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.

For the second stage of Tour-de-Sock, I was prepared to be competitive: it was my last vacation day so I could just sit at home and knit. But then it turns out that the start is at 8 PM and that kind of ruined my plans, because I can't stay up all night and knit. I surprised myself by staying up until 2 AM, though, and the last bit I owe to Hippusia Johanna who was doing a live Instagram of her knitting and that kind of kept me in the knitting mood for so late. By the way, reminded me of when I was young and there were TV chats with hosts - the host reads SMS text messages that are also shown on the TV screen and then comments on them. Seemed to work in the knitting competition context! (Sorry for not participating in the discussion, but I was knitting so I couldn't type messages at the same time :)



The second pattern included colorwork, and it gave me an opportunity to try out my new yarn thimble. I forgot to show it on my recent post of Jyväskylä Summer Knit Festival, but it was actually my first purchase. I'm glad that the first booth that I visited at the festival was Goldsmith Sanni Lehtinen's, because she only had like 5 yarn thimbles left at that point and I was lucky to still get one. I have to say that it made knitting so much easier as I didn't have to worry about keeping the yarns in order.


The pattern also included Latvian braids, and that was a new technique for me. This is what I love about Tour-de-Sock: it forces you to try new techniques! I had seen Latvian braids before, but I'm not a big fan of the look, so I probably would have never tried them if I didn't have to.

I had some trouble with my choice of yarns. My first choice didn't match the pattern, so I had to think of something else after seeing what I would be knitting. I loved the Priha socks, also by Tiina Kuu, that I knitted on the warm-up round and the dark blue looked so good that I wanted to use it for these socks as well. I had 40 grams left, exactly the same amount as in the sample small-size socks listed on the pattern. Only thing is, that in the sample the main colour was not used in colorwork, which was mentioned, but I didn't notice it at that time. So, I ran out of yarn at toes, and had to use the contrast color, which doesn't look very nice.


Having already started knitting, I started thinking that my contrast colors might not have enough contrast after all, so I made one more change before starting the colorwork. This is where I lost my sponsor yarn point, as I switched from a Lanitium ex Machina yarn to the pink that I used here. To be eligible for extra point for using sponsor yarn, you'd have to use sponsor yarn in either the main color or both contrast colors. If I were to knit the socks again, I would use the dark color for the birds, and a lighter color as the main color.

Being in the competitive mode, I went with the smallest size. I thought it was a women's S, but the model in the pictures is my 6-year-old! She loves the socks, so we have a happy owner for this pair. Only thing she's not happy with is the tightness of the legs, she really had to pull hard to get them on. I was afraid of ripping the socks when I forced them on my extra legs to get the first pictures for the competition.


And the competition? Well, I finished 24th, so I did a lot better than the first round! For the next round, I'll be traveling again, so no competition there. I'm still hoping that there's going be one round that I can knit in one go. If I can knit socks that fast. I'd like to try.

It's Tour-de-Sock time again! Last summer I swore that I would never do it again, but by May I was just checking the schedule and yarn requirements, matching my stash with the sock schedule and not going to participate at all, and before I knew what I was doing, I had signed up for the competition.


The first round started on Saturday, July 15 at 2 PM. This was in the middle of a family vacation tour through the Baltic states and we were supposed to drive from Daugavpils in Latvia to Vilnius in Lithuania that day. I knew that I couldn't sit at the hotel and knit until the socks were finished, but I wanted to use the driving time for knitting. Luckily, the world's best playground is located in Daugavpils, so the rest of the family agreed to spend the morning in the park and head to Vilnius after lunch. I was able to read through the pattern before we left, and luckily it wasn't too complicated so knitting in the car was ok. I skipped the part of learning what Turkish cast on is, and used a more familiar one due to the circumstances. In Vilnius, I was able to knit a couple of hours more before going to bed.


Luckily, the pattern was easy to memorise, and I carried the socks with me, taking advantage of any playground stops or waiting times. Of course, I didn't get the socks done before leaving Vilnius, so there was more knitting time on the road, stopping in Trakai and Kaunas before arriving in Klaipeda. I managed to knit the easy parts during the day, and then for the unusual heel construction (afterthought leg - as in afterthought heel, except that here you knit the heel first and then pick up stitches for leg) and the fins on top of the cuffs I did in the evening at the hotel. The last fins I knitted on top of the Parnidis dune on the Curonian Spit, which, by the way, is one of the most amazing places I've seen. We stopped at a cafe to take pictures of the socks, and I tried to e-mail the pics and post them to TdS forum to claim my points. In the end, four days after the beginning of stage 1, I was 139th to finish. It didn't go that well, but I have to say that I'm happier for the day in Vilnius than I would have been for staying at the hotel and finishing earlier. Also, with the new point system it means that I still got 17 points. Let's see if that's going to be any good in the overall standing.