Month: July 2017

Valentino is Free

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When my son was a baby, I was given a knitted baby overall that my granny had made me back in 1982. It was perfect for my son that had just learned to move around. It kept him warm – it was a bit chilly at floor level – yet wasn’t too hot because it didn’t have sleeves.

I was inspired by this garment and started knitting my son another one, in lighter weight yarn. I wasn’t able to choose colors, so I ordered a Wollmeise surprise set of two skeins. I ended up with purple and blue, colors that suited my son’s skintone very well.

Since my husband was working a lot back then, I didn’t have much knitting not to mention designing time, and the overall was finished a bit before my son’s first birthday. The pattern, in turn, was finished two years after I had started! Later on I revised it and added a third size.

Baby wearing a purple. knitted overall

The baby in the photo is my daughter. When the purple Valentino got too small for her, I made another one, also in Wollmeise. There is a third one, too, waiting for her to grow a bit more.

Now I’m happy to announce that the pattern is available for free. There are instructions for making sleeves, as well. There is an image with measurements of the garment, making it possible to finish the garment even with another gauge. The sizes available are 70 cm = 6 to 8 months, 80 cm = 12 months and 90 cm = 24 months. (The centimeter sizes mean the actual height of the child.)

Testing: Humus Shawl in 2-color Brioche

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This is merely a sneak peek at my next shawl pattern, Humus. The shawl is worked from the top down, using basic stitches of two-color brioche. The twisty motifs of the shawl were inspired by the crisscrossing of small roots.

Humus shawl

The shawl is reversible:

Humus shawl, reverse side

The photos here show a medium size shawl. The medium size will be around 160 cm (63 in) wide and 56 cm (22 in) deep blocked. The large size will be around twice the area of the medium one, but it depends on whether it’s blocked or not. If it was treated the same way as the model shawl, it would be around 195 cm (77 in) wide and 81 cm (32 in) deep.

I’m hoping of releasing the pattern in September, to allow the testers to take their time,
especially with the larger size.

The discussion thread for the test is here.

Picking up Stitches from a 2-color Brioche Rib Tab

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When I knit a shawl in two-color brioche, starting from the neck, I first make a tab in two-color brioche rib. Then I pick up stitches from the edges of the tab. Here is how I picked up the stitches for Humus shawl. I don’t know if there’s an official name for the method. I’m calling it brioche rib tab, since the tab is knitted in brioche rib, and the cast-on method resembles the garter tab cast-on.

Two-color Cable Cast-on

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My method of casting on using two colors and the cable cast-on method is a bit different from what seems the standard two-color cable cast-on. There is a video on YouTube on how I do it.

For short, I make the slipknot in only one color – it is the color I knit first on later rows – and I pick up the yarn for the next stitch from under the other color. The latter makes the yarns twist around each other, so if you intend on casting on more than a dozen stitches, it’s more convenient to pick up one of the colors from over the other color.

Festival Yarn

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I attended the Jyväskylä Summer Knit Festival this weekend. I hadn’t bought any yarn in a year and a half and had started to run out of some specific colors and kinds of yarn. I had a shopping list, but didn’t even plan on being strict about it. Eventually I bought a bit over two kilos, so enough for quite some time.

Here’s a photo taken on the spot:

Festival yarn

At home I spread them out and took another photo to show them better:

Yarn I bought at the festival, spread on the bed at home. There are 22 skeins of yarn.

Right now they’re all in the freezer to reassure me that there won’t be any bugs in them when I start knitting. I doubt that any bug would have found them in just a couple of hours there outdoors, but I feel much better if I freeze all my yarn when it gets home.

I have an idea for most of those, and can’t wait to get them out of their cold treatment to cast on.

Kesäyö

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As a kid I was often at weddings in the rural town where my dad grew up. Every time we left a wedding it was already night, but Finnish summer night is not dark at all, and while trying not to fall asleep on the back seat of the car, I watched the misty fields go by.

With the misty summer nights in mind, in Spring 2016 I designed Kesäyö shawl, the name meaning summer night in Finnish.

The shawl was designed for fingering weight yarn. I used Hedgehog Fibres Sock (400 m/437 yd per 100 g) in Moss (green) and Silence (white). You will need 600 m/656 yd (150 g) of color A, 400 m/437 yd (100 g) of color B. In the model shawl the green is color A and the off-white is color B.

Since more than 100 g of the green was needed, I have added instructions on how to knit the shawl in three colors: color A is for the narrow, green stripes, color B for the white sections and color C is used in the wavy sections. A full skein of each should be plenty for colors B and C, and half a skein is enough for color A.

More detailed info can be found on the pattern’s Ravelry page.