Hello! While some of you have been melting in a heatwave, we have had extremely variable weather with strong winds, sunshine, rain, thunderstorms. One moment the sky was bright blue…
… and the next dark clouds gathered and the rain pelted down.
In other parts of the country, the storms uprooted trees and caused other havoc. Here, the wind only tore off some pears in our back garden.
On the whole, it’s been great knitting weather. Between the showers I’ve taken my knitting outside for some pictures. I’ve started on a Norwegian cardigan.
The pattern is in Kofteboken 2, by Lene Holme Samsøe and Liv Sandvik Jakobsen. This beautiful and inspiring, partly linen-bound book contains patterns for 27 sweaters, mostly cardigans with a few pullovers thrown in. There are patterns for adults and children as well as some background stories about designers, motifs, yarns and history. One of the great things about the book is that many of the sweaters are shown in several sizes, colours and different yarns.
It is in Norwegian, but as a knitter you’ll probably understand most terms and the photography is so clear that the sweaters can almost be knit by looking at the pictures alone. The authors’ website can be visited here, and the book can be found here on Ravelry.
The cardigan I’m making is called Lang Yndlingskofte, it is knit from the top down and has a yoke with bands of motifs in two colours. This is what it looks like in the book:
Question marks:
- Knit a 5-stitch or a 7-stitch steek? – Answer: 5-stitch steek as per pattern
- Shorten cardigan (considerably)?
- Add pockets?
- Buttons on entire front as in pattern or just on yoke?
- Knit on facing to cover steek stitches or cover them with ribbon?
The yarn I’m using is CaMaRose ‘Økologisk Hverdagsuld’ (100% organic wool, 150m/164yds/50g).
The pattern gauge for the Yndlingskofte is 22 sts to 10cm/4”. My swatches gave: 22 sts on 3mm/US 2,5 needles and 20 sts on 3,5mm/US 4 needles. The 22-stitch swatch was spot-on, but it felt stiff and I decided to go with the looser 20-stitch gauge. This means that I’ll knit a smaller size that will hopefully turn out the right size for me at this gauge.
I’ve also washed and blocked the socks I wrote about in last week’s post. The yarn used for them is Lana Grossa ‘Landlust Die Sockenwolle’ (420m/460yds/100g) in shade 119, neutrals with bands in the rosy red of our ‘Lipstick’ roses.
The yarn doesn’t have a special starter thread to ensure that both socks turn out the same. Getting them exactly the same is a fun game.
The soundtrack to today’s post is Between the Showers – Irish harp music played by Gráinne Hambley. You can listen to some fragments here. I once attended a workshop led by her, and she told us her name is pronounced something like Gron-yuh (stress on first syllable).
Well, that’s all for today. I hope the weather (and life in general) is kind to you, and hope to see you again next week.
Beauty all around in your world, and a joy to see the good days and the not so good days. I love your knitting!!!
Hello, how lovely to see you pop in! Thank you – this evening after dinner, I sat quietly contemplating the day and knitting a few rounds on the Norwegian cardi. Very enjoyable.