Autumn Joy

August 17, 2019 stgeorgeknits4 Comments

A little while ago I bought a 150g ball of yarn that was a nice colour and I thought it would make a nice, little scarf or shawl. Now I’ve knitted one.

I used a Drop Design pattern called ‘Autumn Joy‘. I needed a pattern for a shawl that could be finished anytime when the yarn runs out. Like I said, I only had 150g (390m) and I used 6mm needle. The shawl is about 122cm x 52cm in size. It’s not very big but it’s big enough. The yarn is 100% acrylic and it’s very soft – which is nice since it’ll be round my neck.

This was a nice and quick ‘stretching muscles’ kind of knit in between other knits.

Happy knitting!

And it suddenly turned blue

June 15, 2019 stgeorgeknits6 Comments

Just a quick little scarf, and look! no snow in sight!

This is a stash busting scarf. I have no idea what the yarn is. It’s some bouclé yarn and I suspect made mostly of man-made fibers. It’s soft and feels nice. I had 75g of it in a fairly large and loose ball and it seemed to be all green. When I started knitting, I was surprised when it suddenly turned blue. And then I was even more surprised when the blue turned into purple. Shame the yarn ran out then and I only got just a hint of purple.

This was a quick little job and I used an odd ball of yarn to the last inch of it. Not bad.

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Scarf · Shawl

Every cloud has a snowy lining

June 5, 2019 stgeorgeknits4 Comments

I looked through some pictures and found shawl pictures taken back in February. I’m terrible at forgetting to work through stuff. Still, it’s nice to look at this snowy picture now as we are expecting temperatures of almost 30 °C by the end of the week. By then it would be nice to dive into this snow – it was up to the thighs.

Anyway, this shawl is a super soft garter stitch shawl – a kind of shallow and long triangle. The yarn is Pilvi (translates as ‘Cloud’) by Finnish Novita and it’s as soft and fluffy as a little kitten. I also like the understated gray colour. It goes with anything.

Here’s the back view. The highest point is about 31 cm / 12″ and the length is about 174 cm / 68.5″. I won’t be needing this shawl this week but it’s always good to have warm gear handy. Just couple of days ago I wore a hat and mittens for a walk. It’s been freezing. So, it’s a bit of a roller coaster with the weather at the moment.

My blog attendance has also been a bit of a roller coaster recently but I’m hoping that things will get back to normal now.

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Scarf · Shawl

Rio of the Arctic

April 13, 2019April 13, 2019 stgeorgeknits5 Comments

I always have a problem photographing scarves and shawls. If they are stretched out to their full size, they are quite small in the picture, but if they’re just draped somewhere, you can’t see the shape of them.

I recently finished a shawl and had just that problem. I took it with me on a snowshoe hike in the hope that I would find a cool place to take the photos. Plus I like multitasking.

The pattern is ‘Rio‘ by Drops Design and it’s the same as this shawl. I had a little bit less than 200g of super-duper soft Teetee Primavera, a merino wool and silk mix. I didn’t even think about the fact that this yarn would not be enough. I just started to knit. I cast on a little bit less stitches than in the pattern. When I was almost done, it became clear that I did not have enough yarn. Because this shawl is knitted until you run out of stitches, it can’t just be ended where you run out of yarn.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll get another ball or two. Hah, little did I know but this yarn had been discontinued. All I could find online were some really dark colours. No thanks. I had no option but to start over, with even less stitches. I cast on another 10 stitches less. I thought that would leave me with plenty of yarn. Towards the end, I started to drip cold sweat and you know what? I finished the shawl with 15cm of yarn spare. It’s like I planned it (which, of course, I did!).

The striping is done completely randomly without any planning. I just winged it. The shawl measures about 185 x 32 cm. I like it being so long but shallow.

This building is by a lake but I’m not sure what it is. Someone’s little hideaway? A shed? It’s by a lake and there are no roads leading to it. During snow-less time it’s difficult to get to it because the lake is on one side and swampy forest on the other. My guess is that it’s someone’s fishing cottage and they arrive by boat. There are other buildings too, one of which is probably a sauna. Finns always have a sauna. Whatever this building is, it had some big nails on the wall in almost perfect places for my shawl. I like the weathered look of the wood, too.

Perhaps you’d like to see a few more pictures from the snowshoe hike. This place is walking distance from my house. I tend to spend more time on this lake when it’s frozen than I do when it isn’t. It’s easier to walk on it in winter than around it in the summer.

This cute green building must be the loo. I could imagine this loo looking even prettier in the summer when it’s the same colour as all the leaves on these birches.

This is an always unfrozen bit of the lake, and it’s where a river starts. When it’s colder, it looks brilliant with steam and the water edges are full of ‘ice flowers’.

And this is looking the other way from the same spot. And yes, it’s the said river. There are two ramshackle bridges leading to nowhere. They are quite scary because you really don’t want to fall into the river in winter. Or even in the summer, come to think of it.

It’s the time of year we call spring-winter. It’s not properly winter anymore, but it’s not spring either. It’s totally on its way though.

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Shawl

Lace Shawl

March 23, 2019 stgeorgeknits3 Comments

In between other things, I made a little lace shawl.

I had some acrylic and viscose blend yarn I couldn’t find a use for, and thought a small scarf/shawl would work with it. It’s a very subtle light green, light grey and off-white yarn.

I found an interesting, yet easy, pattern by Novita. I don’t know if you people, who knit scarves and shawls all the time, are familiar with this kind of construction: on one end, every second row, two and three stitches on alternate times, are left on the needles. The stitches left for knitting reduce all the time, and once they are all done, the stitches that were left on the needle are knitted for 4 rows. This makes the triangle’s longest garter stitch edge. This is probably the world’s worst explanation for it. I guess the right way to describe it would be short rows. Anyway, I thought it was a nifty way to knit a shawl.

Here it is, on my famous prop tree, surrounded by lots of snow. I think, however, that this shawl would be a nice spring or summer shawl. That pesky snow just keeps on coming. We now have over a meter of it, and more and more keeps coming. This winter started with less snow than usual, but it’s making up for it now.

It might sound like I’m complaining but I’m not really. I mean, I like snow and winter – it would be stupid if I didn’t, because I moved up here voluntarily. The trouble is that often snow keeps coming all the time, so that all you end up doing is ploughing. I’m spending all the spare time I have and all the spare time I haven’t got, on ploughing. And that means that I can listen to audio books! Yay! It makes you almost forget you are ploughing. I’ve just started a new book: A Bakeshop Mysteries book 1: Meet Your Baker, by Ellie Alexandra. It’s very entertaining! I recommend this book, especially if you’re into cooking and baking. They tell about the yummy stuff they make in the bakery, and it’s all mouth-watering. You might want to take notes! The titles of the books in this series tickle me: A Batter of Life and Death, On Thin Icing, Caught Bread Handed and Fudge and Jury, just to mention a few.

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Scarf · Shawl

Fab shawl

March 3, 2019 stgeorgeknits11 Comments

I bought some Patons Fab yarn some years ago during my travels in Britain. I bought it because it was so colourful and I had a plan for it, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I knitted a shawl with it instead.

I used the Rio pattern by Drops Design, which is a nice, not-quite-symmetrical shawl. I used a thicker yarn than that in the pattern, so I cast on less stitches (131 instead of 165 – just an arbitrary number that felt right). My shawl is still bigger (206 x 36 cm instead of 180 x 30 cm).

The pattern is very nice. The stitches are increased on one end every other row and decreased on the opposite end every row. So the stitches go down by one every second row and you carry on until you run out of stitches. It’s all garter stitch. Perfect no-brains-required knit.

Because the shawl is relatively big, it’s difficult to take a photograph to show the shape of it properly. I pinned it to a fallen down tree with thumb tacks! So you can see that the highest point of the triangle is not in the middle and the shawl is nicely kind of skewiiff.

And just a detail picture because I like the bright colours against the clean, white snow. The yarn Fab is 100% acrylic. I can’t quickly come up with any benefits that acrylic yarn has but at least it feels soft around the neck. Of course, I think the colour is just fab.

These outdoor pictures were taken on a swamp, just behind our house. My plan was “just to nip out and take the pics”, so I didn’t bother with snowshoes. It would have been hard work even with the snowshoes on but without them, I was up to my thighs in snow. The distance of just 20m feels almost like a marathon. In the middle of the winter you always appreciate how simple and easy it is to move around and to photograph your knitting when there is no snow on the ground. Couple of more months to go!

Happy knitting!