"The early bird gets the worm...

but the second mouse gets the cheese." I read this hilarious addition to the proverb recently - perhaps it's commonplace and I simply haven't come across it before? Anyway, it would have come in handy a few weeks ago when I taught knitting in Kiruna in the far north of Sweden, the perfect time of the year if you want to see the midnight sun.

Fortunately, I never had difficulties falling asleep when it's light - and anyway most nights were cloudy - but it was rather confusing suddenly waking up and worrying I was late for my class before realising it was only perhaps 1.30 am and plenty of hours left to sleep.

Getting there from Stockholm (ca 1200 kilometers) takes quite a few hours, not least if you decide to travel by car. A great opportunity to spend time together with three friends! There was a lot of time to knit too, except when I was driving, of course - here's one reason to pay attention as documented by friend, fellow traveller and car owner Eva. (I'm not like a multi-tasking friend who once showed me his way of tatting while he was driving - something I found equally impressive and unnerving.)

Mini projects are great in a car, even in an unusually spacious one. I've practically finished my twined project based on charts in Richard Rutt's A History of Hand Knitting. For quite a while it came in handy as its own project bag:

self-contained

The light is strange, but I'll blame it on the midnight sun - this was rather late at night.

As usual, one thing leads to another, so I decided to knit a couple of mini cushions combining two of the same ingredients, namely charts from Rutt's book and twined knitting. For the smaller one (similar to a mini tube I wrote about in a previous post) I used 1½ mm needles and for the bigger (or less small) one 2 mm.

I'm going to give the blue and white one to my mother as a surprise. She likes this colour combination, has a thing for small objects and is fond of birds, so to me her name is practically written all over it.

You may wonder why I write a post if it's meant to be a surprise. Actually, she's on her way here for a few days' visit as I'm typing, so she won't know before I give it to her later this afternoon.