A surprise, a blue ensemble, and socks

Surprise: I have a pattern in Ulla!

Pattern: in Finnish, here

Yarn: Wollmeise 80/20 twin, leftover from a shawl I knit two summers ago

Thoughts: Not the most spectacular hat nor pattern, but pretty exciting nontheless 🙂

The blue shawl I showed last time did also get finished in time.

For some reason I look extremely white and annoyed. Oh, the mysteries of photography.

Pattern: Evi by Stricklust, available for free through Ravelry

Yarn: Wollmeise 100% merino, in WD Blue Curacao

Thoughts: Easy pattern, a relatively quick knit (I started on June 1st and finished last Saturday, June 16th). In the end I actually ran out of yarn while binding off, and had to finish with some random Finnish sock yarn.

The pattern is very easy to memorize, and looks impressive although it’s just knits and purls. I got less repeats than the pattern specified, so my gauge was probably off. I always use size 3.5mm needles for knitting lace with Wollmeise. For this shawl I used my new Chiagoo Lace needles that are pure love -pointy tips and a strong cord. I got mine from Villavyyhti in Helsinki.

Despite my morose expression, I can assure you that the party was fabulous.

Finally, I have a pair of very sweet socks:

Pattern: just my basic sock -72 sts, short-row heel. 

Yarn: Ladybug Fiber Company 400yards/100g sock yarn. This is the softest, squishiest sock yarn you can imagine! Knitting it was pure joy -it’s a very round 2-ply, a blend of 80% merino and 20% nylon. I imagine it would also be perfect for cables (this self-striping version of course is best in stockinette). 

The colourway is named “Johnny Jump Up” (google tells me it’s a flower) but I think of these as my Cupcake Socks. The colours make me think of sprinkles and frosting and all things sweet. And of course yarn this nice feels like a treat.

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Shawl Madness

As usual, I have started my summer by knitting shawls.

Yarn: Blue Moon Fiber Arts, Socks That Rock Lightweight, colourway “The New Colour of Love”, two skeins

Pattern: well, mine, sort-of.

Somewhere around March or April I started dreaming of knitting a larger shawl. This green yarn was one of the few lightweight yarns I had more than one skein of, and also seemed suitably spring-y and cheerful. I started a simple stockinette triangle, thinking that I would figure out a lace edging when I got there.

I knit about 50% of the shawl while watching all of the LotR movies and listening to The Hobbit on audiobook. (Despite numerous attempts, I never finished reading LotR but thought that Hobbit might be more approachable. Being able to knit while I listened certainly helped, but still I didn’t exactly fall in love.) Once I was finished with all of the movies and the book, it was rather depressing to realise that I was only halfway through the shawl. (This happens e-v-e-r-y t-i-m-e. Will I ever learn that I get bored knitting shawls?!)

I slowly slogged through the rest of the project. I did get somewhat excited when I found the lace pattern -it’s a modified version of a lace edging featured in the spring issue of Knitscene. In the end I knit the last 25% of the shawl in 24 hours (something which I would not recommend for anyone -my hands hurt a lot afterwards).

I do really like the finished object, though. Which is my only explanation for my current project…

Yes, it’s another shawl. My excuses are that 1.) it’s Wollmeise 2.) This one has a purpose -I’m hoping to wear it to an event next Tuesday. I have been tracking my progress with the Shawl Porgress Calculator from rose-kim.com. 

Winner & Vacation

It’s June, and that means two things:

1. Vacation time!

2. Giveaway winner!

Let’s start with no. 2. My last post got 5 comments (the 6th being from me). I used the random number generator and got the number …4! The fourth comment was from siperoinen, congrats! If you are on Ravelry, please send me a message there with your mailing address (my username -big surprise- is vi0let). Otherwise you can email me at vi0letin @ yahoo.com.

In other news, I did indeed turn in my thesis yesterday. I now feel like I were 14 again, giddy with the freedom of summer at the end of a school year.

At the same time, I have been plagued by nostalgia for the most ordinary things. The ladies’ toilets at the university main building (how I have despaired at the writings on the walls over the years)! The smell of wood, dust and coffee in lecture halls; my favourite teacher’s story about what’s wrong with Heroes (repeated ad nauseam); the vegan banana cake at the cafeteria…

I will, of course, have to make corrections to my thesis, but not until my advisor has had time to read it. For now, I’m free as a bird.

I have very exciting things coming up in June (partly planned as a carrot for finishing my thesis) and some are knitting-related, so stay tuned. I have also some projects to blog about, but I think I will save them for next time. Have a nice weekend everyone!

 

Easy Peasy Recipe

I didn’t manage to post this in June, but here goes anyway. A green recipe for PS!

Easy-peasy pea & sage sauce with rice

two spring onions

one 200g bag of frozen peas

2,5dl oat cream (Oatly)

Potato starch

1tsp sage

black pepper, salt

 

Sauté the onions in a pan for a few minutes, then add the peas and cream. When the cream is just about to boil, add the potato starch and lower the heat. (This part is easier with Maizena, but we didn’t have any.) Add the spices. Serve with rice.

Now it’s on to BLUE July. With cooking, that might be a bit of a challenge 😉

 

The beginning of the lace season

I finished my green lace scarf, with plenty of time to block it and take photographs before the end of June. Yay!

Some specs:

Yarn: Vintage DK-weight sock yarn. Dyed by Ilu (shop here), sold by Kirjava Kerä.

Pattern: Free, in Finnish (but with a chart). Get it from Ravelry or via the designer’s blog.

Notes: I think I added more repeats to make the scarf wider. Also used thicker yarn. I stopped knitting when the scarf was 149cm long and after blocking it measured 180cm. 

And what did I do after finishing a lace project that had been on the needles for more than a year? Start another one!

Our camera still doesn’t play well with turquoise.

 

I go through a lace knitting phase pretty much every year at summer time, so this isn’t anything new.

Green June, the WIP edition

That hat knitting craze I was having? It might be over.

This was supposed to be my green hat for june.

 

After suffering a minor setback on the hat knitting front (let’s just say that the mere words “pick up and knit” make me want to scream), I turned to my UFO pile. Although all this hat knitting might have made it seem like I only had one project on the needles, I actually have plenty. More than enough, in fact. So many that I have one separate little basket that has all my (semi-)active UFOs; the others are tucked away in various places.

So what exactly do I have in my UFO basket?

If this thing looks familiar, it might be because this project is actually on my Ravelry projects page. It’s a rectangular lace scarf that I started *gasp* in April 2010. So over a year ago. I knit on it a bit last summer, then put it away for months. During the Stash and Burn Slong Along I attempted to finish it “by the end of the year”, as is written on my project page. Obviously that didn’t happen. My excuse is being forced to take a hiatus due to hand pain.

Despite the fact that I often mention green as one of my favourite colours, I actually do not have that much green yarn, and even less green UFOs. This scarf seemed like the only plausible option of finishing something green for project spectrum, which is why I picked it up again last week. And it actually seems quite possible that I will finish the thing! The pattern is an easy, 8-row repeat, so I have been able to knit it pretty much everywhere. And now that the end is actually in sight, it’s even pretty fun. But if I ever want to cast on another rectangular lace scarf, someone please remind me that they usually take me more than a year to complete.

Item no 2 is a sock out of Kollage Luscious. The pattern is called “Spring Cable”, and actually one that I have knit before. It was the 2nd pair of socks I ever finished, knit out of Araucania Ranco in a colour similar to this one. I knit them when I was just moving together with my boyfriend and called them my house socks. Last summer we had to live at my parents’ house because our home was being renovated, and my mother started using the socks. Back at our own home, when I got this yarn, I was struck by the similarity in colour between this skein and the Ranco one. I couldn’t get rid of the idea of knitting the same pattern again. The fact that Fixation is a cotton-nylon mix made it even more appealing; I became vegan last February, and a new pair of house socks out of vegan yarn seemed appropriate. For the most part I am still using stash (wool) yarn, but slightly thicker cotton socks might be just the thing for Finnish summer.

Oh and I am totally counting turquoise as green and blue for PS. The socks won’t probably get finished until (blue) July, though, as I’ve only just gotten past the heel on the first sock.

Green June, week 2

This week my main contribution to Project Spectrum was a meal. A little over a week ago I ate at a Nepalese restaurant, and as the dish was delicious and seemed simple enough, I decided to try the same at home.

Alu saag; Potatoes in spinach-ginger sauce

I didn’t write down the recipe, but the dish is really very easy to prepare. We used 300 grams of frozen spinach, small potatoes, some soy cream and a piece of fresh ginger plus the spices that I thought appropriate, like cumin and coriander.

Knitting-wise, I almost exclusively worked on one project, and finished it yesterday.

The pattern (“Kesävoi”) is from a Finnish book (Neulekirja by Ilona Korhonen and Jenni Österman). The yarn is Regia Bamboo Color that I bought ages ago. So yay for stash reduction! Although the hat did only take one 50g skein of yarn :p