Featured in a book, Lovebook

One of my knitted home decoration accessories has landed in Dawanda's new Winter 2011/2012 Lovebook booklet, this is really exciting.
The item in question is this beige simple knitted pencil cup cozy with cables:




The booklet is printed in three languages and it is also available as a pdf file. My cup cozy can be admired on page 19 of the English Lovebook, on page 23 of the German Lovebook and on page 14 of the French Lovebook.

Woollen winter blazer

Started preparing for winter early this year and made a blazer style jacket that would be comfortable under winter coat.
The body part was knitted in one piece, sleeves and collar separately. The main pattern is twisted stitch ribbing that allowed convenient decreases for the waistline to be made. Front pieces, sleeves and collar are decorated with large scale aran motives. Quite modestly.











The jacket required 14 skeins of Patons Fairytale Colour 4 Me yarn in shade No. 4978. This is a lovely thick and warm pure wool, the weight is somewhere between DK and worsted.

Haapsalu Shawl Day

The picturesque town of Haapsalu celebrated the annual lace knitting day yesterday: woolwhite lacework was to be spotted everywhere, both in finished and work-in-progress status. The seaside resort atmosphere was something well worth envying as always.

The lace knitting contest was not too crowded with its fourteen participants:




Some people just knitted on the street without competing:




Shawl dance presented by a classy local dance group:








And some other highlights of the program:






Shawls and other lacy items made by the local master knitters were also sold at the craft fair. And for a shocking price of 50 Euros - unfortunately, this is what people who value handmade can afford here. (The price for being an economically well-behaving country.) Well, start planning your lace shopping trip for next August!






This is the window of the Dome Church chapel, where the White Lady appears on full moon August nights (she must be hiding in there by day as well):




By the end of the day, all this motivation overdose resulted in a midnight swatch with Karukellakiri pattern. This project cannot be postponed any longer and as soon as I'm done with the hardest part - choosing a stitch pattern - my first Haapalu shawl will be cast on.




There is also a sweet short film about knitting in Haapsalu in 1937 available in the Estonian Film Archives:

Spring leaves

Here is something to give the nature a small hint of what everybody is expecting to happen soon: a shawlette consisting entirely of green leaves.




This triangular shawl is knitted lengthwise, making increases and decreases at one edge - probably the most knitter-friendly approach. The yarn is a high quality lace weight merino wool by Angeljays.

White cables and bobbles

And here is the completed cushion cover mentioned in the previous post:




And a matching (favourite item lately, can't seem to throw away any tin cans!) pencil cup cozy:

Chunky aran wallpaper

Winter is definitely not over yet, we had -25°C tonight. In order to keep your computer warm, you can download this wallpaper of chunky knitted cables and bobbles. Behind the scenes information: it's a cushion cover in progress.

Normal 1600 x 1200
Wide 1680 x 1050

Needles kept warm

The needles and hooks got themselves a warm chunky cozy, this way they are always ready to work:

Old-fashioned white roses

Knitted, finished, washed, blocked and blogged: a shawl full of white roses, something to dream about in wintertime.
The edge pattern is from a stitch library, I designed the centre pattern and that took a lot of drawing and erasing. And imagine that heap of swatches! Fortunately they are woollen, so I have some ideas on the back of my mind how these could be used for a felting project.




The mission was to create a rose looking like those old filet crochet motives, of course it is not that simple with knitting stitches.




The yarn is Linate Smyrna Platinum with sheep and alpaca wool, which holds very well and I definitely like it more than lace weight merino.

Iceblue lace

Took a long time, but I finally finished a pale blue lace scarf of pure merino wool. This could have been a nice stole, but didn't have the patience, I wanted to try out knitting the lace edge directly to the center piece with circular needles. The edge came out quite nice, but of course, this way the scallops are formed by yarn-overs, not solid stitches, and may not hold so well. To give the edge more strength, I added some bobbles (nupps) on the last row.











The Allegretto shawl looks a little similar, though I have used a different stitch pattern, and can be made as a scarf with just reducing the pattern repeats.

Black nights

Those dark November nights have inspired some works in black with some sparkle.
Knitted and felted hand warmers, fading from black to grey, made of Aade Artistic, embellished with large crochet flowers and small glass beads:




A long black rosary style necklace with heart, rose and moon, and bronze coloured additions:




And a necklace to add some starshine and golden spark to the black nights:




For now, it has been snowing almost continuously for some days and the nights are not completely dark - thanks to the 30 cm thick snow cover.

Iceland's longest scarf

There was an article in our newspaper about Fríða Gylfadóttir, an artist from Iceland, and her knitting project - a 17 kilometers long scarf! The scarf is going to reach from Siglufjörður to Ólafsfjörður, these towns will be connected by a long-awaited tunnel in autumn.

This seemed such a terrific idea, that I decided to make a small contribution, grabbed the needles right away and made a scarf piece like a lace stitch sampler. Unfortunately, the yarn ball allocated for this project was only enough for 160 cm, but I am going to send it to Iceland anyway.




Currently about 10 more kilometers need to be knit, so if you would like to help, the postal address can be found in Frida's blog. The scarf should be 20 cm wide to fit the project.

One of the sponsors of this project is Ístex yarn company, I already found their online shop and set my eyes on some beautiful Icelandic wool!


Update: the scarf was finished and the tunnel opened! Read the article in Iceland Review Online.

Diamond shawl

The project started in the previous post is accomplished now inspite of the inhumane weather conditions. It's a merino wool lace shawl with continuous diamonds and zig-zags.
The colour is very neutral greyish brown, wearable with almost anything. Usually I don't like to use stitch patterns with "sharp corners" with wool, but I was aiming for a shawl that would look more modern rather than too romantic. If lace can be unromantic at all, that is.
And to think of all the extra warmth captured in it...




If you would like to knit a similar shawl, why not try the Allegretto shawl pattern.

A butterfly brought the summer

This bright turquoise yarn was calling out for a cheerful summer companion. Beads in water tones, as well as intriguing orange and purple, are knitted along with the yarn and cannot escape from the shrug.




Stringing the beads onto the yarn in the right order according to the "master plan" took a whole hour.




The stitch pattern is very simple, just some reaccurring double holes. The bamboo and cotton yarn feels really soft and light.




The butterfly can change itself according to the light direction and conditions.