Born to knit

Spring is in the Air

Today is Valborg in Sweden. Tonight we light bonfires and celebrate that spring is here!

It´s been a long and rather cold and snowy winter. I´ve made heaps of hats and mittens. And I can´t seem to stop. 

But at least my new pair of mittens have a design suitable for spring. Flowers in full bloom.

 

I call this mitten Britta. I´m contemplating calling it Britta Blom, but I´m not sure if that is too naff.
If you have an opinion, please leave a comment! I don´t want to give this cute mitten a naff name if I can help it.

This pattern has both Scandinavian and Scottish influences. It´s not a Fair Isle pattern at all – but since I have used more than two colours it´s not true to Swedish/Norwegian knitting traditions either. So far I haven´t come across a Swedish knit pattern with more than two colours in one motif. I´m not sure about Norwegian knitting, but from what I´ve seen there are usually only two colours used in one mitten.

Actually I´ve started to obsess a bit about Norwegian patterns lately. I´d love to find some more literature about the knitting traditions in Norway. What books are there? (Annemor Sundbo´s books are already in my library)

The Britta mittens will probably be the last mittens that I make for a while. I realise that even I have to stop making mittens now when spring is officially here. 

I just need to finish them properly first – for the time being there are no thumbs.

Look, no thumbs!

I know, I know. How hard can it be? Thumbs are really small and should take no time at all to knit.

But apparently it is very hard. For me.

My friend Eva-Lotta has told me that she doesn´t leave the knitting of the thumbs until last – and I think that is a clever idea. But for some dumb reason I didn´t follow her advice this time. So here they are, nearly done – but for the thumbs.

Hands up – how many readers of this blog think that the mittens will remain in this state until next winter arrives?

Inspiration from Norway

Last weekend I happened to come across a Norweigan craft magazine  called "Bunad" (which means folk costume I think). An article about embroidery caught my eye. 

The Norwegian folk costumes are simply spectacular and have inspired the Norwegian knitwear designer Solveig Hisdal (Poetry in Stitches), for instance.

I believe that it has also inspired the embroidery on the folk costume in the villages  of Dala-Floda, in the Swedish county of Dalarna. Perhaps there was a trail leading to Norway through that part in the 19th century?

 

Or maybe the Norwegian bunad was inspired by the Floda costume?

This particular type of embroidery is called påsöm. The people in Dala Floda wear their beautiful costumes  on special occasions. You can still learn how to do påsöm – and it´s very popular, too. 

You could wear this jacket back to front if you wanted to.

Another page from the Norwegian magazine:

I must start subscribing to "Bunad". It contained lots of interesting reading.

I hope that I haven´t upset any Norwegians or anyone from Dala Floda now. To me it doesn´t matter who was first. But then I´m neither Norwegian nor from Dala Floda. (I wish!)

Though, I have to confess that I have borrowed a part from a Dala Floda knitting pattern for my new Elise mittens. And the inspiration for the rest of the pattern comes from the Norwegian Selbu mittens. 

I think that´s quite a funny coincidence.

Swedish Selbu mittens.

The pattern is already available in Swedish from Nysta.

And it will be available in English at the Loopy Ewe  as soon as the Spring Fling is over.

Elise is my daughter´s name and it also happens to be a quite common name in Norway. Sometimes it´s just amazing – verging on spooky – how everything seems to connect!

 

Banished from Paradise

The miserable Wollmeise sock looks a lot better after I did unmentionable things to it with a hot iron.

I pressed and I pressed and I pressed.

But I´ve still got to make the second sock and we all know how hard that can be, right?

Another thing that feels pretty hard is that I´ve now spent my last weekend at the HV School. We have now covered seven traditional knitting styles of different Swedish regions. 

I´ve learnt how to make a special kind of fringe called kavelfrans. It´s often used on knitted garments in Hälsingland.

 

A kavelfrans adorning the cuff of a sleeve.

This old sweater from 1838 is simply magnificent. Look at this neat shoulder, for instance.

Marina, if you´re still reading my blog – this is for you!

One day I really have to knit a sweater like this.

And look at the detail on the neck.

Me want!

Maggie, a fellow student showed us how to make the kavelfrans using a special device.

Maggie has made a pair of spectacular mittens using the twined knitting technique and finished them off with a kavelfrans that doesn´t go av för hackor as we say in Sweden. These mittens are a piece of art.

Mittens courtsey of Maggie Webrink.

But now there are no more weekends at the HV School to look forward to. It feels as if I´ve been banished from Paradise. So I´ve got to sign up for another course in the autumn.

Karin Kahnlund has been a wonderful teacher, so generous with her extensive knowledge and a lovely person to get to know. Tack, Karin för denna fantastiska resa!

It´s been great to get to know the other students in the class, too. Today we just laughed and laughed, the way a bunch of only women will laugh together. But non-knitters would probably have wondered what on earth was so funny.

Glad Påsk!

What a wonderful sunny Easter we´ve enjoyed so far. My enthusiasm for knitting mittens have melted away with the snow.

But I´ve come up with a new mitten pattern using a little flower motif from the Karin Kurbits design. So I picked out two Spring colours to make one last pair of before I finally give up.

I thought the bright colours would work well together, but I was wrong. It´s so hard to predict sometimes what will happen when colours "react" together. These two colours blended a bit too well and as a result you can hardly see the pattern.

It´s an easy mistake to make and one that I´ve made before.

I think Elise was more disappointed than I was, she really loved the colour combination. Maybe I can make her a pair of striped mittens – next winter.

In my last blog post I promised to show what I´m knitting with some of the Wollmeise I brought back from Germany in October.

I´m knitting a pair of socks for a friend´s husband.

 

Colours that really work well together!

She saw this pattern and fell in love with it and I promised I would help her make them as a surprise gift. Even if her husband´s feet are as big as feet go – a whopping size 47! 

The pattern is called "Arjuna" by Sue Grandfield (Rioutous Assembly). It was made for the Wollmeise Sock Club in 2008 and luckily I could get of a copy even though I was never part of that sock club. My friend Wendy kindly sent me her copy of the pattern as a gift.

This is quite a hard pattern to knit actually. Some rows are stranded and some rows are not. The rows that are not stranded become a lot looser and the result is that the knitting looks puckered. Also the floats are quite long and that also makes the knitting pucker.

I was a bit worried when I saw how it looked, but I kept my fingers crossed that a bit of severe pressing with the old iron would do the trick. And luckily it did. There will be photos next time.

I must admit that I´ve enjoyed seeing that "people" who have googled the word orgy has ended up on my blog – because I gave my last blog post the title "Pink Orgy". And all they got for their troubles was a photo of me covered in a hat and scarf. Ha ha ha. What a great way to increase the blog traffic.