Happy New Year!

Some of the snow is still here and it seems the beginning of the new year will be cold here. I hope you'll have a nice New Year's Ewe.

"A Year in Socks" on display

The 12 pairs of socks I've knit for my sock pattern collection A Year in Socks (Etsy | Ravelry) can currently be seen in an exhibition on the library in Vinderup, western part of Denmark. You can find information about it here on the library's website.

I'll also take part in an event for knitters in the same library on January 16th where I am to talk about how to use the Internet as a source of inspiration, help, social networking, etc. related to knitting. I'm told that there will also be talks on the life and knits of Elizabeth Zimmermann and a case story about a Lithuanian sock - and plenty of time for any knitters that may show up to knit and talk about knitting.

I hope you had a lovely one

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day came and went with no time for blogging, and thus no time for wishing you a Merry Christmas in time. I'll wish you a belated Merry Christmas with a photo of our Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and I do hope you had a lovely one!

Safe trip!

Today - only this...

Not even the snow could stop me...

Almost ready for Christmas!

I went into town today to buy the last Christmas presents. All done now :)

I forgot to shoot any photos of the city dressed in snow and Christmas lights, but I found this photo set on Flickr - quite interesting to see what Copenhagen looked like in the winter time approx. 100 years ago.

Kalenderlys

On films and Christmas shopping...

I just watched The Queen - my favourite kind of film.

Today we finished most of the Christmas shopping in less than two hours - only two more presents to buy on Monday...

I hope you have a nice weekend :)

Not just an ordinary Friday

With Obama just arrived about 10 km from here despite the (to some people, who seem to be surprised by it every year, extraordinarily) snowy and windy weather which has caused our Christmas tree to tilt, and reporters trying their hardest to repeat themselves as many times as possible on every aspect of the COP 15 conference, I'm having a much more calm day winding many meters of red yarn on my yarn winder, planning even more new projects (including this stranded vest), knitting a bit, listening to my Italian Linguaphone course, writing the last few Christmas cards, and preparing myself for this week's much anticipated event: the Christmas dinner thrown by my dear boyfriend's employer at one of the top gourmet restaurants in Copenhagen - this year the one-Michelin-star Kong Hans. Yum! Here's hoping that neither demonstrators nor Secret Service will prevent us from arriving there later today! :)

FO: Center Square Hat - no. 4

Back in the early days of blogging, I knit this hat pattern a total of three times: at first one for Peter, then an attempt at one for myself which ended up too small for me but fit my friend Karen, and then another, larger one for me. Then, earlier this year, Peter went and lost his old one at a football match in Parken.
I don't have a very large grey stash (and that's a mistake I can tell you! ;)) and Peter is very afraid of girly colours, so these two were the best I could find in my stash.

It's knit on needles 4.5 mm with 3 strands of Noda Junik held together for a very tight fabric.

Very keen observers may notice that I have skipped one row in the stitch pattern on all four hats; at first it was a mistake I didn't notice, and then the geek in me liked how it looks like the schematic representation of either sugar molecules or benzene rings and kept it that way... :)

Time flies in good company...

Adorable miniature pointsettas...

Today, I've been watching Christmas TV series (Jul På Slottet), baking, cooking, cooking, cooking, knitting a bit, watching detective stories on TV, and observing the snow falling again after it melted away last night.

I hope you had a nice day :)

Swatches

I just wanted to show you two swatches - the top one is the one for Arietta, which I wrote about a couple of days ago. I wish the colours were more true here, but you can at least get an idea. I linked to the actual colours in the aforementioned post if you're interested...

The other one is for a very recently started project: the Asymmetrical Cardigan, which will be my sixth project from Norah Gaughan's fabulous book Knitting Nature. My mum made a beautiful tomato-red version a while ago, and it's just great, so I'm confident this one will be a success, too. I'm knitting it a bit more chunky than in the book; using New Lanark Aran (such a great yarn! Try it! The colours are gorgeous! this one is called Iris, but Blueberry is just as pretty) I get a gauge of 16 sts per 4 inches rather than the 18 it should be. Therefore, I'm knitting size extra-petite, i.e. I'm knitting a size that is just as much smaller than size petite as small is larger than petite (well, it makes sense to me...). I've already finished one and a bit of the front pieces - it's a speedy knit. I should be knitting Christmas presents, but this is such a great project I can't put it down!

10 days to Christmas

Tomorrow is baking day. Yum and yum! :) The latter - brunkager - is a classic, which I know works (although I'm using a slightly different recipe from one of my favourite recipe books); the former - the Tuscan panforte - is something I've only ever bought pre-made. Let's see how that works out...

New sweaters on the needles

I participated in NaKniSweMoDo09 (National Knit a Sweater a Month Dodecathon 2009) this year. Although, I'm only likely to finish 11 within 2009, I'm absolutely ready for a similar challenge next year, IntKniSweMoDo10.

WIPs and UFOs also count in the challenge, and I will have a few of those come January 1st. Granite and Kingscot have been lingering for a while now, but they are both incredibly nice sweaters, so I'm sure they will be done eventually.

Of more recent projects (cast-on and swatched, respectively, within the last week) I have Helga Isager's Sweater i tofarvet patent from the book Strikketøj (see really poor photo above for an idea) and then I discovered a cardigan in an old Knitty called Arietta. It looks like stranded knitting, but it really is a mosaic pattern with only one colour per row - very nice! I swatched with three different beautiful colours of Holst Garn, one from Noda, and one from BC garn. It looks really nice - and washing did wonders to the swatch! The thinner yarn gives more stitches per 10 cm, but I think I can make it work with size M. I'm looking forward to some more knitting in the new year, when all secret gift knitting is done...!

Goodnight

I've been so tired - even too tired to knit! - for the past two days. Guess that comes with finally having time off? I hope I'll be ready to do some knitting and enjoy the time off tomorrow, though. More then.

Inspiration

Sorry, no post yesterday. I was too busy celebrating my acquired MScEng degree! It was a day full of celebrations, a quite overwhelming amount of presents from the many dear friends and family I invited, and a jolly good time! Once again, we proved that our modest flat can easily have room for a party of 32 people - and a baby :)

Today, I'm a bit tired, but managed to attend a 1.5-hour meeting with my two (future) main PhD supervisors. It all sounds very exciting, but for now I'm a bit more excited with the fact that I have another 23 days of Christmas holidays - with plenty of time for knitting! :)

And now for something actually related to knitting!

This being a knitting blog, there is one of the presents I want to share with you: my mum gave me this intriguing book for by birthday this past Tuesday: Stickning - Ett hantverk att utveckla by Britt-Marie Christoffersson.

It's in Swedish, and loaded with inspiration. You can see some of the fascinating knitting Britt-Marie Christoffersson does in this photo set from a fellow Danish blogger, Lise, who shot these photos when Britt-Marie presented her exhibition (I think it was) in Silkeborg, DK. These samples and sweaters and many more are shown in the book along with instructions on how to knit them. So very inspiring! I'd recommend this one for your wish list ;)

The end is nigh...

At first - Thank you for all the nice birthday wishes yesterday!

Secondly, tomorrow is the day! The end of five and a half years of studies to become a Master of Science and Engineering in Biotechnology - also known as cand. polyt. or 'civilingeniør i bioteknologi' in Danish - is nigh! Tomorrow at 10 AM I'll start my 20-minute presentation and after a bit more than half an hour of questions from the examiners, I will (hopefully, well, most likely) be able to call myself by the above titles. Can you tell I'm excited?!

December 8th -

- will always be a special date for me. Today is my birthday :)

Nothing much to report...

I've been very busy shopping for my graduation party on Thursday all day - along with going to an appointment at the dentist and looking at new specs I can't afford :P

Now I'm really really tired, and tomorrow is a special day...

The view

We're so lucky as to have the common Christmas tree right outside our windows. It's beautiful with all its lights and the star there in the dark.

(This photo wasn't shot today where the weather is a bit more gloomy, but this was how it looked some time last week...)

Christmas TV nostalgia

I've spent several hours today watching the Christmas TV series (julekalender) of my childhood - and before then - at DR's (the Danish national broadcast channel) website; they've provided access to the archives on the site called Bonanza, and now some of Christmas TV series are on a special Christmas site. Oh, there are some of my favourites in there: Jul På Slottet, Nissebanden, and Vinterbyøster.

The link is probably only interesting to Danes, as it is all - of course - in Danish :)

Clara III

Today's post features another FO: my absolute favourite when it comes to baby girl handknit items - and the third I've knit this year - Clara. This one is for the same little girl who got the first one I knit; her mother was brave enough to request another now that the little girl had grown out of the old one and worn it a lot. Well, here it is! I love how the mixture of a pink yarn and an orange one gives such a vibrant colour :)

Info:

Pattern: Clara by Karin Vestergaard Mathiesen
Yarn: some soft and smooth orange wool bought at Henrichsens Uldspinderi (600m/100g) and some single-ply wool bought at Lystbækgaard. The single-ply makes the vest twist a bit, but I don't mind.
Needles: 4.5 mm to make it larger that the 6-12 month sizes it's given in (CO 110 sts).
Size: Well, something like 1-2 years - I'm not that good at baby sizes, but this should be quite large for its recipient who is approx. 9 months old.

Raveled here.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of knitting this pattern. There's the stockinette part in the beginning if you need some easy knitting, and then when you reach the yoke you're almost done and the lace pattern flies off the needles... Well, almost. And the result is great! :)

Shooooes!

Thank you for all the overwhelming comments on the cabled sweater dress - they make me very happy! :)

Today's post is going to quite a lot briefer, but I just wanted to show you my most recent acquisition in the Camper department, because I find them too gorgeous not to share! They are my... uhm... 11th pair of Camper shoes... But then about every other pair of shoes I have are Camper's!

You can find them online here. I must say that I paid considerably less for mine - possibly because they were bought in London - the only thing I could afford in New Bond Street! ;) - and not in Denmark, nor online. I've had that same experience about prices on this particular brand of shoes before :)

Cabled Sweater Dress for Winter

I have so been looking forward to showing you this one!

It's my new and very own cabled sweater dress:

Complete with waist shaping and a saddle shoulder construction where the sleeve cable continues onto the shoulder and the centre back cable continues on the extra rows knit in the neck to create back and front round the neckline.

I started this back in September and didn't really knit much on it until the weather started getting colder and I couldn't wait to wear it - the final enticement was that I wanted to wear it on our 4-days-in-London-where-we-bring-hand-luggage-only-and-must-have-room-for-heaps-of-shopping-anyway trip in the middle of November. The photos are indeed shot at Exchange Square in London, where we happened to pass by a not too crowded place, perfect for a photo shoot.

I wanted to give it a name (as I made it up myself, it doesn't come with a name), and initially thought of Newton, because, like Isaac Newton, I stood on the shoulders of giants for this one: Kim Hargreaves, Helga Isager, and Marianne Isager for design ideas, and not least Elizabeth Zimmermann for the ingenious saddle shoulder construction. Then again, Newton sounds more like the SI unit of force than a cabled sweater dress, doesn't it? :)

This may very well have become my favourite piece of clothing for this (and the next) winter!

Info:
Pattern: my own, but with no intention of publishing, at least not at the moment; if you want to make something similar, but with a less ingenious shoulder construction (if I do say so myself...) I'd suggest Aaren by Kim Hargreaves
Size: mine, that'll be a small/34" bust
Yarn: Cushendale Woollen Mills DK, almost 6 skeins, colourway Wine, bought online at The Yarn Room
Needle size: 4.5 mm
Raveled here - with many more photos!

NaBloPoMo

= National Blog Posting Month.

That's what I'll try to have in December: a blog post a day!
I've been wanting to do something like that for some time now, and as I handed in my MSc thesis today and is not starting of the PhD until January 4th, I now have plenty of time on my hands for Christmas shopping, Christmas preparations, knitting, gift knitting, cleaning, cooking, celebrating my Master's degree after the defense on the 10th - and blogging... :)

I'm looking forward to posting tomorrow :)

In which our heroine goes to London and acquires a negative Sock Yarn O-Meter balance...

Here's my new sock yarn stash! From the left: 1 skein Colinette Jitterbug colourway Vatican Pie, 2 skeins of ShiBui Sock colourway Chinese Red, and Madelinetosh Tosh Sock one skein each of Vermillion and Thunderstorm. Three skeins (the Colinette and the Madelinetosh) fell into my basket along with a skein of Malabrigo Worsted in Ravelry Red when I visited Loop in Islington (Northern London) last Friday - a lovely little shop with gorgeous yarns! The two skeins of ShiBui were bought locally in Sommerfuglen when my mum visited the week before last. All loooovely yarns!

The only bad thing about it is the impact on Sock Yarn O-Meter II... There are 488 g of lovely sock yarn, i.e. -61% on the Sock Yarn O-Meter! Uh-oh. Even so, there is no way I could resist buying these yarns when I had the chance to feel the yarn and see the colours IRL. Do you think I love red?

As a small consolation I did in fact finishing some sock yarn using projects! (Or should we call them Sock Yarn O-Meter neutral projects these days...?). I've been knitting baby gear on commission - a friend of a friend of mine is having her first baby (a girl), and so I've been set up for knitting an haute couture collection ;) Here it is:

And all in sock yarn! Alas, it's only 136 g of sock yarn... i.e. +17% on the Sock Yarn O-Meter II. That leaves the poor O-Meter at -44%. Well well, I guess I can enjoy even more sock yarn knitting then! :)

Methinks winter is upon us...

- at least my urge to knit scarves and shawls is quite pronounced. My current plan is to knit the following:

• Ysolda's Peak Island Hood
• A cowl inspired by Thermis
• Karen's Transition Stash-buster Shawl; I think I'll stick to one colour, but I liked this shawl better than the other ones I found
• Ysolda's Scroll Lace Scarf

Well well, off to finish (and blog about) some of those 14 WIPs - some of them even with pre-Christmas deadlines! - to make room for some more knitting. And oh, there's this MSc thesis I have to hand in on December 1st... 

New Layout

What can I say? I got tired of the dull old one. And I love red, I love Converse All Stars, and I love straight modern lines and simplicity.

I hope you like it, too :)

Now I just need to figure out how to remove that orange box...

Sock Yarn-O-Meter no. 2

I liked the first Sock Yarn-O-Meter so much, that I want to make a second. Trouble is: I don't have 1000 g of sock yarn to use up! I've counted and it seems I have around 900 g when I include all scraps. Therefore, new rules:

- 800 g used = 100% (i.e. 8 g used is +1%)

- all sock yarn counts

- I can knit whatever, not only socks

- If I buy new sock yarn before reaching 100%, 8 g will equal -1% (setting the limit so close to the max. amount I have, I can't really have 'double punishment' (here: -2% per 8 g), or I'll end up never being able to finish this one!)

- Prize: whatever suits my fancy :)

BTW, I realised I didn't mention this in my Sock Yarn-O-Meter I wrap-up: I didn't buy any sock yarn during the first Sock Yarn-O-Meter! But seeing as the second version is likely to be more slow going - I'm knitting sweaters and baby gear and am no longer on a sock knitting frenzy - I may not be that good this time... :)

Sock Yarn-O-Meter done!

With the second last pair of my A Year in Socks pattern collection I reached 100% on my first Sock Yarn O'Meter. Here they are, the July Socks:

I used 112 g of Socks That Rock Lightweight, colourway Firebird = 11.2 % added to the Sock Yarn O'Meter - which brings it above 100%!

The Sock Yarn O'Meter comes with a prize upon completion. My prize?

Well, I went overboard on Tante Hanne's August/September sale on Isager Alpaca 2. I can't think of anything better than having a nice stash of high quality yarn in (small) sweater quantities (with this yarn, 250 g is enough for my size). Yum!

Pattern Collection Release: A Year in Socks!

Finally, the mystery is over! Some of you have been wondering and waiting to know what all those secret socks were for (nobody have been more impatient than I) and here it is:

A Year in Socks - a collection of 12 sock patterns

by me :)

A knitting pattern collection of 12 different sock patterns - one for each month of the year - where I've let each month inspire me. I've always found calendars and their division into days, weeks, and months fascinating, and I take great pleasure in the seasonal change we experience here in Northern Europe - especially just now, in late September/early October where summer turns into autumn; my favourite time of year!

The product is a collection of 12 different sock patterns reflecting the seasons and featuring a variety of stitch patterns and designs all using the same foundation - the sock.

With this, I hope to inspire you, too, even if you feeling about each month is not the same as mine.

The pattern collection is up for purchase in my Etsy shop - 12 patterns for $22 USD!

Each pattern includes:

- one or more photos of the socks

- information on gauge, suggested yarn, and needle size

- brief description on how to make larger/smaller sizes (the patterns are written for a woman's size medium)

- instructions on how to knit the sock, i.e. the pattern :)

- charts showing the stitch pattern

The collection is a 43-pages .pdf file.

Now, I want to show you all those socks I've been working on. Chronologically, of course:

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

(yes, you've seen this one before...)

December

You can find more information on Ravelry and more photos and details on my Flickr page.

Finally, I want to thank Britt for indirectly giving me this idea: a sunny day in June where I ought to be studying for my exams at the terrace I started knitting a sock to add some percentages to the Sock yarn O'Meter that Britt just got me started with. The sock was knit in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock Multi in the colourway Shadow; the colourway made me think: This is so January! And there it was. I already made the November sock last year and thought: Hey! I'm making a collection - a sock for each month! The rest, as they say, is history and so is the Sock yarn O'Meter I - all this sock knitting over the summer made me pass the 100%; more on this later.

FOs: More secret socks

It never ends, does it?

Well, it does, quite soon, but up until then you'll have to do with another of those toes only photos of the two pairs of socks I've completed recently. In fact it's all about sock knitting around here these days.

Two lovely yarns and two lovely colours: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock Solid colourway Firefly and Colinette Jitterbug colourway Velvet Damson.

It's another 188 g = 18.8 % added to the Sock yarn O-Meter. That adds up to 91.4 % on the O-Meter - another pair of socks should bring me over 100 % then - yay! :)

FOs: The Cardigans

Or rather, a cardigan and a vest (but I couldn't help it choosing this title...:)).

First up is Twinkle's Biker Vest from Big City Knits. The pattern is meant for the Twinkle Cruise Yarn, but I wanted it to be more like those small quilted vests that were in fashion earlier this year (and hopefully will be for another few months... ;)), so I adapted the pattern to the super bulky wool yarn and knit on Needles size 9.00 mm to get a dense fabric. My Ravelry project page is here.

Next up is my 8th garment for NaKniSweMoDo: Polly from Kim Hargreaves' Thrown Together. It's knitted in Araucania Nature Wool Chunky (a really nice yarn!!) in a semisolid dark grey colour (a bit overexposed in the photos). I used the well-known trick of swapping skeins every two rows to avoid pooling or visible skein differences. According to the pattern and several Ravelry project pages the yardage I had in my stash was insufficient, so I decided to make the sleeves 3-4 cm shorter to be able to use this stash yarn anyway (I've used quite a lot of yarn from stash recently - yay!). It turned out that this wasn't at all necessary as I still have a bit less than half a skein left over, but I didn't really want to redo it after seaming it all together... :)

Like most Kim Hargreaves' designs this is a really nice one too. Simple yet effective - and wearable. As you can see, I used four different buttons; I didn't have four similar ones of that size in my inherited button stash (yes, my grandmother's again), so I found it better to use four different ones of similar size and colour - a bit more fun to carry these buttons and their history around than heading off to buy four new ones.

And here's my Ravelry project page for Polly.

FOs: Accessories

Right... I have quite some FOs to show you this time - mainly because I must the laziest photographer/photo uploader known to mankind. The 8 FOs I'm going to show you (divided into 3 posts or so) have finish dates from the middle of August up until last night. That is to say - I didn't finish it all at once! :)

To avoid drowning you in FOs I've split it up into 4 posts, this one showing hats and scarves:

This vibrantly yellow shawlette is Damson by Ysolda knit in two strands of Posh Yarn Eva 2 ply (55% silk, 45% cashmere = incredibly soft and smooth), colourway Daffodil. It's in Ysolda's new collection Whimsical Little Knits 2 and already all over the place.

Speaking of said collection, another item from there is the slouchy hat Ripley:

It's available in 2 versions: a smaller, more girly one with lace edging and the slouchier unisex version which is the one I knit using two strands of Posh Yarn Lei (also incredibly soft and smooth), colourway Vermeil.

(I sense a pattern here: Ysolda accessories in Posh Yarn...)

Finally, some chunky knits to use up every inch of my super bulky stash (Cascade Magnum and Twinkle Soft Chunky): the Aspen Hat from Twinkle's Big City Knits. I tried out another of her hats first, but I didn't like it - luckily knitting a hat with this yarn is not so time-consuming... :)

The other item in the photo is a (rather short) scarf using up the very last inches after I knit the hat (and a vest you'll see in another post).

In case you're interested, links to my Ravelry project pages are here:

Damson

Ripley

Aspen Hat

Chunky Scarf

Next up: Open front garments aka cardigan and vest :)

Clara

A cute little vest for a cute little girl. Started knitting this one for a number of reasons: wanted to see how much yarn it used up in this size, wanted to knit up that odd ball of yarn, wanted to knit this pattern.

As it turns out, I've now found a recipient for it, too :)

Info:

Pattern: Clara [Rav-link] by Karin Vestergaard Mathiesen

Size: 1 year

Yarn: Noda Junik, colourway Redcurrant, 42 g (washed as well as unwashed)

Needles: size 3.25 mm

Chest circumference: 50 cm

Link to my Ravelry project page here.

I'll definitely knit more of these. Very satisfying.