta and Terje are at Marta's school now, where her class is having a Santa's Workshop. I am home taking care of the cold I have been struggling with the past two weeks. A huge mug of hot "gløgg" is perfect for that.

Advent is here.

Advent means coming, the coming of the world's Saviour. And advent is a time for preparations, preparations for the coming Christmas. Starting today our house will gradually be clothed for Christmas, starting today my mind will gradually be prepared to meet Christ on Christmas Day. The Christ Jesus, the God Almighty whom I walk with every day. Again I will meet him as a newborn baby, away in a manger, born into a world in many ways unprepared to welcome him. I pray that advent will prepare me to welcome him once again.

Today the Star of Bethlemen is hung in our main window, and there it will shine for some weeks. In another window shines a candelabrum with seven lights, Ingrid has an angel in her window, Marta has a heart in hers. Besides that not much has changed in our decorations yet. But small and bigger changes will come every day now, and to help me I have my advent basket.

  The advent basket is something I have had for a few years now. I actually start to fill my basket the night before December 1st, and then use it's filling to decorate the next morning. But I also fill the basket for the 1st Sunday of advent.

What is an advent basket, you might ask? Well, if you follow me the coming weeks you'll get to know alot about it, my whicked basket filled with items to decorate my home and prepare my mind for Christmas.

Last night I filled the basket with our old, red Christmas curtains with Maria, Joseph, the shepherds, stars and Betlehem in the background in silver and pink. The curtains are now hung in the sittingroom window. I also filled the basket with a cd with "Christmas with Dickens" and Dickens' book "A Christmas Carol". The book has 5 chapters, one for each Sunday in advent, the last one for Christmas Eve. The first snowman from my growing collection was in the basket, a small quilt of purple and gold angels made in pure silk (my own design), a Christmas book, "Christmas with Rosamunde Pilcher", a Victoria Christmas magazine from 2001, and a Provence nativity set which I bought in Avignon a few years ago, "Chrèches et Santons". Terje was in Avignon again this autumn, and I hope to get a few more santons for Christmas.

Most of the things in my advent basket are from my Christmas collections. And there will be one item from every collection in the basket every day. But for that I have to wait untill December 1st. And while waiting I'll sit down with a mug of spicy advent tea. Yes, of course I use my Spode china, which have now found their place in the glass cupboard.

...and real travels.

I love to travel, and I have during the past decade been lucky to visit different parts of the world. Twice I have been to Eritrea, this small and beautiful, though in periods quite unsafe country on the Horn of Africa. "My" town in Eritrea is Keren, a small town north of the capital Asmara. Here in Trondheim we have a friendship link to the city of Keren, developed through the past 12 years. And through my work with this friendship I have gone to Eritrea to visit the people there. In Keren there is a small and utterly charming hotel called Keren Hotel. It is right in the middle of the town, at least it feels like that to me. And when you stay in Keren Hotel it is a must to eat breakfast, or about any other meal right over the street where Aragai has his small cafe. You can sit outside on the porch with your chai (tea), read the lokal paper and watch life going on. And as there are few Europeans in Keren people will recognise you. This is a great way to make friends.

OUtside Keren there is a huge trea, big enough to walk inside, where it is a St. Mary Chapel. Women comes here to ask St. Mary to help them if they have problems in becoming pregnant. I already had 4 kids when I came here the first time, so no prayers was needed. And the women in the middle is already pregnant on the photo - she might have been here before :-)

The photos are from my travel diary. I always write tavel diaries when I travel, and now have a huge collection of these spiral bound books. They are among the most valuable things I have.

My first trip outside Europe and USA was two weeks in Haiti and The Dominican Republic in 1998. The first week we spent in Haiti, most of the week in the capital Port au Prince. I travelled with the Norwegian organisation Norwegian Church Aid, and the goal with the travel was to gather information about the situation in these two countrys to use in an annual lental camoaign NCA run to collect money for partnets in poor countries around the world. But in between visiting small villages, prisons to look at human rights, and different organisations, we also had time for leasure. The photos are taken at Hotel Olafsson in Port au Prince, the hotel Graham Green use in his book The Comedians. The two weeks on Hispanola made a huge impression on me, and this is not the theme for this post, but if you want to read more about these two countries I can recommend the books by Edwidge Danticat. They are very good.

My last travel outside Europe was one year ago, to Laos. Laso is a small country in between Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. A country which was severly treated during the Vietnam war, but which the world knows very little about.

I spent two weeks there, and again two weeks which gave me life long impressions. One day I would love to write a travel book, or at least an article from my travel there. But to do that I need time. Sometimes I wish I was a full time writer.  And then travel litterature would be my field :-)

But I am no writer, at least not so far, so what I can offer you now is my blog and a few photos.

Armchairtravelling.

I have got a cold, and spend my week-end indoors. And a favorite way to spend time then is to armchairtravel.

In Oslo earlier this week I found a wonderful Norwegian book about female travellers and how women have conquered the travel litterature during the ages. The Norwegian title of the book is "Odyssevs i skjørt" and it is written by Anka Ryall. I meet many of my favorite female travellers in this book, among them Margaret Fountaine, Alexandra David-Neel, Mary Wollstonecraft and others.

For some years now I have run a yahoogroup called Armchairtravelling. You find us at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Armchairtravelling/

We do alot of different discussions on the theme of armchairtravelling there. Right now we are discussing The Pre-Raphaelites. A wonderful way to get to know the world better, and to get to know people on the list.

You don't need to travel far to be a traveller, or a travel artist. Travels can be so many different things, and for me it is a state of mind. The way I see the world, like a pilgrim on her way to the goal but still living with open eyes. My travels can be far away ones, but they can also be a bus trip downtown, a walk in my garden or reading a book. And I hope that I can keep on being an art traveler. "I hope I can keep walking untill I die. I'd like to be climbing a mountain when that happens"(Judith McDaniel in A Woman's World - true stories of life on the road)

Let it snow!

When I came home from my week away Wednesday night, everything was covered in snow. I am always very fond of spring and summer, and can many times feel that our winters are way too long. But nevertheless, nothing is like the first snow. When Terje and I came home from work yesterday Marta and a friend were playing out in the snow, having alot of fun. Both Wednesday and Thursday it was too dark for photos though. We are sauth of the arctic circle and have a few hours with daylight also during the winter. But our days are short. And it is dark when we leave in the mornings and dark when we come back home in the afternoons. Today we came home a little earlier though, because of a parent teacher conference at Marta's school. And the first thing I did was to find my camera and take a photo of the first snowman of the year. Marta made it earlier this week, and you can see that our frosty friend has had a cold and hard time in the snow the past days.

Garden looks like winter wonderland, and I wish it could stay like this for the rest of the winter. But of course mild weather is coming, everything will melt and then freeze to ice and my fairytale land will be only a sweet memory. But I have a big heart filled with sweet memories like this, and now you can share it with me :-)

And through long and dark winternights there are always more than enough of things to do indoors. I am a passionate game collector, and love to watch when the girls grab a game and sit down for a moment to play.

My games are displayed around the house, but will soon be put away for a while now to give room the the Christmas collections.

Beautiful mountains.

I've been away for almost a week. On work. My work can be prettygood though. During the week-end I took part in an environmental network conference. We stayed at Sjusjøen Fjellstuer near Lillehammer. And both Saturday and Sunday we did mountain hiking in between the indoors meetings. And of course I brought my camera.

Quilting inspiration.

I am a long time quilter. Started quilting back in 1980, after buying my first quilt book on honeymoon in England. For many years I quilted all the time :-) But for the past four or five years my quilt inspiration source has been almost dry. Tonight I have been packing for a week away (on work) and suddenly decided that I wanted to bring a small quilt to work on. I had to do a search in the cupboards in my studio, but after a while I found what I was searching for, my "green with envy" quilt. It is a miniature I pieced many years ago. I was a member of an internet quilt group then which we called Best Friends (unfortunately I lost contact with the group some years ago). One time many of the members in the group, who were mostly Americans, were going to meet. It was not possible for me to cross the Atlantic and take part in the meeting. I asked the members to send me small pieces of green fabric, and I pieced this green with envy miniature.

The Pre-Raphaelites

In my Arnchairtravelling group on yahoo: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Armchairtravelling/ we are discussing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for the moment. This group was almost unknown to me when someone first mentioned it in the spring, now I have become really fascinated by them. A few days ago I made a new page in my art scrapbook with Millais' painting and Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Mariana as a theme.

Scrapbooking and cartoons.

Marta loves to draw, and she loves reading. A few weeks ago she met a Norwegian cartoon artist at the kid's club in church. The artist use the artist name Inkalill. I have never spent much time reading cartoons, so for me Inkalill was just a name. But I was very pleased when I saw that the meeting had been an important one for Marta. She came home with stars in her eyes, and immidiately started to make alot of drawings. We also searched for Inkalill on google, and found her home page.

We printed out cartoons about the cat Felina, and Marta made a couple of scrap book pages. Inside the envelope is a drawing Inkalill made for her during the church meeting.

Yesterday Marta and I was downtown, and among alot of other errands we had our visit to the library, as we use to. There we found several of Inkalill's cartoons collected in hardcover books. Marta borrowed three of them. She finished the first one in bed this morning, I think she went to sleep terrible late, and was awake early just to finish the book.

In the beginning of the books Inkalill tells the story of how she started to make cartoons. Through Marta I have also been inspired, and know that I am going to read her books, and will also see if they are still in print, these sounds good enough to be part of my book collection. And inspired by Inkalill I know that I can make my own dreams come true. Inkalill started to make her Miranda world of fantasy at the age of 10. It took her great many years to get the first stories published, but she never gave up. And today, many yeras later she has created dreams in the life of a nine years old girl and her mother.

Knitting during long and dark nights.

Knitting is a perfect pasttime when autumn comes. During the summer months I love to spend time in the garden in the afternoons and nights, but now the daylight is almost finished when I finish work. And we can't go out on flash light hikes every night :-) Besides reading and listening to opera, knitting is my favorite activity in autumn and winter (though different  types of crossword puzzles and sudoku's are also fighting for a place on top of that list). A few days ago I finished a pair of fancy socks which are now on their way over the Atlantic to a new owner.