baby yoke

here is my little knitting muse in the same sweater as mum. knitting for her makes me happy, and looking at her in her knittings even more. it is a little difficult to see the sweater in it. she is a very active little one.

and my job problems has been solved. got a new job friday as a teacher for children (english) and i have a good feeling about the new place. but it is not very easy to leave a place where i have been happy to work for more than twelve years. so many friends and so much history.

knit on with confidence.....

oh it has been quite a week. my workplace is slowly but surely closing down due to the danish immigration policy and i have been busy writing applications for new jobs. went to one job interview today and i am going to another tomorrow. hopefully everything will be solved by the week after next week when my holiday starts with a gig with rufus wainwright.

but this is a knitting blog. and there has been knitting (as elizabeth's motto goes: knit on with confidence through all crises) and there will be more knitting. i am apparently a serial knitter so i have finished the last fair isle yoke in a trio of fair isle yokes for grandmother, daughter, granddaughter. and this is by far the cutest. i will have alba modelling it very soon and post pics. i got the yoke decreases a little wrong so i made up my own ( no blind follower am i) and the end result looks good. i made the sleeves as elizabeth says: rib like mad and increase severely to 40 % of K. i like a blousy sleeve for a little person. it looks really cute. the sleeves are long but i guess that the arms are growing faster than the cheeks at this age when the little girl starts to walk and such. and she is a very active little girl who does things she is not supposed to do yet, just like the bumblebee.

and now i think i will start a series of saddle shoulder arans.... although i made a slip stitch pattern swatch yesterday and i love the effect and may do further experiments.

a visit to the lys

well i couldn't help myself could i? the owner of a whole cupboard full of wool. i had to pass my lys today and before i knew i started commenting and giving advice to all the knitters there. am i awful..... right now, after years of education my only wish is to have my own wool shop. well maybe with a music department as well. i go to three kinds of shops. clothes shops, music shops and wool shops. in the first kind there are a lot of women and some men who look really tired. boyfriends and spouses of women trying endless amounts of clothes and asking for opinions from men who really couldn't care any less, mostly.
in the second kind of shops there are almost only men beavering cds. and your occasioanal 19 year old pierced goth girl buying nick cave's nocturama. and me of course buying the same. and in the yarn shops there are only women and sometimes a male sales clerk for some reason. so if my dream came true it could be the ideal place for men and women to meet. singles that is. and maybe both would get a new hobby as a bonus..
reality is that is have to do more language testing tomorrow. it allows me to knit since i only have to watch that the students don't cheat. that is nice for me who would really like to start and finish the following garments in the nearest future:

adrian's bonnet
purly victorious' bonnet
meg's saddle shoulder aran (one for me and one for my 25 year old nephew who is desperate for one)
norah gaughan's tweedy cardi
an adult tomten
2-3 tomter for children

it is probably good that the summerholiday is getting nearer every day. i cannot wait.

fair isle for the mother

here is my sister wearing her new fair isle sweater and the sweater in a flowerbed and my niece trying on her mother's sweater. it was great fun to work with totally different colours and amazing what colours can do. i used the same baby pink in both sweaters for instance and in the aubergine it is very muted whereas the same amount of pink is very prominent in the caffe latte coloured. i made this one a bit shorter than the last one since my sister is a skirt girl exclusively (like me) and that call for shorter or very long sweaters i think. i have a hybrid of the two on the needles for my niece's baby girl. i don't know how they have ended up in this mother/daughter wearing matching sweaters situation but they have made a promise to each other that they will new go anywhere together in the same sweaters. the baby one was the first i had in mind to knit. so that is my decision. i hope this little lovely girl will not grow up to detest hand knits. i have a lot of not very pleasant memories of yoke cardis with pewter buttons. actually i have seen the exact same button in schoolhouse press' catalogue. or handknit socks in cotton. oh dear.

knitting in public

well yesterday was the official day, but i don't know anyone to participate with as all the people i know love things i knit for them but don't love to knit themselves. and i do find the whole concept so funny (pecualiar). like a day for knitters to get out of the closet. like there would be something offending with knitting in public. i often knit on the bus, or in the park in the summertime. it is nice to walk to the park for the purpose of getting some knitting done. but when i read international blogs i envy those who knit in central park with a lot of much more eloquent knitters than i could ever find here, i tell myself in my wisdom ( and i am sure it is very untrue).

well i did even knit in public yesterday. and what happened? there was a big speedway competition going on at the stadium close to where i live so i was approached by several tipsy swedish speedway fans who just wanted to know if i could knit something for them since i knit at such amazing speed according to them. and they should know. well one even asked for a mössa which i found quite cute due to my penchant for everything elizabeth zimmermann.

and there has been knitting going on here. the second fair isle is finished and i am much more satisfied with the way the colours mix and match than i had expected. it is a boring knit except for the hems and the yoke and the calculation but it is also fast even when you work on smallish needles. total knitting time is about 2 weeks.

and i have started a new tomten for my little tomte. the colour is not very babyish but we don't like babyish colours much... for tomtens as least.

and there has been shopping. i have bought a few new books. alice starmore's book about men's sweaters from the scottish isles. some of the sweaters are completely from a time long gone (i.e. the fit) but there are some very good ideas to get for patterns. i definitely must cave in and buy barbara walker. it is ridiculous that i spend so much money on much less interesting books instead of paying that damn tax that may and may not be put on top of the price.

watch me.

oh yes and then 20 skeins of yorkshire tweed chunky. my niece has been begging me for an adult tomten. i was persuaded to do it because she said it was her 30th birthday which she also said when she asked for the fair isle. but it actually was last year. but who cares about numbers. as long as she doesn't turn 29 for a freaking amount of years.....

tomtenspirations

i am not the kind of blogger i like myself. i like bloggers who blog at least twice a week. but it ain't me. but today i received new wool in the mail. actually it is old wool since it is rowanspun aran and dk which has been discontinued for a long time. personally i find it a great mistake of rowan. both wools are so lovely to work with.

the green aran is in the colourway hardy and it is funky and spunky. the grey is dk and the colourway mist.

today i have swatched for a tomten with bobbles and i-cord. i tried out 3 sizes of bobbles which i suppose will all be included in the final garment. i tried two kinds of button-holes i.e. the loop i-cord button-hole and the hidden button-hole. i think the latter will be my choice. the sweater is for alba who has two already which she will have grown out of by winter. this will make her look maybe more like an irish leprechaurn than a tomte or a nisse as we say in danish. and that is not a bad thing in my book.

so eager as i am to start this modified tomten i better get back to tackling her grandmother's fair isle that i am sooooo much looking forward to finish.....

tomten rocks

when the cute alba was in the park yesterday with mummy she was a adressed by a group of american tourists who were dying to know where in copenhagen to buy the lovely little tweedy baby jacket she was wearing (rowanspun dk). my niece told them that it was her aunt who had knitted it for the baby and they replied that this aunt should knit a lot of them and become rich :-)) my poor niece got so confused that she couldn't get herself together and tell that it was actually an american pattern. i am happy that people think i can get rich and i wish tomten was my intention. i have ordered wool for another one which she can wear next winter. green rowanspun aran at cucumberpatch.co.uk. i think i will make it with toggles and a few bobbles.

the aubergine fair isle is proceeding fast without any problems apart from being a rather boring knit until the colourwork starts. and after that i shall seek new challenges. that i am damn sure about now. i can hardly wait and have five days off from work so i suppose the fun will start pretty soon. hooray.