2 heads in a duffel bag

September 20, 2019 stgeorgeknits8 Comments

Sometimes the odd balls of yarn start to make me neurotic and I simply have to drop everything else and use up the yarn before it drives me crazy.

This 100% wool yarn was perfect for a slouchy hat.

Brown is not really my colour so I’m thinking that maybe this is part of my Christmas offering to someone. This would mean that I’ve actually started my Christmas present making. Yay me!

I had some more of the yarn left after the said hat, but not enough for another hat. So I added a stripe of another yarn – a dark grey-ish colour, which kind of goes. I knitted this one top-down so that I could use all of the yarn. I added a pompom with the dark grey-ish colour, just to make it look like it was all planned this way.

I love hats and I wear them all the time – almost all year round. But still, this second hat might end up as a Christmas present, too. We’ll see. But to think of having two presents ready and September isn’t even finished yet. I’m on fire!

This yarn is all gone now. I can breathe again. But the dark grey-ish yarn might start to call me soon because there is some of it left. This is a never-ending circle.

By the way, this is the first time I carried a polystyrene head into the woods. It got a nice 7 km walk.

Happy knitting!

Good old 80’s

July 7, 2019 stgeorgeknits9 Comments

I have lots of yarn but I keep knitting old, unravelled jumper yarns. What’s wrong with me? I don’t know. I just hate wasting stuff and having a jumper in the wardrobe that never gets worn seems like waste to me.

I knitted a jumper in the mid-80’s. I liked it and wore it quite a bit for some time. After that I’ve not worn it at all. It was quite big, like jumper were in the 80’s and these days it wouldn’t fit inside a jacket or coat, and that makes it unusable, as far as I’m concerned.

So, I unravelled the jumper and knitted a smaller, simple, no-nonsense top-down jumper. Now it fits inside a coat. I don’t know anything about this yarn. It’s some kind of man-made fiber, possible mostly, if not entirely. In the 80’s I liked the colour. I liked those little colourful blobs. I still do. The yarn is quite thick and it only took about a week to knit this.

Back in the 80’s I remember thinking that this jumper is really warm because it’s so thick. Of course, it’s not that warm at all; I know that now. I plan to use it as an in-between seasons jumpers.

This scarf shows how much smaller the new jumper is compared to the old one. This is the leftover yarn from the jumper. The scarf is all garter stitch and I knitted until all the yarn was used. The scarf is about 160 x 32 cm so it’s a reasonable size.

None of this is helping me reduce my yarn stash but at least I didn’t waste much time on these AND at least now in my wardrobe there is a jumper I can use, rather than a jumper that just takes up space. The scarf is a bonus. WIN-WIN, methinks.

Happy knitting!

Jumper · Knitting

Winter blues

March 16, 2019 stgeorgeknits4 Comments

Another jumper finished!

This is a very quick top-down jumper that knitted up in a week. The pattern is from a book called Neuleita, by Saara Toikka. It’s very simple; there is no funny business and that’s the way I like very thick jumpers. The main thing to me is that the (thick) jumper is warm and fits under a coat well.

The yarn is Viking Naturgarn. I really like the colour. When I was a kid, my favourite colour was blue. Then I adopted a black period, and although I wasn’t a goth or anything, I did wear a lot of black. I remember thinking those days that blue was so boring. Now I’ve gone back to wearing colours and liking blue again. Blue and lilac. And lots of other colours.

Happy knitting!

Jumper · Knitting · Stash busting

Tom, Dick and Harry

March 14, 2019 stgeorgeknits4 Comments

There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose!

And not just one moose but three! They have been totally naked until now. I promised them jumpers and although it might take a while, I usually do keep my promises and hey presto! We have 3 tiny jumpers. They are all top-down jumpers and all of them slightly different.

These moose, if you were wondering, are small liqueur bottles. They used to contain Swedish lingonberry liqueur, which is aptly named ‘Elch Blut’, ie. ‘Moose Blood’.

Is it just me or does anyone else think of Northern Exposure when you see a moose? With me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a real moose or a novelty liqueur bottle moose, my mind goes straight to Cicely. I’m looking forward to the new series. I hope they go ahead with it. Do you remember the piano catapulted across the skies? That was brilliant!

Happy knitting!

Hats · Knitting

Forever green

February 9, 2019 stgeorgeknitsLeave a comment

Yet another hat! I had to knit this hat because I found a small ball of this green yarn and simply had to get rid of it.

The yarn is Sirdar Country Style for Kids. I bought the whole packet (a kilo I guess) a long time ago. It was a good offer and I was a student at the time – say no more. Over the years I’ve been knitting and knitting and this never-ending yarn just – well, never ends. Until now.

I’ve knitted a cardigan, a bolero, mittens, fingerless gloves, a scarf and now a hat with this yarn. Maybe something else too. The yarn is 45% acrylic, 40% nylon and 15% wool. It’s clearly not a very warm yarn but it’s easy to care for. Just throw the knit in the washer and it comes out the same as you threw it in, only cleaner.

This hat was knit with double yarn, and top-down. I used 3½mm needles because I wanted the fabric to be dense. I suppose I could have knitted some interest into it but I simply wanted to see the end of this yarn, so speed was of the essence. I get a bit neurotic when I find yarn that I thought was already gone, or when I find a little bit of yarn that would just be enough for some small and quick knit. It burns a hole in my yarn stash until it’s gone. This hat was knit in one evening. Phew.

I once again proved that even if I have a big yarn stash and some yarn has been sitting there for years, even decades, eventually it all gets knitted.

Happy knitting!

Jumper · Knitting

The dress that never was

January 25, 2019 stgeorgeknits2 Comments

Yay, I finished a lacy jumper!

The pattern was actually for a dress but I made it a jumper instead. I’m not much of a dress wearer and thought that a jumper would get much more use. For once, the pattern is also available in English. The yarn is Novita’s Venla, which is a fingering weight yarn and it’s a blend of 75% wool and 25% polyamide.

Because I made this a jumper, I added some decreases and increases to the waist (which weren’t there for the dress). I just winged it. I made it quite long and it’s on the limit of being a tunic. It’s a top-down pattern and the lace yoke is very easy. The whole jumper knitted up very quickly, despite the thin yarn.

The front and back are the same. I wanted to mark the front somehow, and attached a wooden button to the hem. You can just see it on the bottom right. It says Handmade on it. I don’t know if people are usually bothered about which way they wear a jumper that’s the same both ways, but I always like to know that I wear it the same way every time. Hence the button. All in all, I’m quite pleased with this jumper. I had my doubts many times along the way, but it pulled through.

Happy knitting!

Hats · Knitting

Top-down hat

January 6, 2019 stgeorgeknits6 Comments

Yet another hat. I like knitting hats in between other (bigger) things. I like how they can be finished in an evening.

I had one 50g (100m) ball of this yarn, Novita Puro, which is a soft, variegated 100% wool yarn. I knitted the hat top-down so that I can use every last inch of the yarn – which I did. The tiny orange pom pom is some other yarn and I had made it sometime earlier. It seemed to match well.

I like blues, purples and oranges. And this yarn has them all with a little green thrown in for good measure.

Happy knitting!