Birkenwasser knits: November 2016

Indie Design Gift-A-Long 2016

6:31 PM

Join the Indie Design 2016 Gift-A-Long! What is Gift-A-Long? It’s a multi-designer promotion to help you kick your holiday gift-making into high gear! The Indie Design Gift-A-Long is a 6 week long KAL/CAL of holiday gifts made from patterns designed by a rather extensive list of independent designers. From November 22, 2016 at 8:00 pm US EST (that would be 3 AM Nov 24 here in Finland) to December 31, 2016 at midnight US EST there will be fun games, contests, and 8 KAL/CALs that will help you get your holiday knitting done with companionship and fun! Come and join us in the Indie Design 2016 Gift-A-Long group in Ravelry!

To make it even better - all participating designers are giving a 25 % discount on select patterns! There are 335 participating designers from all over the world, so there's plenty to choose from. The discount runs through Nov 22-30. Following that, you will have all of December to work on your KAL/CAL projects. There are lots of prizes and with more than 7000 members in the group you won't have trouble finding other knitters/crocheters to chat with!

So wind your yarn, get set, and see you in the group!

traveling

Knitting in Saaremaa

9:47 AM

Some of you might have wondered how I managed to take such a sunny picture of the Broken tweed stitch mitts for my previous post. Well, it wasn't in the darkness of Helsinki in November, but in sunny Saaremaa in Estonia. Our autumn holiday took us to Kuressaare, which is the capital of Saaremaa island. The last time I visited Saaremaa was some 20 years ago, so I had totally forgotten what a lovely place it is!

One of the testers for my Mesmeria dress is Estonian and she used Estonian Aade Long gradient yarn for the dress. I love the way it turned out, so I wanted to find some of that yarn for souvenir. Unfortunately, she didn't know of any yarn shops in Kuressaare, but as she put it "if there are yarn shops you will find them".

In a small town of 15 000 inhabitants you might not expect to find yarn shops, but Estonia is a country of knitters and there were "Käsitööpood" signs everywhere! Mostly the shops sell knitted items, but some of them also yarn. The first shop that I visited was Tiiu Tanu handicrafts shop on Lossi 1. I admired all the knitted items on sale, but I didn't find anything interesting in their yarn selection - until I looked under the table and that's where all the Aade Long yarns were!

I believe that I found exactly the yarns that my tester used in her project. Although, I have to say that I'm not totally sure: we didn't have a common language with the ladies in the shop, and either they didn't understand my question of how the colors look like once knitted or they just didn't have a sample. I'll let the yarn surprise me!

From Fingerless Mitts to Gloves to Fingerless Mitts

12:39 PM

In April, I thought that I was done knitting Broken tweed stitch gloves and mitts after making a fingerless pair for myself and gloves for Young Warrior. The young man initially wanted fingerless mitts, but had to settle for gloves as mom didn't want his fingers to freeze. Then Pokemon Go happened, and pretty soon it was obvious how unfair it was when mom was playing with fingerless mitts and son had to take off his gloves every time a Pokemon appeared. As there was yarn left, it wasn't a problem to knit another pair, using the modified gloves as pattern for re-modification back into fingerless mitts.

Pattern: Broken Seed Stitch -kämmekkäät by Maria Kostamovaara (modified)

Yarn: Rowan Fine Tweed in colorways Pendle (18 g) and Bedale (5 g)

Needles: 2,5 mm

These three pairs of gloves and mitts finally used up all four balls of yarn, so there won't be any more of these mitts. Unless my Troll Princess wants a pair and I find more of the discontinued yarn somewhere...

It's a creative Tuesday again - taking part in CreaDienstag.

Shimmering Sea in Malabrigo Lace

9:49 AM

My original Shimmering Sea sample went to Quince & co and it's touring the US with the rest of the Shawls 2016 collection. I realised that I wanted one for myself, and as it's a nice shawl to knit with all that garter stitch it was about time to make another one. I wanted to try another yarn (the original design is for Quince & co Piper), and as a friend was planning to knit this with Malabrigo Lace I thought that I would do the same. I had a skein in Pearl Ten colorway left from my Wigeon project, so I wanted to get two colors to go with it. Now the problem was that my LYS only had one colorway of Malabrigo Lace. The light purple they had might have worked with Pearl Ten, but I would have needed to order the third color online anyway. So why not go with something completely different then!

Pattern: Shimmering Sea

Yarn: Malabrigo Lace in colorways Water Green (33 g), Emerald (62 g) and Verde Esperanza (62 g)

Needles: 5 mm (US 8)

The problem with ordering yarn online is that it's really difficult to see how the colors would look together. This is an especially challenging pattern in that respect, as you work with two strands at a time and mix two colors in the marled sections. I spent hours going through Malabrigo Lace projects on Ravelry, trying to find colors that would look nice together. Finally, I chose to go with this line of blue-green shades. As the yarns arrived, I noticed that there wasn't enough contrast between the darker shades. Or, there might have been, had the Emerald skeins been the same lighter dye lot. Unfortunately, I received a lighter and darker shade of Emerald, and the darker one was too close to Verde Esperanza. The good thing with this pattern is that it doesn't really matter if you're working with two different dye lots: simply switch between dye lots when starting the next stripe. So I didn't want to go through the trouble of finding another colorway and ordering more yarn and chose to work with these as planned.

The shawl has 5 sections: 3 with a single color and the 2 between them marled and striped. You can see this on the lighter end of the shawl, going from Water Green to Water Green + Emerald with Water Green stripes, and then Emerald alone. However, the rest of the shawl appears to be in one color only, even if it is marled Emerald and Verde Esperanza with Verde stripes and then Verde alone.

Didn't work as planned, but it's a lovely shawl anyway. This shawl came out smaller than the Piper version: 157 cm wingspan and 51 cm deep (vs. 224 x 69 cm in Piper).

Taking part in RUMS.

design

Mesmeria Dress

4:37 PM

Mesmeria Dress is seamless and knitted top-down, starting with a garter stitch yoke. The dress features bubblewrap stitch rows in two alternating contrast colors. There are buttons on the back neck matching the bubbles of the dress. The dress is long, but you can easily make it shorter: the top-down construction allows you to try it on and knit until desired length. The yoke is tight fitting, but the hem has more ease and plenty of room to allow play. The dress will turn into a tunic as your child grows!

Pattern: Mesmeria Dress

Yarn: Knitlob's lair Tuulen tytär in colorways Mokka, Tiili, Puolukka

Needles: 3.5 mm (US 4)

This project took a bit longer than usual. Knitting bubblewrap stitches requires that you pay attention to what you are doing (check out a video tutorial by Knitting Stitch Patterns if you don't take my word for it), so I would knit the stockinette stitch part and then put the project aside until I had time to do the bubblewrap round. My original idea was to only do the stripes at the bottom of the dress, but then I ran out of yarn and also realised that it would look better if fully striped. On a side note: my Troll Princess who is modelling for me here saw my original drawing for the dress and added bubbles all the way. I should've followed her advise right away instead of first stubbornly knitting according to my initial idea and then frogging it and doing it the way she proposed. Good thing is that now we are both happy with the end result!