Busy Signal

Beer, ,

So I’ve enjoyed being able to find Westvleteren beer at Bert’s Bierhuis in Utrecht.  It’s a lot less than you have to pay on Ebay in the US, but still not cheap.  So I’ve been calling Westvleteren each time they have an open slot.  So far: no luck.

Their phone lines are constantly busy.  My cell phone can’t call international numbers (haven’t figured out how to navigate the Dutch phonetree to turn that on).  And Westvleteren doesn’t allow anonymous numbers, so Skype is out.  So my only option is my landline, which is a phone that I think is older than I am, with clunky buttons and no redial, currently on a short cord in the living room, with a wobbly base sliding around as I try to punch in the, by now memorized, 12-digit phone number for Westvleteren (00 32 70 21 00 54, at least I don’t have to dial all those zeroes on a rotary dial phone).

To relieve the monotony, I get a couple of different kinds of busy signal.  About half the time, I get a busy signal right away.  The other half of the time, it rings for a bit and then gives me a busy signal (I wonder whether these are the times when a bunch of people are all trying at the same time, and some other lucky bastard gets through instead of me).  Occasionally, I misdial because the phone is sliding around or I don’t get the buttons pushed all the way down.  But the result is always the same: busy signal.

So next weekend, I think we’re going to just drive out there and see what there is to see.  I’ve seen blog and forum posts saying their cafe sometimes has six-packs for sale.  And since it’s the middle of winter, I figure the tourist traffic is going to be as low as it’s going to get.  So you never know, I might get lucky.

Silk garden hitchhiker scarf

knitting, ,

Noro’s silk garden has beautiful colors, but I guess hadn’t thought too much about how the colors cycled. They cycle slowly. Very, very slowly. So, as usual for me, I ended up with something that I like, but not quite what I had envisioned in my head.

I really liked the beginning (the narrow purple to yellow at the bottom in the right picture), but then a little light went off about halfway into the orange/red section – my stripes were going to get thinner and thinner as I went further into hitchhiker, because the pattern works by expanding each row (it’s a fantastic pattern, by the way!). I went through the usual Stages of Knitting, all done while still knitting away on the project:

1. Surprise (???)
2. Disbelief (But, but… It’s not possible that this yarn cycles through colors so slowly!)
3. Despair (Crap – This is going to be the goofiest looking hitchhiker scarf ever)
4. Anger (Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why did I ever think I liked this yarn?)
5. Wild Thoughts (I should just rip this all apart and pick a different project.)
6. Acceptance (I’m not wasting all this effort. I still like the colors. So, I get to have a stripy scarf.)

As it turns out, the stripes didn’t get as narrow as I thought they would (though only because I ran out of yarn). And I like the final result – using a thicker yarn makes it more snuggly than usual, and the stripes create an interesting effect when I wear it (because they are diagonal).

Further fun with felt

Fiber, ,

Redbeard is just shaking his head, but I’m rather pleased with my most recent adventures with felt. I got it into my head about a week ago that what I needed to do, what I really need to do was, I needed to try to make needle felted tulips. I finally got a chance to give it a try, and am pretty happy this first effort. Of course, I didn’t think to take pictures until I was nearly done, but here is one in-progress picture and the final product:

Bulb flowers are for sale everywhere here, usually in small pots that have just enough soil to let them grow, but not enough to let them grow very large. There are lots of pygmy daffodils here. 🙂 Anyway, my idea was to do the same thing with these felt flowers. So, rather than a vase, they are in a little pot.

The small scale of these was a bit challenging, and I am still thinking about how to best shape the flowers themselves. The thing that I thought would be a problem – having stems that were strong enough to stand upright – turned out to be no problem at all. I figured I’d have to somehow put wire into the stems, but they are easily standing on their own.

Also, I’d like to pretend that I planned for this, but I have to admit that it is sheer dumb luck that I picked tulips instead of some other flower. Because tulips have a naturally thick stem compared to most other flowers, I think my tulips look better than if I had started with, say, roses. In short, chunky is okay here. I think.

The Netherlands also has these traditional tulip vases that have small holes for each individual stem instead of a big opening at the top. I may have to try that for my next set.

Local Beer

Beer, , ,

I always enjoy drinking a new beer I’ve never had before.  It’s almost never undrinkable swill, and adds a nice element of surprise and discovery.  So it was nice to find some local beer in bottles we could drink at home, and not have to go to the castle to get it.

In our local organic/alternative grocery store, we found a few bottles from Brouwerij de Leckere in Utrecht.  I really liked the Witte Vrouwen, a cloudy wheat beer with a nice grassy, spicy taste and a little creamy.  The Paulus was less interesting — a pale ale with a little bit of biscuit malt, but not much flavor at all.

At the fabulous Bert’s Bierhuis in Utrecht, Wind found a couple bottles from De 7de Hemel (7th Heaven).  They’re not exactly local — they’re near the German border in the southeastern part of the Netherlands.  Donder (Thunder) was a great find — a dark, nutty, earthy Belgian dark ale, which reminded me quite a bit of Cigar City’s Maduro (one of my favorite beers from back home).  The Vorst (Frost), on the other hand, was very strange.  The aroma was spicy and sweet, but the flavor was dominated by bitter mint and resiny notes.  This was a big surprise since I was expecting a more traditional dark, gingery winter ale.

So half the beers turned out to be very good, and the other half not so much.  But De 7de Hemel has quite a few more beers, so we’re going to give them a try soon.  The Donder was good enough to give me hope that they’ll have a few more really fantastic brews.

Redbeard gets a hat

knitting,

Just in time for the thaw (it got up to a balmy 35 degrees today), I made Redbeard a hat:

It’s a criminally soft yarn (an alpaca cotton blend) that he chose himself while dutifully accompanying me to the yarn store as we made the rounds of shopping errands. Positive reinforcement is a good thing.

 

No lessons this time – it went remarkably smoothly and as expected.

Mittens, part twee

knitting, , , ,

Well, I ran out of yarn right at the end, but managed to bind off the fingers. However, I was still left with thumb holes. Faced with the choice of waiting until I could get back to the yarn store and having mittens right now, but with different colored thumbs, my daughter decided color contrast was good.

The end result is funky, but sort of cute. I had just a couple options, since I left the vast majority of my stash back in Florida.

The interesting this here is that this white yarn (that my daughter picked) is actually some that I spun myself, and this is the first time that I have put any yarn I’ve spun to real use. The mitten yarn is DK weight, but the homespun is…. thick. The end result, after a lot of cursing while trying to knit 2 stitches together over and over (I actually bent one of my needles a little – those puny size 3s just couldn’t handle my fearsome yarn!) was having really thick, dense mitten thumbs. I’m going to spin this as a good thing – extra protection against the cold while making snow balls!

Lessons learned: You CAN switch up a needle size (or two… or four) in the middle of a project if your needles are too small. For the thumbs, once I switched up to size 7, things went much better. Plus, at least in this case, you can’t tell when I made the switch. My other lesson? Sadly, I think it is “Always buy an extra skein” – I am going to be able to make a heck of a scrap blanket very soon, I suspect!

It Comes in Crates!

Beer, ,

I spent way too long trying to return empties today.  Our grocery store, Albert Heijn, has a nice machine that counts the bottles, randomly rejects a few, and then spits out a receipt you can exchange for cash at the checkout stand.  Except today it wasn’t working.

So there was a line of people with bottles and such to return, and a handful of Albert Heijn employees gamely trying to fix the machine — testing all sorts of bottles, peering inside, and even rebooting it (I sometimes apologize on behalf of all programmers at times like this).  In the end, a little glass cleaner in the right place fixed things and we were all able to get our empties turned in.

Though watching a couple of guys returning crates of bottles reminded me that I can get crates of Westmalle Dubbel and Tripel now.  We’ve been mostly buying one or two bottles of different things, and trying lots of different things.  But Westmalle Dubbel is one of my favorites, so it was nice to get a crate (though I was cursing myself as I lugged the crate home in the snow).

Now my only problem is I want to keep the crate instead of turning it in for refund…

Still here!

knitting, ,

We’re still here and up to beer- and fiber-related things. Just not much to say much about at the moment.

I extended my son’s “silver” mittens, which went fine. My daughter has demanded a pair of her own, which is fine except that I’ve realized, as I finished her first mitten (minus the thumb) that I HATE double-pointed knitting. I’m also knitting Redbeard a hat, which I love to knit because I can knit in the round. Pictures soon, I want to wait until I can get the mitten finished enough for my daughter to model, because they scrunch up into yarn-balls when not worn. Does one actually have to block mittens? That just seems wrong!

(A “Massive” snow “storm” here (read: 2 inches over the course of the morning) in the Netherlands meant we had to cancel our trip to Paris this weekend. I know, world’s smallest violin and all, but it was still pretty pitiful to watch our son standing in the snow at the outdoor-only train platform crying while we waited for our train that never came. Plus, this was supposed to be our birthday present to our daughter, so she was only barely managing not to cry herself, at least at one point. Poor things!)

Kafé België and Bert’s Bierhuis

Beer, , , ,

We went to Kafé België in Utrecht for lunch and a few beers today.  The food was great café food, but not a lot of selection.  This continues the trend of really outstanding food we’ve gotten at cafés.

The beer selection was impressive — they had 150+ bottles (see pic), and a dozen or so taps.  They were dominated by abbey beers, but there were also a few saisons and other styles.  They even had some American beers (Bud, Anchor and Flying Dog).  We were glad to see some saison and Flanders red on the menu, since we hadn’t seen any since we got here.  One of the beers we got was contract-brewed for them specially, and our waiter called it a DPA (Dutch Pale Ale): a milder, less hoppy cousin to IPA.  It reminded me a lot of Swamp Head’s Big Nose: lots of aromatic hops, but not a lot of bitterness.  Though it wasn’t as full-bodied and malty as Big Nose.

After lunch, we strolled down the Oudegracht to Bert’s Bierhuis.  This is a great beer shop owned by the same people who run Kafé België.  The selection is great, and very well-organized by region and style.  It was nice to see the beers I’d seen back home lined up, with all the other beers from the same brewery next to them.  There were a ton of beers I’d never heard of before, and hard-to-find things like Westvleteren 8 and 12.  We got as many bottles as we thought we could lug back to the train station, and they threw in a free totebag.

I’m definitely looking forward to coming back to both of these places, and sampling many more of their broad selections.

Mittens (and beer)

Beer, knitting,

It’s dropped down into the low 30s here (or -4/-2 C, which sounds so much more alarming), and so I experienced some increased pressure to finish the mittens. (Especially because my son was resisting going outside for recess.)

Here they are:

I started to move my beer and its stray bottle cap out of the way, and then thought “Well, it is Knittles and BEER after all…” and so here we see the mittens, plus the beer that helped me finish them last night.

For once my second copy was better than the first, thought I did have to frog my first attempt at the second mitten. The pattern is actually meant for a two-color mitten, with columns of a different color in the cuffs. My son was not at all interested in this, so I just stuck with “silver”, but now I think I understand the basic logic of slipping stitches to do multi-color patterns. So, that’s my lesson for this project. 🙂

Also, I’m not so happy with the length of the cuffs. I did what the pattern called for, but they seem too short to me. My son seems to agree- he kept trying to pull his coat sleeves over them all the way to school. I may try to lengthen them after the fact with just a simple ribbed pattern.