Solen (The Sun)

It's finally on display! Starting back in February, I took some huge breaks in knitting this one. Finally, I procrastinated sewing the side seams for almost a month. But now its done (still needs a washing, but I've started wearing it): Solen (English: The Sun) from Marianne Isager's book Japan published about a year ago. 

I made the following modifications: 

• 1 "column of suns" less, i.e. I have 3 or 4 circles on each row, not 4 or 5. MI usually designs very wide sweaters for my taste; turns out I was right - this one fits me.
• I made St st sleeves with garter stitch edgings instead of the full garter stitch ones called for in the pattern.
• I've randomly placed two small, red circles (like the ones on the front) on the back instead of one huge one.

I like this sweater. It's not going to be quite as much a favourite as the Cabled Spiral or the IncREDibly Red one, but I think I'm going to wear it quite often - it came out better than I anticipated!

It's knitted using 1 strand of Spinni and 1 strand of the equivalent of Tvinni bought directly from Henrichsens Uldspinderi. The red/pink/orange circles are Tvinni, Tvinni Mohair, and some other yarn from Henrichsens.

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Info for Stastalong:

Stash reduction: 390 g.

The lovely, cozy, bulky, purple dress :)

Not the best photos known to mankind, but here it is, my new wonderful dress:

I was a bit skeptical back when I started it (or rather, when I started considering whether to make it a couple of months ago when the VK Fall 08 issue landed in my mailbox), but I'm not anymore! Of a garment can be cozy and fashionable at the same time, this one is. I've been wearing it all day round the university and I just love it! The length of it is perfect for this years short dresses and tights fashion and that kangaroo pocket is more ingenious than I actually thought it would be. It looks great with a belt or a ribbon below the bust as well, but I wore it like this today.

Linking to Ravelry, the pattern is #22 Twinkle Cabled Dress from VK Fall 08, and the yarn is Cascade Magnum in the fabulous colour (my favourite) Blueberry #9464 (purchased at wollbox.de). 

It's another of those extremely fast bulky knits. Being very busy at school (and liking it!) it took me a week to knit (I knitted a bit on a sock and a sweater as well...). I must say work gets the best of me these days, but I really don't mind.

Read about the few mods I made in my Ravelry post.

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash reduction: 732 g

Crappy photos...

... but I did finish the sweater for Sigrid's 1-year birthday. 5 minutes before I stepped out of the train in Vejle on our way there! Seeing as I did have some trouble knitting I'm quite happy I actually made it :) And I think she liked it! :)

104 g of Garnstudio Drops Alpaca. 

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash reduction: 104 g

Trying very hard...

Just to let you know: having a splint on your ring finger does not make knitting that much easier... :)

Fortunately, it'll be off in a day or two - nothing major, just a swollen purple-ish joint after not quite catching a ball thrown too hard at a too short distance at yesterday's rugby training. The splint is self-prescribed (something Peter just happened to have lying around...) and just to avoid unnecessary movement. While knitting, for instance :)

Pattern: Decipede!

I've just put the pattern for this cute little knitted toy up for sale in my Etsy shop. Having only 10 legs, its neither a millipede nor a centipede. It's a decipede! 

An excellent toy for children, as it contains no parts that can be swallowed. 

Combine colours using your imagination and create a great personal gift for a child - or a childish grown-up - you know. You could also just knit one for yourself! :)

It may look hard to knit, but if you know how to do different kinds of increases and decreases, you'll be good to go. I used a special cast-on method, but included links for tutorials in the pattern.

You can find the pattern's page on Ravelry here.

I hope you like it!

More FOs!

I'm really putting an effort into finishing up my WIPs before the summer holidays end! Here's another couple:

Twinkle's Shopping Tunic in Twinkle Soft Chunky and Cascade Magnum. Mmmmmm :)

And my 2nd Ravelympics project which I finished Saturday: a small Shetland Triangle in the much dreaded kidmohair - now finally used up! It's nice to wear, though.

Coming up shortly:

- Solen from Marianne Isager's Japan

- Another pattern release: the Decipede!

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash reduction: 672 g + 44 g = 716 g

Free Pattern Release: Bubbles & Cables Cowl

I've released the pattern for this cowl! Just in time for the arriving fall (on my side of the globe, that is)! And it's free!

In my part of the world, chunky knits featuring bubbles and cables are highly fashionable this fall. What's more, cowls seem to be the new scarves. Go ahead, add some fall fashion to your own wardrobe with this bubbly, cabled cowl.

You can find the download link in the sidebar. It's page on Ravelry is here. I'm working on getting the Ravelry Download thing to work so that you can save it in your Ravelry library. By then it should also be available to people not on Ravelry. Until that happens, email me if you'd like a copy but cannot access it through Ravelry (as the download link is a Ravelry one). My email is in the sidebar, too. 

Pattern ideas?

Inspired by Ulla's comment on my last post, I'd like to know if any of you have some ideas as to what I can use all this lovely yarn for. Only one of the skeins has nylon in it and is thus ideal for socks. And while I plan to dig out some of the reinforcement yarn I inherited from my grandmother a long time ago, I'm not sure I'll make all of it into socks. Do you have any ideas for patterns using approx. 380 m of sock yarn?

Incredibly lucky!

Some weeks ago I entered a donation "contest" on Jenny's blog, donating a few dollars to her fundraising for the Arthritis Foundation Run/Walk to Milwaukee Irishfest. And you know what? I won the first prize!! And it wasn't just a prize... I got to choose 5 skeins (some of them were actually 2 skeins as you can see from the photo, but a "skein" corresponded to the amount going into a pair of socks - rather appropriate when the cause is a walk!) out of 22 skeins of beautiful, wonderful yarns! I had a hard time choosing, since there were so many lovely skeins, but I ended up choosing yarns in my favourite colours which were also yarns that are hard to get one's hands on here in Denmark. 

I apologize for the crappy photo shot with my mobile, but while it doesn't show the depth of the colours properly, the colours themselves are quite accurate. From left to right (links to company pages - links in brackets for Ravelry):

- J. Knits Superwash Me [Rav-link]- Socks, colour: Tampa

- the famous Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% Superwash [Rav-link], colour: Drachenblut (if you don't know how hard it is to get your hands on Wollmeise, I'll just tell you: very hard!)

- Artyarns Ultramerino4 [Rav-link], colour: 138

- ShiBuiKnits Sock [Rav-link], colour: 4401

- Claudia Hand Painted Yarns Fingering [Rav-link], colour: Ocean Depth

Let's just say this is one of the most amazing prizes I've won in a long, long, long time! I feel so incredibly lucky! - and grateful to Jenny for setting up such a great contest. She did well with the fundraising as well, I can tell you. :)

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash enhancement: 572 (wonderful!) g

Oh, I almost forgot...

... to show you what I bought during my weekend in Oslo primo August. The best yarn Norway can offer! What's more, it's available in an amazing range of wonderful colours: Rauma Finull (here on Ravelry). 14 skeins (50 g each) in my favourite colours: purple-ish blue and reds. Being turned into a yoke sweater at some point.

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash enhancement: 720 g

 

Showcasing my recent FOs

I'm rounding of my 12 weeks of summer holidays by finishing a lot of WIPs - knitting time will soon be severely limited when university starts again on September 1.

The first FO I'll show you is my first Ravelympics2008 finish: ta-da-da-daaa: The Adamas Shawl (lovely pattern - go knit it right away!) in 2 skeins of Posh Yarn Sophia 2 ply (100% cashmere) - soft and beautiful. 175 cm wide and 85 cm long. Link to my Ravelry post here. 

Secondly my new incREDibly red sweater! Woohoo! The pattern is called Roman Candle and it's featured in Runway Knits by Berta Karapetyan (pattern here on Ravelry). The basketweave pattern includes a .... lot of cables, but once I got the hang of it, it was quite alright and a nice knit. It's knitted in Hifa2 (100% wool) - bought at an incredibly low price far out in the Danish countryside (Grønhøj Garnlager, for you Danes...). I'm sure this red sweater with my favourite turtleneck will keep me warm and happy this winter. Link to my post on Ravelry here.

Finally, a sneak peek on something I'll be publishing as a free pattern soon:--------------

Info for Stashalong:

Stash reduction: 106 g + 450 g + 122 g = 678 g

More items in my Etsy Shop

Today I added some more handmade items to my Etsy Shop. Knitting as well as T-shirts with my own print. Have a look if you like :)

My pattern is up for sale!

I just put a pattern for the two scarves I designed up for sale on Etsy - here's the link! 

The pattern includes instructions for both of these ingenious and graphic scarves - with plenty of possibilities for customizing and varying both scarves to match you yarn, temper, and fancy. 

The scarves are knitted using the double knitting technique. Using this technique the front and back of the knitting will look equally nice - perfect for scarves! And a great feature that you can employ in the design.

Included in the pattern is a comprehensive tutorial for double knitting supported by loads of photos where I show you how-to. Hence, even if you're not familiar with the double knitting technique, but would like to try it out, you can! 

I also listed the pattern on Ravelry, but I'm still waiting to get a connection between my profile and the pattern. And I need to add some photos to the pattern as well. The link is here. 

 

Twinkle's Best Friend Cardigan

As described here, I finished this wonderful Best Friend Cardigan in one day last Saturday. Yesterday I finally managed to have a photo taken of this little wonder. Like with my first Twinkle knit I'm absolutely thrilled with this one - and the immensely bright purple colour of the Cascade Magnum yarn (the colour is brighter than the photo gives it credit for). Like the original yarn - Twinkle's Soft Chunky - the Cascade Magnum is hard to get your hands on in Europe. I bought it on a special order at wollbox.de. Here's a link to my cardigan on Ravelry.

It's my second Twinkle knit, but definitely not my last! 

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash reduction: 544 g

New yarn from over there!

The dear boyfriend finally arrived from his business trip to Houston, TX today! I had of course made sure to order some yarn and the most wanted pattern book to his colleague and friend living over there so that Peter could bring it back home for me! 

3 skeins of Twinkle Soft Chunky (colourways Sapphire, Eggplant (a deeper colour than the photo shows), and Canary), 6 skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk colourway Guava, and 2 skeins of Plymouth Yarn Suri Merino colourway charcoal. Add to that the great Berroco pattern book Norah Gaughan vol. 1 (one of my favourite designers!) Wonderful stuff, all of it! 

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash enhancement: 992 g

How To Knit A Cardigan In One Day

1. Make sure you have got hold of Twinkle's Big City Knits and some beautiful chunky yarn before you start.
2. Sleep till 10am cos you stayed up till after 2am last night.
3. Have breakfast, surf the internet, read the newspaper.
4. Cast on for the Best Friend Cardigan.
5. Knit for 3 hours while waiting for the thunderstorm to blow over. After 3 hours you will have completed the body of the cardigan including knitting the shoulders together. Try it on and get the feeling that it'll turn out magnificently.
6. Go for a 12 km run. That'll do you good.
7. Shower, Skype your boyfriend who's soon to return from his never-ending (16 days) business trip to Houston (TX), knit the collar onto the body of the cardigan, prepare and eat you extremely healthy dinner wishing it would all of a sudden turn into a delicious pizza!
8. Cast on for the first sleeve while watching Robin Hood on TV - and finish it.
9. Cast on for the second sleeve while drooling over Sean Connery in the Saturday night James Bond movie.
10. Sew the sleeves on to the body (be brave, this is the worst step!).
11. Weave in ends.
12. Sew on the buttons.
13. Try it on (and think: niiiiiice), and move one of the buttons a little. 
14. Think: Damn, I look gorgeous in this one! 
15. Soak it in cold water and leave it drying on a towel on the bathroom floor overnight (optional).

There you go! And I tell you this one is a good one! Unfortunately, it is now way too dark for photos; I'll post some tomorrow or Monday - you have to see this one!

In other crafty news

Photo courtesy of Little Factory

I found these scarves (through Karie's blog, which I found through Ravelry). Why did I not come up with that idea?

Orange Cowl FO

FOs seem to be popping out all the time these days - I guess that's what holidays are for. This time it's a cowl - inspiration found here (link to Ravelry here)

It's knit with the two skeins of Posh Yarn Eva 4 ply colourway Embroglio that I recently bought (108 g). So incredibly nice to wear at your neck! Come autumn and black clothes, and I'll be ready for you. 

2 FOs and a prize

Having spent almost a week at my parents place, I've been very productive in finishing WIPs! I finished 2 and got much closer to finishing a third one. I will however start this post by presenting the prize that arrived in the mail while I was gone:

A couple of weeks ago Dee (of Posh Yarn) had a contest on her blog - and I won one of the prizes; wooohooo! :D It's a skein of new cobweb (1200yd/100g) alpaca yarn she's launching (it's called Marianne) - incredibly soft and nice! I'm sure it'll make a lot of Posh Yarn lovers happy! The colourway is rightfully called Leaf - it's a much denser lime/acid/leaf green that I was able to show here; gotta buy that new camera soon! 

And now for the FOs: 

I finished Otto the Polar Bear - my mom insists it's a girl and she's called Isa (as polar bear is isbjørn in Danish), so I'll hereby present to you: Isa:

Knitted in 52 g of Jo Sharp's Silkroad DK Tweed (colourway Magnolia) - a leftover from a previous project - on 4mm needles; she turned out rather large, I guess around 40 cm tall. 

My second FO is the pocket-y scarf - my own design, and a project I've been working on for some time now. I'd like to make a pattern for it; let's see if I get round to that...!  It's stripy on one side with the coloured stripes peeping out through the holes on the other side. 118 of various stash yarn (400-600m/100g). 

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Info for Stashalong:

Enhancement (prize): 100g

Reduction: 52g+118g = 170g

I bought yarn!

For quite some time now, I've known that I would buy 100 g of New Zealand Lammeuld in these two colours. I've had them before, but I've only got some scraps left now, and I want to use them for Marianne Isager's Sommer i Tokyo along with some pink and orange Tvinni/Henrichsen from my stash. Going to visit my parents this week gave me the opportunity to go to a local farm where they sell Filcolana yarn at low prices. I also bought a skein of Arwetta (the extra fine merino, not the sock yarn) - good for baby clothes in case any of my friends or relatives should get some :)

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Info for Stashalong:

Stash enhancement: 250 g

FO: Amimono Coral

There you go. Mulberry silk from garn.dk. Uuuhhhmmm. 1 cone, i.e. 100 g used for this one. The stripes on the top are made with a bit of blue linen. It fits perfectly and is nice to wear! 

Pattern: Amimono Coral - available in on of the spring issues of Boligliv (you can find it on Ravelry). 

116 g for Stashalong (as the plastic cone is included).  

Birgitte's 365 Photos blog - now up and running

Here! Enjoy! I will ;)

I've put a link to it on the very top of my sidebar if you want to use that.

365 photos

In pursuit of something to do in my endless summer holidays I was happy to find a link to the Project 365 at Frk Snupps blog. Take one photo each day in one year - preferable one that captures that particular day. Sounds like such a good idea that I'm going to play along! It'll also teach me to look for photo opportunities - something I'm not particularly good at. I'll set up a new blog for it - I'll let you know the link when it's up and running. 

Don't expect Yann Arthus Bertrand style photos from me - if I'm going to make it easy for myself (and I am!) I'll mostly use my phone for shooting photos, and as it has 2 megapixels only and no flash, not all photos will be that great as you may well imagine. 

If you want to join, please do! 

I've been challenged...

- to think! How's that for exercising my brains on a summer holiday Sunday night (soon to be Monday morning if I don't go to sleep!) after a weekend of too much partying. 

Tora challenged me to make lists to go by for the next year. Well, I've been a bit apprehensive about this, since I'm feeling that I don't quite know where to go with my knitting at this point. On one hand, I want to create my own designs, but on the other hand I also want to take the easy road and knit up some of those incredible designs that have already been made.

I'm going to stray a bit from the original concept and replace one of the list of things I want to learn with another one as I can't really think of things I want to learn at the moment. I learn enough at university, I guess. 

Things I want to create:

1. Marianne Isager's Sommer i Tokyo from the book Japan. 

2. A pattern for the double-knitted scarves I've been making.

3. Asymmetric Cardigan from Knit So Fine

4. Twinkle's Best Friend Cardigan

Small things I might want to knit:

1. A pair of mittens; want to design my own, but let's see what happens

2. Tudora neckwarmer

3. Celestine docahedron "ball"

4. A pair of socks, possibly Charade

Non-knitting thing I want to create/finish/accomplish:

1. The pair of gloves I started this spring

2. The embroidered pillows I started too long ago

3. Read Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (in less than a month since I went to the library to get in its original, wonderful language, English - and numerous other books, as I only read literature during the summer holidays (can't cope with it while reading for university), but I have to start somewhere

4. Finish my 5 kms at the DHL relay race in less than 27 minutes, preferably in 25. 

I think I am going to challenge another 5, but I won't (at least not at the moment). If you want to play, feel free and let me know :)

Not much knitting being done!

... as this arrived yesterday!

Me being a PC user up until now, this beautiful little white wonder is a bit challenging to me, but I think I'm learning quite fast. I've now got all my browser bookmarks set and my favourite software installed. And don't worry - I know it looks like the screen has already been damaged, but it's not! It's merely a blur I made in the photo editor cos you're not supposed to be able to read the title of the draft paper I'm about to read through - this will be my first paper ever if it gets published! Exciting! (No, my name is not first on the list, as I didn't write the paper, but as there are only 3 names on it - my two supervisors' and mine - I'm quite excited! :D)

We have a winner!

I had a great time reading all your comments - I thought a contest might be a good enticement for you all to comment, i.e. for me to get some new links to bloggers from all around blogland. So here's my thanks to you - including those of you I already "know"; so nice to know that you're reading here!

Well, as many of you correctly guessed, my new sport is: rugby!
As pointed out by some of you, you (most often) do not need the gumshield for ordinary football/soccer. On the other hand, more equipment is needed for american football, etc. Still, some other sports may require the exact same equipment, but this was a guessing contest and not a math problem, i.e. all possible solutions to the problem needn't be correct ;)

Having fun reading your comments, I simply have to draw everybody's attention to Eve's comment as it really made me laugh: "My thought after rugby (in case I was wrong) was some sort of game where you have to run really fast somewhere and at the finish line you get punched in the face. Which is really what rugby is all about, anyway :) Do you have to tape your ears for each game?" You may not be completely wrong, Eve, but I tend to think that rugby is slightly more sophisticated than that! ;) The answer to whether I have to tape my ears in for each game will be no. Taping the ears is only necessary for those who have to put their heads between other players thighs in the scrum - and that'll not be my task :D

Reading the comments, I also found out that Karen watches this (to a Danish person rather odd) game on TV and like many people lost her heart to the haka-performing New Zealanders! ;) Which TV channels show the games, Karen?

I listed the names of those of you who got the right answer, used the random number generator, which picked the winner:

knitmomma

Congratulations! I'll send you an email.

Thank you all for participating!

News + contest!

It's been a bit quiet around the blog for a while, so I thought I might drop you a line. No big news, though. So - to make some fun out of it, I made a contest (see below) for you! The subject is not knitting-related, but the prize is!

I received a parcel from Posh Yarn today! Alas, there's no sign of my purchase from May 21st yet (I'm beginning to convince myself that it's been lost in the mail - oh horror, good yarn gone to waste!) but the one from this Sunday's sale arrived quickly. Do you think my favourite colour is red?





On another note, I almost finished knitting the Alpine Shrug from one of Rowan's magazines in this linen/alpaca blend that's been lingering my stash for ages:

It's a beautiful yarn and colour, but the predominant feature of it is that it dusts all over the place! Yeah, some yarns do dust, but this one dusts with long black fibres sticking to clothes, the couch, etc. and very short grey ones that floats in the air, let alone in your airway! So, I ended up thowing the whole shite away! I figure I should have done so a long time ago, but it has been too hard for me to part with this beautiful yarn until now.

The summer holidays started 10 days ago, but I haven't really been knitting much anyway. I think the non-knitting exam period is still clinging to me - still getting used to having all this time off. Additionally, I've also started the 12-week training programme for the DHL relay race in September. Not that it's anything huge, but I've been running regularly (1-3 times a week) for a year now, and I found it high time to do something seriously about becoming faster - and it gives me something to do in these many many weeks of summer holidays (12 to be exact), and as Peter (the dear boyfriend) has joined in on the training as well, we have something to do together.

And now for the contest:

I've recently taken up a new sport that has started to take up some of my time as well (one has to hang out for the socials and games as well, you know). Can you guess which one?!

Clue: you must include all items shown in the photo to guess the right sport.

If you guess correctly and I draw out you name afterwards, I'll send you a small prize including a homemade item (knitted or felted), a ball of yarn, and some goods.

Edit: The contest is now closed! I'll be drawing the winner in a moment!

To enter the contest, just leave a comment to this post. If you don't want to enter, but want to comment anyway, just state so in your comment :)

BTW - aren't these boots just fancy? ;)

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Info for Stashalong:

Yarn thrown away: 532 g

Posh Yarn purchase: 464 g

A soft one

Last week I finished the Backyard Leaves scarf (from Scarf Style) in the Emily yarn from Posh Yarn in colourway Raddle - a mix of oranges and reds; hence, these leaves are beautiful autumn leaves and they are incredibly soft around my neck. I actually wore it twice last week despite the summery weather.

I bought the 100 g of yarn from another Raveler, pictish. I used 98 g of it for this scarf. Both numbers now added to the Stashalong stats.