six flavours of icecream and three pairs of earrings

The heat of summer has arrived in Vienna. If you have nothing to do, it's great. If you have to work or think, it's torture. It only gets a little cooler in the evening and if there's a wind, it might be a bit better, but it can also be like a giant hairdryer. But I need to make the page number rise, after all, I'm starting an internship on Monday and I'll be insanely busy all July. The perks of that internship are great, however. I'll get to do something I really, really like - work in a library, putter around in their stacks, help out customers - and they have a terrace, air conditioning and I can dress normally and not too office-like.

However, I'll have to take a shawl to work. The highest stack room has a temperature of 18° Celsius, the lowest floor is colder than that and there is a constant draft. So a shawl and a scarf! I think I'm going to take Anna's Scarf (the grey one I showed a couple posts ago), because it clings to itself so nicely. But which scarf? Should it be Pink Champagne?

This was my first try of a Finnish scarf pattern. I just looked at the pictures of the original pattern and then made up my own numbers, since it's a really easy pattern. I actually made six more of it, all with different trims. Five of those I gave to friends. The sixth I kept. It's not a giveaway item. It's my Raincaller Scarf and noone except me gets to wear it.

Have I actually worn it, you ask? No ... not yet. But I will! Just like I'll wear my Summer Stream in the Shade scarf, it just needs to be blocked first ...

It's made from Lana Grossa Asia, which is 50% bamboo, 50% cotton and feels very nice. Even nicer is this one, though, the Asphodelus Aestivus. I have yarn to make a woolen version of this, but I haven't gotten to it, yet. I really love the blue color and the fringe, but it's so easy to pull a little sling of yarn out of it and then it's hard getting it back into the scarf.

On July 14th, I should probably wear my Lace Ribbon Scarf, which I've christened Vive la France! It's made with silk yarn (the blue and red) and silk and linen yarn (the tan) that my dad brought me from Japan. This one was a pain to knit, it never seemed to grow and I couldn't pick up dropped stitches like I usually can and had to unravel rows more than a few times. The first part I knit was super-tight, so I had to pay attention to keep the tension that way and it didn't always work out. And I added the crochet trim, because fringe wouldn't have looked good at all. The blocking turned it from something very scrunched up into a beautiful scarf, though.

The last one is a crocheted scarf again. I bought the yarn to make a birthday present for a friend (one of the stringy scarves like Pink Champagne) and managed to have enough left over to make myself a little Crocus scarf, since the color is just like those pale white-purple crocuses.

This one still needs to be blocked, too. I guess if I had proper blocking tools, I'd do it more often, but I have no immediate access to proper blocking pins or blocking wires and the most important thing I lack is space. I used to have about 4 beds on which to block at my disposal, but now, I only have the one and my couch is perpetually occupied with layers of paper, clothes, yarn and many other bits and pieces. Maybe I'll be able to block more this summer.

And to finally get to the tantalizing promise of six icecream flavours and three pairs of earrings. I met up with one of my very best friends today, who I love very much and first we had some iced drinks and sandwiches, then we headed over to my favorite icecream place, Bortolotti. There's three Bortolottis on the Mariahilfer Straße, which is the most popular shopping street in Vienna. I live closest to the uppermost one and that's where we got our icecream. Here in Vienna, you don't get a ball or two or three of icecream on a cone, you get a spatula full of icecream and the basic cone has three of those, so, I had a cone with nocciolone (chocolate-hazelnut icecream with bits of hazelnut), maroni (sweet chestnut icecream with bits of candied chestnut) and a new flavour, cola-fizz (coke icecream with coke poprocks). I just wanted to try the last flavour, it's definitely something for the kids.

Then we went earring shopping by chance. We came across a new store and all those earrings called out to me. I finally settled on some that looked like buttons, six of them, in all the colors of the rainbow except dark blue (the one opposite the yellow button is purple) - always wanted to have some like those.

Then I found the perfect earrings for my serious look - fake pearl earrrings, fake diamond earrings and larger fake pearl earrings with a flower design on them. Heh. I'm really looking forward to wearing those.

And to top it off, I finally found the perfect disc-with-design earrings. I'd been seeing them with flowers and other patterns, but nothing had called out to me. These are perfect, with the sparrow and the flowers ... love them!

And after I had said goodbye to my friend, who went and sang opera in this wretched heat, brave her, I had more icecream. Because we had just hit the middle Bortolotti and they had new flavours, too. Mojito (lime and mint and a vague alcoholic taste) and caramel, which was quite good as well. To go with those, I had raspberry as the third.

Now for washing my hair and then work ...