Christmas mitten 2016 - now available in English

Julevotten 2016 was a mystery knit along in Norwegian last December.

The pattern is now available in English too. 

Saco Otavalo

Saco: Jumper in Ecuatorian Spanish
Otavalo: Ecuatorian town with a well known craft market
Saco Otavalo: Jumper pattern by torirot design inspired by the colourful patterns seen at the Otavalo market

Pattern is now available in a Ravelry store near you! The pattern is at the moment only in English.

Mystery solved

It has been such a pleasure to host this year's July Mitten Mystery with the lovely members of the I make mittens group on Ravelry!

Aínigma mittens - 145 projects on Ravelry now.

34 finished pairs in the finished objects thread.

That's where the prize drawing will be done. 

You have two more days to finish, 

prizes will be drawn on August 1st.

Here's my black and white experiment. 

It's a good way to check for contrast, 

but as you can see, it's not always right. 

You see the yellow quite well with the white, 

the b/w photo could have deceived you. 

Mitten news

I am teaching two mitten classes at Shetland Wool Week this year. 

Knitting the thumb gusset (places avaiable)  

and Design your own mitten (sold out)

In July, there will be a Mystery Mitten Knitalong on Ravelry, in the "I make mittens" group. I have designed the mysterious pattern, and it is test knitted as we speek. Stay tuned for more information!

Mystery revealed - welcome April

Last clue for the mystery KAL was up some days ago, and finished objects are popping up in the FO thread on Ravelry. Liv has blogged about her beautiful blue shawl, and "Lysstreif" has had fun with her green, stripy yarn. It's so fun to see the different colours and yarns - and it looks like people have enjoyed the KAL. I definitely have. I even finished my shawl!

My orange Wollmeise March shawl and my "Little red shawl in the forest", super soft in a gorgeous red. 

The pattern is now available as an ordinary pattern. 

Lily in Lilyhammer

I fell in love with this cute little top Lily, when Andrea in Fruitiknitting reviewed the Springtime collection by Marie Wallin. I notice that I often fall for her patterns, but I have not knitted any of them before. The Orkney cardigan is beautiful, and I even have the pattern, but there it stops: The cardigan is all over colourwork, worked flat (front left and right, back, sleeves) and then seamed. I just can't get why anybody would do that. I also find it hard to knit from the black and white charts she uses, with symbols for each colour where it's hard to see the overall pattern in all the different symbols. 

So when I decided to make this top, which the pattern says to work in pieces, front, back, sleeves, there had to be adaptations. I started in August, to join the fair isle garment knitalong with the Fruityknitting podcast. I didn't finish in time, terrible non-monogamous knitter that I am. 

I changed it from worked flat, to worked in the round. I did a false seam working the two colours together in the side. My row gauge was off, so I had to to more pattern repeats. That gave me another row of roses on the chest, which I'm very happy about. I also wanted the sleeve pattern to match the body, so I did that, and joined the sleeves as I went, with a false seam faking set-in-sleeves. I did steeks for the back and front neck openings. All because I don't like stranded purling. In the end I had to do 64 sts of colourwork purling on the shoulders - I can live with that. 

I really like the crochet neck edging, will use that again. 

The yarn is a thin wool, Holst Garn Supersoft, Karmin Supersoft, Malsen og Mor Shetland soft and Magasin Duett Supersoft - which I believe all come from the same mill and is essentially the same yarn. It is super soft when washed and I wear it happily next to my skin, as you can see.

Texture too!

I do a lot more stranded colourwork than textured knitting.

But for the mystery shawl it's all about texture. Today's clue encourages participants to come up with their own ideas.

In Clue #7 I did a mistake - I was supposed to do rows of eyelets, with 3 rows of knit in between, as in the top photo. Instead I workede eylets on every right side row. In this pattern it doesn't matter at all. Someone mentioned they liked the wrong side of the eyelet pattern better - I'm inclined to agree. Anyway - texture is a lot of fun too!

Risky business

Well, I did warn people that a mystery knitalong, where the pattern was not tested, nor written, was risky. And in clue 4 we did get some weird shapes. Luckily, someone noted it quickly and messaged me, and I was able to fix the error before everybody got weird looking shawls. And noone is complaining, just having fun, it seems. 

It was these elongated stitches (and my bad explanation) that complicated thins yesterday. But my Wollmeise colourway is lovely, isn't it?

And if you're going to Edinburgh, for EYF17 - say hello to Edinburgh for me, and have a lot of fun!

Mystery in March

From now on, you will find some posts in English and some in Norwegian - and my old blog in English will not be updated.

The first post in English is a mysterious one:
At Oslo Strikkefestival, I fell in love with a beautiful skein of red, fingering yarn from a French dyer - Les laines de l'écureuil, or Squirrel's yarn. I bought it and cast on immediately - for a scarf, or shawlette, that I made up as I went. I designed it so that could use every inch of the beautiful yarn. And since I was quite happy with process, and the result, I have decided to have some more fun with it:

I offer it as a free pattern in March - using the code MysteryinMarch - you get it free on Ravelry. It will be updated every now and then thoughout Marrc 2017.

Warning!
You enter this mystery at your own risk!
The pattern has not been test knitted, in fact, it is, at this moment, not even written....

But the design is quite simple, so I hope and believe this will work out by the end of March.
It's actually my 100th pattern on Ravelry - all the more reason to celebrate with a mystery.

So if you have a beautiful skein of fingering yarn, appr. 400 m, feel free to join.
Gauge and yardage is not crucial, you just cast off when you run out of yarn. My gauge is 20 sts in garter stitch in 10 cm, I used needles 2.5 mm, you might want to choose a larger needle, as knit quite loosely in garter stitch (ok, so there I revealed that there is some garter stitch involved in this pattern... but at this moment, I say no more).