The first Thursday of a new year brings a fresh opportunity to highlight some beauty of both the outgoing and incoming calendars. Here are just three such moments from the past week:

1. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are so unseasonably warm it encourages spending time outdoors. We bike to and from the cinema for our annual film watching marathon, and we spend most of our time at Michael and Julia’s open house sitting on their deck.

2. Before the second of our New Year’s Eve movies, someone from the movie theater comes in and describes their upcoming features in an excited kind of way. It feels very homey, and, as Sarah said, alerts us that the staff are film aficionados.

3. Up early for a meeting, I am toasting an English muffin and doing something else at the same time when I turn around to discover that my toaster oven is on fire (we apparently hadn’t emptied the crumb catch in a really long time; that’s now been remedied). Because I am right there, I can blow it out, and the sirens that stop at our intersection not five minutes later are not for us.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

I mentioned in yesterday’s list and in my earlier fall/winter knitting goals that I wanted to make a new sweater.

I wear my Everyday Cardigan all the time, but it’s not really a flattering sweater. It’s functional and warm and a good all-around item, but it’s not … girly. And I’d really like a girly cardigan.

When we were in Iceland, we stopped in a supermarket so I could buy yarn. Yes, this shot is in one of their grocery stores. It’s probably the size of a large suburban Stop & Shop or Giant in the U.S. It was not as big as a supersized Target or the Fred Meyer in Salt Lake (which I think might not be called Fred Meyer anymore). But it did sell dry goods such as basic clothing and toys. And a whole wall of yarn.

I ended up bringing home several discs of unspun Icelandic wool — Plotulopi (which I remember by thinking of it as Plutolopi). That’s it along the bottom shelf.

I had done some research once I sussed out which yarns were available and local in Iceland, and this one was something I hadn’t ever seen back home (semi-regular access to Webs can spoil a girl). Checking in on Ravelry suggested several patterns that were specifically designed with Plotulopi in mind. I hemmed and hawed over a couple of them, but, really the choice came down to two — and I made the final decision last night.

My upcoming sweater (to be cast on later this month after I get back from Salt Lake) will be Haust.

Now I just have to hope I bought the right amount of yarn — or figure out how to get back to Selfoss if I need a few more meters.