Changes

I have both good news and bad news.

The bad news: somewhere along the way I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining two blogs in two languages may be a bit too much for me. Therefore, I've decided to give up my English blog and continue maintaining my Finnish blog only.

The good news: English inserts will be added to the Finnish blog whenever possible. I will also continue posting lots of photos, so you can at least see what I'm doing. Sounds alright? Then, please come on over here and say hi to me at my new (old) place!

Christmas presents?

Phildar magazines


Scarf style (finally!)


Rowanspun DK in "Mouse"


Rowanspun DK in "Eau de Nil"

No, just some clever investments I’ve made lately!

I already started something from Eau de Nil:



It’s Miller from A Yorkshire Fable.

Just some simple stockinette stitch for me, please, until I recover from all the pre-Christmas fuss.

Happy and relaxing holidays to all!

Swatch

The swatch was a pleasant surprise. I hope that the colors will behave as well in the real knit. I’m planning making anklets. I hope my 50 g of yarn is enough.

I would so love to start the anklets already but there are so many things I should finish first. One of the things is this (I just realized that I haven’t shown it to you yet):



It’s this cardigan from Phildar Tendances Printemps 05.



I’m using Sandnes Kitten Mohair in chocolate brown.

If you look closely, you may notice that I’m making the front bands in moss stitch instead of garter stitch. There’s a good explanation for this. I hadn’t looked at the picture that closely and when reading the pattern I, as a non-experienced French knitter, naturally assumed that “Pt mousse” is the same as “moss stitch” because the words look the same. Duh! However, I’m going to stick with the moss stitch because I like it better.

Another change I'm going to make is to knit the front bands separately and sew them to the front pieces. The moss stitch combined with the stockinette stitch makes the pieces all wonky. I don't understand how they avoided this problem at Phildar. I know, they used garter stitch but to my understanding that would do the same. Maybe their yarn was stretchier and they could fix it by blocking? I tried that but it didn't work.

Surprise

Could it be that The Swamp Thing is a beauty after all?



Don’t go away. We’ll be right back with a swatch. :-)

Dyeing experiments continue

Some turquoise yarn using blue food dye. This one I like. The yarn I used was Sandnes Sisu in ecru (80% wool, 20% polyamide).



The green yarn that I dyed previously went to a blue bath in two different phases and it now has three shades of green (although it’s not that apparent in the picture). I like it but the green is so intense that it may take a while to get used to it.

Now what’s this? The swamp thing?



I won’t admit that it’s an unsuccessful dyeing experiment. If you need to know, I used the green and white yarn I dyed the last time and some blue and red dye. I think it may need a black bath the next time...

Ready, steady, cook

Yesterday was a cooking day.



I used some green food dye and ecru yarn (75 % wool, 25 % polyamide) and got some very green yarn.



The skein on the left is so bright that it makes my eyes hurt. The one in the middle was supposed to have three shades of green but I ran out of dye. I think I'll have to continue with that skein later.

This was the first time that I’ve dyed yarn. It’s not exactly like any gourmet yarn but one has to start somewhere!

P.S. Thanks for your comments on Katie!

Regarding comments, I don't know if anyone's noticed but I usually respond to your comments in the comments section. Just so you know and don't think I'm not reading your messages! I do read each and every comment and appreciate you taking your time and writing to me. I also appreciate everyone who just reads my blog without leaving a comment. Thank you for reading and hope you enjoy your visits here. :-)

Katie

Katie is finished! Do you want to see bad or lousy pictures? Here are the bad ones (sun, please come back!).



Katie
Pattern: Kim Hargreaves, A Season’s Tale
Yarn: Rowanspun DK (731)
Needles: 5 mm Addis

Katie was a quick knit with 5 mm needles but the finishing almost killed me. That’s my own fault; it was me who decided that there should be an i-cord to cover some ugly stitches at the neckline



and inner facings to cover the zip.



The i-cord was necessary, the facings not so, but they do give a nice professional touch to the finished work.

Some other changes I made:

I knit the collar without increases because I don’t think that increases in a ribbing look particularly nice. To compensate, I made the collar a bit longer (13 cm) than instructed.

The zip I used was 55 cm, not 56 cm. I didn’t make any changes to the pattern because of this; I just carefully blocked the front edges to 55 cm instead of 56 cm, and that worked fine.

All in all, I think that Katie is one of the best knits I’ve ever made. It fits like a glove and there are no ugly bits that I should feel embarrassed about.

I should also mention that Katie is a friendly pattern to all of us equipped with shorter arms than the average person that the patterns are usually written to. I didn’t have to do any changes at all and the sleeves fit perfectly. Bliss!

Oh, one more thing: I only used 5,5 skeins of yarn instead of 7 that’s mentioned in the pattern. I have no idea where the difference came from but I’m glad it was not the other way around.

After all the finishing trouble I was allowed to start something new:



Finally! These are the butterfly mittens from Sata kansanomaista kuviokudinmallia by Eeva Haavisto, a book that has patterns for 100 traditional mittens from Finland. I did not know that butterfly is a traditional Finnish pattern but it may have been common in some areas. It says in the book that the butterfly mittens are originally from Kotka, a town in the South-Eastern Finland.

For the inquiring minds who might want to know: the book is from the 40’s and it’s out of print. There is no ISBN on the book because it’s so old. The publisher is WSOY. I got mine from a second-hand bookshop in Finland. If you’re interested in the book, you can try to find it here. There might be other sites as well but this is the only one in English that I know about.

The yarn I’m using is Novita Alpaca – a stash yarn, can you believe it? The yarn is not sold anymore either, so it’s kind of appropriate for this project: an extinct book and extinct yarn.