Birkenwasser knits

The 5th round of Tour-de-Sock included plenty of cables with some beads. There were practically no repeats on the pattern, so you had to look at the chart on every single row. Not something you can carry around and knit a round here and another there...

Vogue Knitting brought a group of knitters to visit Norway and Finland. After touring Bergen and Oslo, their next stop was Helsinki. Tiina Huhtaniemi, the entrepreneur behind Titityy and Tukuwool, organised a lovely event for the group of North American knitters to meet Finnish knitters and indie yarn dyers. Kellohalli at Teurastamo was a nice venue for the event, especially as it's walking distance from where I live! It was also nice that there was enough room to mingle, even if the event was sold out. Still, with 130 guests, the waiting time for pizza was rather long, but as you could wait at the table and not have to stand in line it didn't really matter.


There was a great opportunity to buy souvenirs from Finland, with Lanitium ex Machina, Handu and Titityy selling their yarns. Even if the Vogue knitting group had been to our LYS Snurre earlier that day, it seemed that many still wanted to buy more! And who wouldn't with such a great selection. I might have bought something, and so did the happy lady in the picture below.


The program was hosted by Jonna Hietala, editor in chief of Laine magazine. She interviewed Barbara, the tour guide of our visitors, as well as Carla Scott, editor in chief of Vogue Knitting. It was so interesting to hear more about their trip and their impressions of Finnish knit scene. I didn't know that all Finns knit the same way, where as North Americans all have their own style. Maybe the reason is that in Finland, knitting is taught at school, so everyone learns to do it the same way. I also had a nice chat with Carla who brought some Vogue Knitting magazines with her, and it was great to see the magazines, especially the printout of the latest issue that's not even out yet.


Jonna interviewed Veera Välimäki about her designer career and current work. She was working on a new sweater design, and as often happens, had to frog the whole thing during the evening as it didn't turn out the way she wanted. She also explained how the best feeling is when the design comes out exactly like you wanted it to be. I have to say that it sounds familiar, both the frogging and the joy when it works out!

Jonna also talked about the story behind Laine magazine, and how she started it with Sini who was also there. We all know how knitting brings together people of different ages and backgrounds, and in this case the psychologist-journalist combo turned into a great magazine!


The best part of the evening was meeting other knitters. Luckily, our North American guests were not afraid of small talk like some Finns might be, and we talked about knitting with so many lovely people from the US and Canada. It was also nice to see so many Instagram friends live. Knitting, old and new friends, yarn shopping - that's what perfect evenings are made of!

Mosaic knitting is something that was expected and feared on Tour-de-Sock. When stage 4 pattern was released, there was a collective sigh of relief: it's a lovely pattern! This pattern makes great use of mosaic knitting: you couldn't really achieve the same result with stranded knitting.




This time the pattern was released at 6 AM, so I thought that if I'm ever going to get socks done in one go, this would be the timing for that. I can't stay up late and I can't knit if I'm tired, so any round that begins in the afternoon or evening (or night) means that I will eventually give up and go to bed. This time, I persisted until midnight and got the socks done! For the last hour, I was so tired that I would have normally given up and gone to bed, but as I was already knitting the toes I decided to stay up and finish the socks.


Unfortunately, blocking didn't even out my slipped stitches like I was hoping for. I'm still happy with these socks: I think the neon pink looks good and the smallest 60 stitch size turned into a women's medium size with my loose knitting.

Third stage in Tour-de-Sock included lace and cables and many options. Picot cuff or ribbing, decorative heel or Eye of Partridge, and even more options if you are not competing: ribbed or patterned instep. First choice is yarn, of course, and for me there were only two options: wildly variegated dark green or this pink with gray and white tones. The reason for only two options was that we were visiting my sister and I only packed these two. The pattern was published at midnight on Friday, but I decided to go to bed early and then to wake up early to get started before everyone else gets up.





Weekend at my sister's was great, and I did get some knitting time here and there: in a park, on the bus, at a museum (I did check the exhibitions with Young Warrior, but when he wanted to inspect the exhibits at the Game museum more thoroughly I took the opportunity to sit down and knit). Now, this pattern isn't exactly optimal for on-the-go knitting: it looks easy enough to memorize by taking one look at it, but it isn't. That meant a lot of time wasted correcting mistakes. More time was wasted with the extra work on the heels and I only finished the socks on Sunday evening after returning home. That meant finishing 72nd.

Linking up to CreaDienstag.

You can knit all you want in all colors of the rainbow, but, let's face it, the items that you use most are black cardigans. That's at least what happens with knitted garments in my case. On my quest for the perfect black cardi, I decided to go with a circular lace yoke cardigan by Veera Välimäki. This might be the first design by Veera Välimäki that I've knitted, and it was nice to see how she writes her patterns. Instructions were clear, and the design is pretty straight forward, so all there was to do was to knit it. So why did it take 9 months to do it?!




The problem with this project was the yarn. I love Malabrigo Sock, so I thought that it would be an easy choice for this cardigan and bought the yarn. Now, a dark color, such as this BLACK, may bleed, but as it was the only color I was using I didn't want to waste time washing my yarn before knitting. The result: any amount of knitting resulted in my hands turning black, and the dye didn't even come off by washing hands so I would have black nails and fingers for a couple of days after knitting. Normally, I work on my projects while doing all kinds of other stuff: reading, travelling, sitting by the playground, waiting for something, you name it. With this project you couldn't do that, though, because picking it up always meant hand washing.


I don't give up easily, so when my LYS had a Malabrigo sale, I bought another cardigan's worth of Sock. This second lot feels different than the first one. It's much softer, and that makes me think (hope!) that maybe it was a problem with the dye lot and I won't have the same trouble with my next project. We'll see, I haven't tried knitting with the second lot yet.



It's RUMS day.