Born to knit

Knitting on the Edge

So I´m still knitting lace and I´m still using pink yarn. There are some pink beads there somewhere, too. So what´s new?

Well, nothing. Never change a winning.

This beautiful shawl is called Grace and it´s designed by my friend Heléne Wallin, who writes the funny En till stickblogg. The yarn I´m using is some Rowan kidsilk haze combined with Madeline Tosh pure silk lace yarn. 

I´ve reached the end of the ruffled edge and I´m now trying to cast off nicely. It´s not going well. This shawl might look innocent enough, but it´s really a trouble maker. And I´m at the end of my tether. This bad ass shawl will be finished tonight. And tomorrow it will hang nicely and well behaved over my shoulders.

 

 

Tickled Pink

When I was a baby I was never dressed in pink. My mum was a young and hip art student, so she dyed all my clothes orange. She also painted a lot of the furniture orange. I was probably a very trendy baby.

And that is probably the reason why I have to go through pink phases as an adult. I had my first pink period when I was 19. I was dressed from head to toe in pink. I even dyed strands of my hair pink. I think I overdozed on pink, because for years I couldn´t face wearing anything pink.

But now pink is back in favour again. Big time. In July I made myself a pink linen tunic, using a Drops pattern.

So if you want to avoid having your grown up daughters wearing nothing but pink my advice would be to dress them in pink when they are small. Or they will also go around looking something like this:

Because I used  a different  type of linen yarn to the one in the pattern I had to do quite a lot of recalculations. I´m quite happy with the result and have worn it quite a lot.

Now it´s a bit too cold to wear this tunic – but I haven´t given up wearing pink. Oh, no.

 I have made myself a new pair of wristlets in pink Koigu and pale pink Japanese beads, that were a gift from my friend Wendy.

 

I´ve also made a pair of wristlets for my friend Mia, who is not well. They are not really pink, but more of a heather colour that I know that she likes.

I hope Mia will get better soon.  She´s suffered from borreliosis (lyme disease) for about 15 years and she´s not getting any help from the Swedish health care system. 

Wonderful Wollmeise

I have been knitting with Wollmeise a big part of the summer. My very generous friend Barbro gave me the last part of a skein of Wollmeise that she had already made two shawls from. 
There was enough left for a shawl for me, too!

I started a Hyacinth shawl by Evelyn Clark last summer, but didn´t finish it until now. It has quite a lot of beads, even though you can´t really see them in this picture.

I put in a few extra rows along the edge, to use up all of that lovely yarn.

 

You can´t let any Wollmeise go to waste now, can you?

One of the reasons that I stopped knitting this lovely shawl last summer was that we had a problem with aggressive bumblebees on Edö.

Yes, I know that this might sound like something I´ve made up – but mr B and I were sitting peacefully in a deck chair each, me knitting and him reading – when suddenly a few really vicious bumblebees attacked us and we both got stung quite badly.

Later I read somewhere that bumblebees are particular to the colour blue – and I really didn´t feel like challenging those bumblebees any more. I´m not terribly brave like that. It felt like being in a horror movie – a follow up to Hitchcock´s "Birds". 

Perhaps I should send the "Bumblebees" synopsis to few producers in Hollywood? Or maybe not.

This summer I´ve also made a pair of socks in Wollmeise. They are for a friend´s husband and his feet are huge. A whopping size 47. When I was making these my kids asked me: "why are you knitting Christmas stockings in the middle of summer, mum?"

This design is not my own and it was rather hard to knit. Lots of rows where you have to bind the yarn to avoid too long floats where tiny rather large toes could get caught.

Anyway, I think the recipient was happy. And if he doesn´t like wearing them, he could always hang them on his mantle piece on Christmas Eve and hope that Santa will drop by.