These last few days have been a blur. Besides a few trips to the beautiful open air museum Skansen here in Stockholm (I’ll show you the place in a moment) there is nothing exciting happening except being pregnant and waiting. Waiting. And knitting, mostly.

And finally things are getting a bit of colour around here, too. It’s so refreshing to see all those trees and flowers back at work for a change after the long winter months. It really feels that we had only one real day of spring and went straight into summer. A bit like a Monty Python sketch 🙂

It’s really the first time in ages I have so much time to myself and I cannot really come up with anything new or creative, so I just dove into my stash, pulled out the thick merino yarns I purchased at the Wollfabrik Hamburg when I was there last time and started knitting the first thing that came into my head that fits the yarn: Hats. And more hats. On the sofa, on the balcony, on the go. I’m such a brainless knitter at the moment!

These are all knit on 3mm needles with 96 stitches and have a lovely thick feel to them. Perfect for summer… Seriously, I must be weird. But since I really can’t be bothered to make up anything new right now (I guess the creativity inside me might be used for something else at the moment) I made the Pointy Pompom Hat a few times over in different colour combinations. Once I started to mix and match colours the matching possibilities seemed endless even with a limited number of colourways, and so I just need to make more. Oh dear. What am I going to do with so many hats… For now I put them up in my Etsy shop.  I think I need to dive into my inspiration queue again soon.

But for now I’ll show you some lovely inspirations from one of my favourite places here in Stockholm. The open air museum of Skansen. Like most places in Stockholm, if you’re planning to go more than once it’s recommended to get an annual pass. And since this is one of my favourite places of course I have one. It’s not only a great place to get to know some Swedish history, but also a lovely park to hang out, a zoo with all the Nordic animals (that all have little ones right now1) and also a great place to go to with kids. And it’s one of the most photogenic places I know! I mean, look at the residents alone! (this one was showing off just for me, it seems)

But besides free ranging animals like him there are so many cute places to relax and have a picnic that it is impossible to see everything in one day. Even if you tried.

The park is beautifully set upon a hill that overlooks the city of Stockholm and includes so many different areas that you’ll most definitely have trouble finding your favourite one.  They rebuilt old houses and farmyards from all across the country and you can go and visit them all, with people ‘living’ and working there as they were a few hundred years back. Plus they also do a lot of fun activities every day, like olden times games and also workshops, for example about making yarn from flax, and spinning and dyeing with natural ingredients!

There’s even a competition in hand spinning happening this year, if you feel up for the challenge.

If all of this makes you hungry you could grab some traditional food and candy there, too, like on the candy stores that you can read about in the Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren 🙂

Anyways. I could bomb you with pictures of this place, but I’d much rather go and knit another hat, haha.

Enjoy your week and happy knitting!