Birkenwasser knits

There was a long journey before I got this far. My first attempt was to work with gray only for the front panels, but you could hardly see the different directions they were worked in. You can see the beginning of the project on my blog post from April 2016. I put the project aside, until I saw something striped and realised it was the solution for this cardigan.





Prufrock was an old man, and in the poem he's talking about how there always was a later time for making decisions and achieving things. In my case, it didn't take a life time to publish this pattern, but  it was a long project. However, thinking that there will be time proved right, and now is the time: the pattern is live!


It's CreaDienstag!

When preparing for the Indie Design GAL, we heard that one of the designers had gotten into an accident and couldn't promote her own patterns during the GAL. Many participating designers wanted to show support for her and bought her patterns. Natalia Sha designs lace shawls for advanced knitters, and as I had been thinking about knitting a shawl with lace and beads, it seemed like the perfect time to do that. I chose her Mountain Ash shawl, and found some blue beads and lace yarn in my stash.




It was a good decision, as I ran out of yarn a couple of rows before finishing the border. I undid the provisional cast on, and unraveled the first couple of set up rows of the lace border. ("Brilliant! You'll never have to buy yarn again, just keep unraveling from the other end!" said Business woman.) With this yarn I was almost able to finish the border, and then I used the variegated yarn to bind off. I was planning to use two colors for the main shawl, but it was so small that I didn't even need a whole skein of the variegated one.


Then it was just about easy stockinette stitch towards the end, and I was going to finish by the GAL dl. Well, things don't always work out as planned, and just before reaching the top I realised that I was decreasing at a too fast pace and what was supposed to be a small shawlette had turned into a tiny nothing. At this point I could have finished and just leave it at that, and had I known that Natalia was one of the unrepresented designers of the GAL I would have done that. But I didn't want a weird tiny shawl, so I unraveled the variegated part and started all over. It didn't take too long to finish knitting, but as I wasn't in a hurry to finish, it took about a month to block the shawl! You have to pin every 4 sts of the bind off, and I was dreading to do that. In the end, my little Troll Princess asked if she could help and we had a nice time blocking the shawl together. Afterwards, she asked if she could have the shawl, and I didn't have the heart to say no. It's not really my style, I just wanted to knit it. It might not be the style I'd like to see my daughter wear either, but she loved the beads and I didn't have other plans for the shawl so it's hers now. I'm not sure if I'd ever want to knit another one, there was too much of looking at the chart in the lace part to my taste, but I'm still happy that I did - I always enjoy trying new things when it comes to knitting!


It's CreaDienstag!

Jyväskylä KnitFestival organised its first Winter Festival on Feb 2-4, 2018. The first day of the festival wasn't easy: local traffic was on strike and there a blizzard in Jyväskylä. Not the best day for an open air market, with temperatures below -10 'C! Luckily, long distance trains were not on strike, and as I live within a walking distance from the train station I was able to make it to Jyväskylä on Friday. I arrived just in time for the Knit Night at Cafe Muisto, and had a lovely evening.


On Saturday morning, we were greeted with sunshine! It was a beautiful day, although colder than Friday. You have to admire the marketplace vendors who spent the day outside. I wasn't dressed for the weather, so after some quick shopping outside I headed to Titityy for some more shopping and to check out their new premises. There was plenty of room to sit and knit and chat with other knitters, and I was able to swatch with some new yarn to find out what size needles I should buy.


In the afternoon, I participated in Rachel Coopey's Inspired Socks class. We learned how to design a pair of socks with inspiration from stitch dictionaries. I brought a stitch pattern with me that I thought might be too difficult to turn into a sock design, but Rachel was very supportive and encouraged me to go ahead with it. After 3 hours of knitting, I noticed that I didn't like the pattern after all - it looked so different in sock form compared to the picture of a flat piece. But now I know what parts of the pattern I want to keep and what I'm going to change, so this just might become my first sock design!


On Saturday dinner, we had the opportunity to see (and try on) some of the samples in next Laine Magazine. There are some lovely designs among them!


Sunday morning started with a Knitting Brunch at a lovely teahouse, Teeleidi. After that it was time for me to head to the train station with my souvenirs. Two bags of yarn. I don't know how that happened... But this set of Tukuwool Sock was included in the ticket price, and there should be a pattern by Rachel Coopey coming to go with it!


It was such a nice weekend, again. Thank you for organising such a great event and thank you everyone who participated for making it such a great experience! Hope to see you all at the next event!

I had quite ambitious plans for the Indie Design Gift-A-Long, and they turned out to be too ambitious. This cardigan took more than 5 weeks to knit, so I only finished it after the GAL was over. I'm still super happy with the cardigan - a long, open cardigan is something you can wear with everything!




If you notice a side seam in the picture above, it's where I changed between two skeins to even out the differences in colour in the plant dyed yarn. There were big differences in colour between skeins, so I used two skeins throughout the cardigan and tried to vary the width of the stripes. You can still see some stripes, but they look ok to me. The only problem was that the first two were so similar that it looks like I only started striping after dividing for sleeves.


It's RUMS day.