winter

Colour Dominance in Stranded Knitting

by

Hello! I was only going to write a short post today, about colour dominance in stranded knitting, but I seem to be incapable of writing short posts somehow. Looking through my photos I realize that there is much more to share. We’ve had some beautiful, clear, frosty mornings this past week, and I just have to show you a few pictures.

The railings of a bridge we crossed on one of our walks were covered in a furry white coat of ice needles.

There is a wafer-thin layer of ice on the smaller waterways. Daytime temperatures are far too high for a safe ice floor for skating on to grow.

But temperatures are low enough throughout the day for wearing mittens, and the Selbu mittens I’ve just finished come in handy.

Colour dominance in stranded knitting

The first time I knit a similar pair of mittens was long before the internet, and I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to go about it. While I was knitting them I discovered that it makes a difference how you hold your two yarn colours. I always hold one thread in my left hand and one in my right hand. I found out that the colour I hold in my left hand pops out/is dominant, while the one in my right hand forms the background.

I’ve knit a small swatch to show you what I mean. In the bottom half of the swatch below I held black in my left hand and white in my right hand. And in the top half it was the other way around, with white in my left hand and black in my right hand.

Makes quite a difference, doesn’t it?

So how does this work? Looking at the back of two-colour knitting, you can see that there is always one colour that takes the shortest route, while the strands or floats of the other colour sort of come up from under that and take a longer route. It’s the colour that takes the longest route that is dominant. Recapping:

  • If you’re holding one colour in your left and the other in your right hand, the left-hand colour will be dominant.
  • If you’re holding both of your yarns in one hand, the thing to do is look at the floats at the back of your knitting and find out which one takes the longest route – that’s the dominant one.
  • Keep the same colour in the same hand/position throughout your stranded knitting project for a consistent result.

For my Selbu Mittens, I wanted the black to really pop out, and held that in my left hand.

Different cuffs for men and women

Traditionally, Selbu mittens for men had cuffs with colourwork similar to that on the hands, whereas women’s mittens had either the zigzag cuffs I used or striped ribbed cuffs. Below, two pairs of women’s mittens in Selbu Bygdemuseum:

Which float to pick up for increases

While knitting these mittens I made another discovery – it makes a difference which float you pick up when increasing (M1L or M1R). For the thumb gusset below right, I picked up white floats for making a stitch, and for the thumb gusset below left, I picked up black floats. I don’t know if it’s very clear in the photo, but picking up white floats results in a kind of steps along the sides of the gusset (blue arrows), while picking up black floats gives a smoother line (red arrows).

What I’d do differently next time

This time, I used the same needles throughout. Next time I’d go down one or two needle sizes for the cuffs.

What I’m inordinately proud of

How the all-over pattern on the palm of the hand continues on the thumb, so that you can hardly see where I picked up the thumb stitches.

Pattern/yarn/needles:

Mittens are great little projects and I can see myself making more in the future. Do you ever knit mittens? What is your favourite pattern?

Large Copper

by

Hello, hello, it’s good to see you! You’ve arrived right on time to join me for a walk. I’d also like to thank you, but we’re coming to that later. We’re in de Wieden again, part of the wetland nature reserve I’ve taken you to before. The path is a bit muddy but still walkable.

The landscape here has a limited colour palette at this time of year. There is the green of the grass and the blue of the sky (at least today).

But mainly it is, uhm, well, what would you call the colour of reed in winter? Tan, buff, sand, wheaten?

Yellow, golden, camel or brown? It depends very much on the light.

Here and there a spot of white is floating by…

… or standing still. It’s very quiet and peaceful, with just the honking of geese in the distance.

The only bright pops of colour come from the mosses and lichens.

And from the large copper.

Not a real one, obviously. It’s a felt large copper butterfly that travelled here in my inside jacket pocket. There are no real butterflies here in winter. Unfortunately, the large copper can’t be seen here in summer anymore either. It is still fluttering around in two nearby nature reserves, though, and my husband was able to take a few photos of it there last summer. It’s a vivid red-orange on top,

with white on the underside of its wings.

Beautiful, isn’t it? This particular species (Lycaena dispar batavus) doesn’t live anywhere else in the world anymore but in these two nature reserves. A precarious existence. It would be great if its habitat could be extended to the Wieden. Nature conservation organisation Natuurmonumenten is working hard to create the right circumstances for that to happen, protecting host plants and creating corridors for the large copper to fly along towards de Wieden.

By purchasing my Seventh Heaven scarf pattern, many of you have become supporters of their good work. I have now donated all of the proceeds from the pattern so far to Natuurmonumenten. On behalf of the large copper and Natuurmonumenten thank you so, so much for your contribution!

Links:

Colourwork Hats in the Snow

by

Hello!

This week we’re having a wintry spell with sunshine, blue skies and even a sprinkling of snow. Such a relief after all the rain we’ve had. On the whole I’m fine with rainy days, but three months of them is a bit much even for me.

On a glorious frosty morning, before we set off for a walk, I popped the four colourwork hats I’d just finished into my backpack for a photo shoot. Before going into the actual hats, this is the yarn I used:

Four skeins of Rowan’s Felted Tweed in the shades Rage, Clay, Cinnamon and Black (from left to right). I like it when manufacturers give their shades names instead of just numbers. The pattern I used is the Colorwork Cap (here on Ravelry). Four skeins make four of these hats when a different shade is used as the main colour for each of them – very economical.

Three of the hats were knit as per pattern. For someone with a smaller head who likes her hats to be closer fitting I made the fourth one (with red as the main colour) shorter. Here they all are in a row in the snow.

The difference will become clearer when you see me wearing them. The original hat is fairly tall. It has a wide colourwork section and a crown with decreases in four places.

The smaller hat has the same ribbing and colourwork band, but decreases in six places and consequently fewer decrease rows.

Here are the two versions side by side – the black hat with decreases in four places and the red one with decreases in six (click on images to enlarge and take a closer look at the decreases). The red hat would have fitted more smoothly over the head if I’d left off part of the colourwork and spaced the decreases out over more rows, but I didn’t want to do that and am happy with the way it turned out.

The photographs were taken in an area with shifting sands that is officially called Aekingerzand, but we call de Kale Duinen (the Bare Dunes). As children this is where we went on our annual school outing, to play ball games and sunbathe on our beach towels. It was like a day on the coast minus the sea. Here is an impression of what it looks like on a winter’s day.

I hope you are keeping well and warm (or cool, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere) and have had a good start to the new year. The four hats will soon be on their way to their new owners. One more project to finish and then it’s time for something new. I’m bursting with ideas and am looking forward to sharing them with you again this year.

New Year’s Wishes

by

Just a brief note from me today to wish you and yours a very happy 2024. Along with my general good wishes, I’m sending a Lüsterweibchen for you to personalize them. Make your own wish for the New Year while you rub her belly and it will come true. Shh, don’t tell or it won’t work.

The muscular Lüsterweibchen above, with antlers for wings and a mermaid’s tail, lives in Cochem Castle, Germany. Judging by the peeling red paint on her belly, many people have rubbed it to make a wish. I am quite sure it will work just as well via your screen.

I’m spending the rest of this week weaving in ends and planning new projects, and hope to be back with my regular posts as of next week. See you then!

Happy 2023!

by

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! May 2023 be filled with happiness for you and your loved ones. I hope you’ve had a great time over the Holidays and a good start to the New Year.

As for me, I spent part of the last day of the old year baking a big batch of knieperties (recipe here).

Keeping a few back for ourselves, I filled several bags with knieperties, closed them with cheerful ribbons, put them in a basket and distributed them among our neighbours. We don’t see much of each other at this time of the year, and it was nice to catch up on their news.

In exchange for the knieperties, some of them gave us home-made oliebollen and appelflappen. Yum!

When the clock struck 12 and the fireworks started, it was 15 ˚C (32 ˚F) – a nice temperature for a sunny day in May, not the middle of a night in December! Reading about the terrible snow storms and torrential rain some of you have had, I wish things could have been distributed a bit more evenly across the globe. I hope all is more or less back to normal now where you live.

Our Holiday break was uneventful, and I’ve been knitting quite a bit, finishing the Advent calendar mittens.

They were getting neater and neater as I went along – practice makes perfect (or at least improves skills). Taken together the backs make a lovely sampler of Norwegian colourwork that could be used for all kinds of other projects (description of how to download the pattern at the end of this post).

I’ve put them away now, moth-free in plastic, and made notes in my planner here and there to remind me of finding small gifts, poems and quotes to put inside. And especially to remind me of gifting them before December 1, 2023.

The life-size mittens I’ve also been knitting were less of a success, turning out a wee bit too small, and will have to be re-knit. More about those if/when I’ve found the courage to start anew.

Beside a few walks and a great family get-together, we also enjoyed a concert of a group of midwinter horn blowers. They called it An Ode to Peace through Connection.

It was great fun, seeing and hearing these strange traditional wooden horns, made by the players themselves.

The concert lasted all of 15 minutes, with each of the players doing a solo first, and finally all of them ‘making a lot of noise together’, as they themselves put it. The group has members aged from 7 to 70+ and each player has their own technique, resting the end of the horn on the ground or holding it high up in the air.

They’re an elusive bunch, these people, playing their horns from late November through the first week of January in a dozen or so villages around the area. Excepting this afternoon concert, you never know where they will pop up. Their announcements say: You’re most likely to hear us somewhere around 6 pm.

Did you notice the 2023 from buttons at the top? Well, I’ve also been rummaging through my button box. If I can get my act together, I’ll tell you more about that next week. Hope to see you then!

PS. If you’d like to hear the weird and wonderful sound of midwinter horns, there is a video on YouTube here. This isn’t ‘our’ group, but the sound is similar.

Nearly Finished

by

Hello, and welcome to my last blog post for 2022. While I am typing this, the Christmas stollen my husband has baked is cooling on a wire rack in the kitchen, filling the house with its delicious warm smell.

We do not celebrate Christmas in a big way, but there are certain traditions we hold dear. Like the above stollen, a Christmas tree with the same baubles every year, and a Christmas dinner prepared and shared with love and attention.

We also enjoy visiting a Christmas market in Germany when we can. So on a frosty morning, just before the sun came up, we set off for Münster.

On the way there, I knit a few rows on a simple sock in a lovely hand-painted yarn, the only suitable knitting project to take along – everything else was either too complicated or nearly finished.

Actually there isn’t a Christmas market in Münster but six, on various squares around the beautiful old city centre.

They are all slightly different. Some are more food-oriented, some more about gifts and handmade things. And one small new one was focused on organic, sustainable and fair-trade products. Even the mulled wine was certified organic.

As our gift-giving moment is already behind us, we didn’t need to shop for gifts and were free to stroll around, enjoy the sights and each other’s company, and have a bite to eat here and there. I love the traditional hot and golden Reibekuchen mit Apfelmus (potato fritters with apple sauce).

I also quickly popped into the yarn shop in the city centre, thinking it might be nice to write about, but popped out just as quickly – nothing to write home about there. Well, never mind, there was enough to enjoy without yarn.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this time of the year. I really love Christmas. And no matter what, how, or where we’re celebrating, I think we can all do with a message of peace and light.

But I can also relate to newspaper columnist Doortje Smithuijsen, who recently wrote, ‘… it’s the time of year again when we feel that at the end of the month the world is coming to an end – the time when everything needs to be finished NOW […] The time of year when you’re feeling vulnerable, looking for something to hold on to.’ (De Volkskrant, V2, 15 December 2022, my translation).

Unlike Doortje, I’m not joining MyInnerHealthClub. I don’t need to look far for something to hold on to – I have my knitting needles. Like her, I feel the urge to finish things, and I try to have all my knitting projects finished before the end of the year/world. My navy blue cardigan is nearly finished.

I also hope to finish my Advent calendar mittens soon. I am really, really enjoying knitting these, and if the world doesn’t stop turning at 12 pm on December 31, I’d love to do more Norwegian knitting in the new year.

I’d also love to knit more for our grandson, more socks (not just simple ones) and more things designed by myself, and to write about what I’m learning along the way. I won’t be able to finish my new shawl pattern before the year is out, but I’ve already wound the yarn for the final version. I hope to be able to tell you more about it in January or February.

I’m taking a break from blogging now to spend time with my loved ones, knit, read and go for walks. Thank you so much for reading my blog over the past year. It’s been lovely hearing from some of you now and then. I hope to ‘see’ you again in 2023, and wish you and yours a happy and relaxing festive season!

7 Small Things

by

Hello! No big projects or FOs today, but 7 small things that have made me happy over the past week.

1. A walk
The nights have been frosty this week, with temperatures just above zero during the daytime. On Sunday morning it was dark, cold and foggy, and I didn’t feel much like going for a walk. We went anyway. The heather and grasses were still white and frozen.

But the trees were already dripping.

It was cold, it was wet, it was gloomy. And it was lovely.

2. Small hands, big hands
Our grandson and his parents came to celebrate Sinterklaas last Saturday. At 8 months, he was more interested in the wrapping paper than in the gifts inside them. His small hands next to my husband’s big ones made me sigh a sigh of happiness.

3. Jingle bells
Sinterklaas brought me a few gifts, too. One of them was a small tin filled with jingle bell stitch markers.

4. Small bird feeder
A dear friend came on a very belated birthday visit bearing gifts. One of them was a new bird feeder, hand-made from willow. Too small for woodpeckers and too difficult to hold on to for house sparrows and finches, it is specifically for great and blue tits. I asked them if I could post a picture of them eating pieces of peanut from it on my blog, but they said: uh-uh, we value our privacy! So here is just the feeder.

5. Small cable
The same friend also gave me this:

Only a fellow-knitter would know how happy that would make me. It’s a new type of cable for my Chiaogoo circular knitting needles. I am trying it out on the small Advent mittens I’m knitting with the magic loop technique.

What can I tell you about it? Well, the Swiv 360 cable is quite a bit thinner than the original red cables, and it is also a lot more flexible – very nice! These cables are attached to the ends that screw onto the needle tips in such a way that they can rotate freely – a tremendous improvement.

The only downside of these new cords is that there is a slight hitch where the cable is attached to the ends, which makes sliding the stitches from left to right over them towards the tip (when moving from one needle to the next with the magic loop method) a little more difficult. But, all in all, I’m very happy with it!

6. Mini-mittens
I’m not quite but almost on schedule with the Norwegian mini-mittens I’m knitting for an Advent calendar to gift next year. Number 13 has just slid off my needles.

It’s great fun, knitting these. My idea was to spend some quiet, contemplative time burning a candle and listening to music while knitting one of these every day. In real life it’s more like 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there, sometimes with, sometimes without music, often forgetting to light a candle or to be quiet and contemplative.

Still, I’m getting there and enjoying these knitting moments. The only thing I’m not quite happy with is the bumpiness of the sides of some of the mittens and the irregularity of some of the stitches. But let’s look at it from a positive side: I still have things to learn – yay!

7. Mini-sock
The first Christmas card arrived accompanied by a small gift – a mini-sock. No, actually it wasn’t a Christmas card but a New Year’s card. The friend who sent it explains why on her wonderful blog about her life, knitting, walks with her dog and music. It is in Dutch, but Google does a fairly decent job of translating it. You can read about and see all of the mini-socks she knit here.

I’m happy and honoured to be the recipient of one of these sweet little socks. I’ve attached it to the zipper of my babysitting bag, so that it will travel with me every time I’m looking after our grandson.

May your weeks be filled with small things that make you happy, too.

Little Red Riding Hood or Grandmother

by

Hello!

As soon as I saw these sheep, huddled together in a field, I realized that something was wrong. They looked distressed. Looking into the distance, I saw the reason why. Oh no! A dead sheep, and the owner and somebody else looking upset, searching for something. Tracks? Other evidence of the culprit?

Only DNA-testing can tell whether this sheep was killed by a wolf or a dog, but chances are that it was a wolf. We hear about sheep being killed by wolves around here on a weekly basis now.

For the people who lived here long before us, those who built the impressive megalithic burial monuments called hunebedden, wolves must have been a fact of life to be reckoned with.

But for us, in the 21st century it’s a phenomenon we’re not familiar with. There haven’t been any wolves here for at least 120 years. And now, all of a sudden the wolf is back! Arriving here from Eastern Europe via Germany, the wolf is supposed to eat roedeer, rabbits and other furry creatures. But it isn’t playing by the rules, because why waste energy chasing a meal that runs away fast when there is so much juicy mutton to be had with far less effort?

I’m talking of ‘it’ and ‘the wolf’, but it is uncertain how many there really are in this area. There is at least one, probably a couple, and maybe even a third. This newcomer is certainly causing a lively discussion. Some people are thrilled, while others are of the opinion that there is no place for wolves in this small, densely populated country.

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I think, who are we to decide who or what is to live in this corner of the world? We are happy that the raven is back. We are happy that the otter is back. And we are happy that the badger is back. There are badger trails everywhere nowadays – zooming in, you should be able to see their paw prints.

Shouldn’t we be happy about the wolf being back as well?

On the other hand, when I hear of a wolf jogging past a playground full of playing children in broad daylight in the village where a friend of mine with school-going children lives, well, I don’t know…. How dangerous are they?

It is hard to imagine these otherwise peaceful surroundings being populated by packs of wolves in the future. Will guests of this Bed & Breakfast hear them howling at night in a few years’ time?

I’m fairly certain that the Highlands belonging to the B&B owners will be able to defend themselves with their fierce horns.

But how about me? I have no idea what to do if I were to come face-to-face with a wolf. Take photographs? Hide behind a tree? Call in my own personal superhero, ‘HELP! DO something, shoo it away!’?

Or strike up a conversation like Little Red Riding Hood?

Inside, I still feel like Little Red Riding Hood, but to all intents and purposes I’m becoming more like her grandmother by the day. In fact, I am becoming a grandmother this spring. And I may even need hearing aids before long.

Ménière’s disease is affecting my hearing. Although I’m still managing in everyday life, I can’t hear the little birds high up in the trees anymore. Fortunately I do not have the dizzy spells that go with it very often, but I’ve recently had one.

It wasn’t so bad this time that I’m in bed. And it’s never bad enough for me to be wearing a frilly cap.

It does mean that I need to take some rest and limit my screen time. So if you’ve posted a gorgeous FO on Ravelry or published a great blogpost and haven’t heard from me, please know that it isn’t because I’m not interested.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time quietly knitting, but had to rip out almost as much as I knit because my brain wasn’t functioning properly. Awooo! No, I wasn’t really howling like wolf. I thought, oh, well, we all have times like these and hope to show you some progress next week.

Stay safe! xxx

Nettle Socks and Nettelbosch

by

Hello!

Today’s post has a nettle theme running through it. To begin with, I’ve knit a pair of socks with nettle fibre in them. That was interesting, because the yarn (Onion Nettle Sock) behaved a little differently from the usual all-wool or wool-and-nylon sock yarn. Let’s take a look at the thread first:

As you can see, there is maroon fibre and white fibre. The maroon fibre is superwash wool (70%) and the white fibre is nettle (30%). Nettle doesn’t take the dye used for wool and stays white, which gives a nice marled effect. Here and there thicker bits of nettle stick out, but on the whole the thread is smooth. Nettle is a very strong fibre, and the thread doesn’t break easily.

For me, the problem was that the yarn has hardly any elasticity at all. At my first try, with a few centimetres of knit 1, purl 1 rib followed by stocking stitch, the sock became too loose. Casting on fewer stitches would give a tighter fit, but also a stiff sock. After throwing it into a corner taking a break from it, I had a lightbulb moment: what the yarn lacks in elasticity, can be added by using a stretchy stitch pattern! So, I knit the leg and the top of the foot in k2, p2 rib.

TIP: Here is something I learnt from my mum and she learnt from hers: start on the toe of the sock when the little toe is covered. I can’t guarantee that it works for very long toes, but I think it’s a good rule of thumb.

Laid out flat, the ribbing is all bunched up and the socks look rather narrow.

But on the foot, you can see how the rib stretches out and the socks fit perfectly.

I had my doubts about this yarn, but I’m happy with these socks now and hope the friend I made them for is too. Still, they’re pretty basic. I have more of this yarn for another pair and have an idea for making those a little more exciting. More about them in a few weeks’ time, I hope.

Q: Does nettle yarn sting or itch?
A: No more than any other sock yarn. It feels surprisingly nice, really.

All this focus on nettle fibre gave me an idea for a little outing to the Nettelbosch, a garden in the nearby town of Steenwijk. Come along! Up, up, up the stairs we go, on to the top of the old town wall.

After a short walk we go down another flight of stairs…

… and arrive at the entrance gate. Apart from the name of the garden, it shows a simplified map of the old town centre, with its wonky star-shaped defensive walls.

Long, long ago, there was a garden here, too. But it became a neglected spot – a tangle of nettles that was known to the locals as De Nettelbosch. When in 2018 the municipality decided to give the town centre a ‘quality boost’ by creating a new garden, the spot kept its name.

The small, stony pond looks nice all year…

… thanks to its attractive leafy bridge.

For the rest, De Nettelbosch looks rather bare and bleak at this time of the year.

At least at first sight. Spending a little longer looking around, small details catch the eye, like these seed heads.

There is also some colour to be found.

And even a few signs of spring!

These bulbs (daffodils?) are much further along than those in our garden, probably because of their sheltered situation behind the town walls. I’ll certainly take you back here in spring, to see what De Nettelbosch looks like then.

Goedgoan!*

*Local expression for Bye!

Knieperties

by

First of all, Happy New Year! It’s a bit late, I know, but I still want to wish you all the best for 2022.

We’ve had an uneventful but nice and relaxing week, and I hope you’ve had a good time, too. My Christmas Break knitting project is almost finished. I’ll share that with you next week when it’s all done (I hope).

What I’d like to share with you today is the recipe for knieperties, paper-thin waffles that are traditionally served on New Year’s Eve and Day in this part of the Netherlands. They can be eaten flat or rolled up. Similar ones are also baked in Germany, which isn’t all that far away from here.

Baking knieperties (pronounced something like kneepertees, with an audible k and stress on the first syllable) is a tradition passed on to me by a neighbour across the street. She baked stacks of them on New Year’s Eve for her extensive family and always brought us and other neighbours some, too. After she died about a decade ago, I decided to continue the tradition.

Traditionally knieperties were baked using a cast-iron waffle iron held over a fire, but nowadays everyone I know uses an electrical waffle iron. Mine is from German manufacturer Cloer.

INGREDIENTS:
(makes about 100)

  • 150 butter at room temperature
  • 325 g fine caster sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 500 g flour
  • A pinch of cinnamon
  • 600 ml lukewarm water

METHOD:

  • Cream the butter together with the sugar and the eggs.
  • Stir the cinnamon through the flour.
  • Add small quantities of flour and water alternately to the butter-sugar-egg mixture until everything is stirred in (the batter should be quite thin).
  • Preheat the iron for about 10 minutes until the little light switches off – heat setting 3 (middle top) works best for me.
  • Place one tablespoon of batter on the waffle iron. Close it and keep it firmly closed with your fingers. Hot steam will come out – take care not to burn your fingers!
  • Open the iron when steam stops coming out. The waffle should now be a pale golden brown. Quickly transfer it to a chopping board.
  • Leave to cool flat or roll up very quickly using the handle of a wooden spoon.

From start to finish, baking this quantity will take about 90 minutes to 2 hours.

Knieperties are deliciously crunchy and so thin that they are almost translucent.

This is my set-up, with from left to right: chopping board for cooling knieperties, wooden spoon for rolling them, waffle iron, plate for stacking cooled knieperties, small bowl of batter (works easier than big mixing bowl; refill from time to time), pancake turner (bottom right-hand corner) for flipping knieperties from iron to board.

And this is the whole batch, excluding the ones that got eaten during the process. Rolled-up knieperties can be filled with whipped cream if you like.

In the pouring rain (we’ve had quite a bit of that here lately) I took them around to several neighbours. A great opportunity for catching up on the latest news.

Knieperties are not just served around New Year’s, but also on other special occasions.

Instead of an ordinary Christmas card, dear friends sent us this:

A wonderful pop-up card of Villa Rams Woerthe, a historic house in a nearby town. The last time we visited it, we were served tea and knieperties in the drawing room. ‘Must enjoy baking knieperties’ is high on the list of requirements for anyone who wants to work there as a volunteer.

This is what it looks like from the back:

And this is what it looks like in real life (photo taken in spring):

I’d love to visit it again someday soon. Ah, so many plans and ideas for the New Year! I’ll try to share anything I think may be of interest and hope to ‘see’ you here often.