The Nordlándda Collection: Fauske and Rosta

Above photos copyright 2015 The Fibre Co. & Tommy Martin

Today I want to talk about two pieces from the Nordlándda Collection that share a common edging - the wonderful, occasionally fiddley, applied i-cord edge. Rosta is one of the simpler pieces in the collection, with a wide panel of stockinette bordered by two loose cables, while Fauske is one of the more complex, with an intricate cable border and an expanding and contracting panel of a smaller, very traditional cable motif, but both use an applied i-cord to generate a tidy edging that won't roll or curl when you're finished.

There are a couple of tricks for getting a nice i-cord edge that lies flat. First off, for both of these pieces, the i-cord is made by slipping the last three stitches of every row. On the right side rows, the last three stitches are slipped purlwise with the yarn in back, and on the wrong side rows, the stitches are slipped purlwise with the yarn in front. In both cases, you want the yarn to be on the right side of the fabric for working the start of the next row.

The other tip is to keep the i-cord stitches a little bit loose as you are knitting, Because the i-cord is only worked every other row on each edge, if you work those stitches tightly, the i-cord will be shorter then the rest of the piece, and your finished item won't lie flat when it's blocked. Be careful to leave a little extra slack in those three edge stitches, and you should end up with a beautiful finished edge.

Please come join us in the A Yarn Story #AYSWInterCablesKAL on Ravelry - Carmen has some gorgeous prizes lined up, and we'd love to see your take on the Nordlándda Collection!

Note: If you are in Europe and would like to purchase one of the patterns from the collection without paying VAT, please go to the Nordlándda page and be sure to include your Ravelry ID (if you have one) when you check out. The pattern will be emailed to you and put into your Ravelry library. Thank you!

Nordlándda

Today is the launch of my new collection of accessoried, Nordlándda, from The FIbre Company. I'm going to be blogging about each of the pieces from the collection over the next few weeks, but I wanted to show them all to you as a whole.

By the time this post goes live, the patterns will all be available on Ravelry. I'll get them up shortly over here. In the meantime, I hope you like them! If you're interested, A Yarn Story is kicking off their #AYSWInterCablesKAL with this collection today, so come on over and join in!

ETA: the patterns are now up on the website, so if you'd like to purchase them without paying VAT, head over here! If you include your Ravelry ID with your order, I will gift you a pattern for your library in addition to email you the pdf. Thanks!

Trifecta

If nothing else, this blog has been good at motivating me to finish things. I guess the looming deadline coming up in a few weeks also has something to do with that, but I'll give the blog credit. I've actually been doing some finishing in the last week or so, my absolute least favorite thing about knitting. Oh, I like having things done and getting to wear them, but seaming and blocking and weaving in ends is pretty mind-numbing as far as I'm concerned. So I tend to procrastinate until I have an entire cupboard full of things that are "finished", i.e. I've finished knitting them, but not "finished", as in I could give them away to their intended recipiants because they are, in fact, really done. So without further ado, I give you the trifecta:

1) Devil's Christmas sweater, since she's going to be up in the great white north for the holidays

Pattern: Child's Pinwheel Sweater by Shelly Mackie at Elann

Yarn: Nature Spun Worsted from stash, less then one ball each of Brick Road, Blueberry and Touche Teal (who comes up with these names?)

Needles: US 8/5 mm

Start/finish: 9/19-11/11/07, but the majority of the sweater was done in about a week and a half

Comments/mods: knit pretty much as written, except that I used a size 8 for the body instead of a size 9 in order to get gauge. The loopy edgy was interminable, but looks really cute, so I'm glad I did it. I made the sleeves a bit shorter then called for, because I was afraid I would run out of yarn. Instead of ribbing at the cuffs, I used garter stitch to mimic the edge of the jacket. A fun pattern - I'm tempted to make one for myself, but I suspect it would look really silly on me...

2) Hemlock Ring (not shown in its entirety since it is going to be a C%$^&$**^& present for someone)

Pattern: Hemlock Ring from brooklyntweed

Yarn: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, 5 skeins plus about 15 yards

Needles: US 10 (I think)

Start/finish: 9/12-11/11/07 (finished knitting 9/19)

Comments: Very fast to knit, I love knitting lace in worsted weight yarn. It ended up a bit smaller then I expected, about 44 inches in diameter, so if I make it again, I'll probably keep feather and fanning for quite a bit longer to get a bigger blanket. And maybe block it out a bit more severely. As it is, it will be a good lap blanket for someone for C#$#&^*. (Note: friends and family can place bids in the comments as to who gets this one).

3) Mini-bandwagon

Pattern: Clapotis. If you don't know where to find this, I'm sorry, you'll just have to be out of luck because I am not linking to it. And really, it's time to crawl out from under that nice rock you've got there.

Yarn: my own handspun, from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club June offering, colorway Thistle

Needles: US 8/5 mm

Start/finish: Started as a reward for finishing the Halloween costumes 11/1. Finished the knitting on 11/3 - completely addictive! Blocked and dried, 11/11/07.

Comments/mods: Since I only had just over 200 yds of yarn, of course I couldn't do a full sized Clapotis. And I don't really need a full sized one - it just doesn't get that cold in Houston. So with the help of numerous other folks who have already done mini versions, I decided to do one set of increase rows and then weigh the start of the scarf (17 g). I then knit straight sections until I had 20 g of yarn remaining and did the decrease rows. I probably could have knit one more straight section, but the scarf starts and ends on the same part of the color repeat, which I like for symmetry's sake.

I read the very informative post here and decided to twist my stitches on both the knit and purl sides, and to twist them so that the front leg pointed into the stockinette sections. I really like how it looks once the stitches are dropped - there's no wonkiness along the edges of the stockinette sections at all. This yarn is my first chain plied yarn, and as I've already said, I'm a big fan of the three ply. It's wonderfully soft, and I'm anxiously waiting for it to be cold enough to need this beauty in the mornings. I can't wait to show it off!

FF: Thistle Redux

The spinning has not been happening so much. When last it made a serious appearance in these pages, I had started spinning Adrian's June offering (nothing like attending to these things in a timely fashion, yes?) after a long time away from the wheel.

My plan was to spin up the entire 4 oz as one single and then chain ply it to keep long stretches of color. This fiber was just wonderful to spin - soft, easy to draft, flowed through my fingers so smoothly that before I knew it I had a full bobbin.

Once again, I was pleasantly surprised at the difference between the fiber as dyed top and the fiber as singles. I wasn't convinced by the colors as roving, but the combination as a single was just gorgeous.

About the time I filled this bobbin there was a thread on the Spin Tech group at Ravelry about chain plying. One general consensus was that de-energized singles were easier to chain ply then active singles. So I decided to let the bobbin sit for a few days so that the plying would be easier.

Ahem. A few days stretched into a week. And then another week. And finally Ironman went off to South America for a few days for work, and I was free to stay up too late watching the Jon Stewart show and Project Runway reruns and ply to my heart's content. Which I did. The first 2/3s of the bobbin were plied in one go that took about 4 hours*. This was my first "real" attempt to chain ply, and I used the plying head for my Lendrum and went very, very, very slowly. It took a little doing, but I eventually got comfortable with the motions. And the finished yarn is absolutely gorgeous!

This shot is truest to the colors on my monitor

I finished it by submerging in very hot water, agitating a bit as the water cooled. Then a dunk in cool water, a squeeze to get the extra water out, and hung to dry.

Fiber: 18 micron merino from Hello Yarn Fiber Club in Thistle colorway, June 2007

Spun at 10:1 on ST Lendrum folding, chain plied at 5:1.

Specs: 204 yds, 10-12 wpi, soft and cushy!

I've decided that I'm a big fan of the three ply yarn. It's just so round and bouncy. I can see why you'd want to do a two ply for lace projects, but for anything else, I think I'm going to go for the three ply.

I couldn't stand not knitting with this stuff, so after some searching on Ravelry for an appropriate project, I'm going for a mini-Clapotis scarf. I'd like to pretend that it will be a Christmas present, but who am I kidding?

After one bus ride home (~1 hr) and a couple of hours in front of the TV last night, I'm well into the straight sections and flying along. Watching the colors come together is so entrancing that I even knit a few rows this morning as I waited to head out to meet my neighbor for a run. Usually I'm not much for scarves (neverending...), but this one looks to be a winner.

* Ow my aching right knee!

Granny's party

I'm mostly recovered from my expedition over the weekend with the girls to North Carolina*, but it's amazing how exhausting vacation can be! We left on Thursday, sneaking out of IAH between feeder bands from Tropical Storm Erin, and made it safely to Richmond, VA without an further mishap. Despite having to sit on the plane for an hour at the gate and then for almost three hours in the air, the kids were fabulous. Having a bulkhead seat helped tremendously, but it was still a long time to be stuck in one place, particularly for Devil.

We met Nana in Richmond, threw the kids (neither of whom slept on the plane) into the car, and headed south. They were both asleep inside of ten minutes, and we had a very peaceful trip down to the lake. Things were very calm until Friday morning, when my cousin arrived with her two kids (7 and 3) and then later in the day, my two aunts arrived with another cousin and 2 more kids in tow (4 and 10 months). Devil was so enthralled by all the excitement that she basically forgot to eat. The rest of the weekend was a blur of playing in the lake, going for rides in the big motorboat (which Devil very proudly got to drive), and the ingestion of copious amounts of junk food.

On Saturday night we had Granny's birthday party, and I gave her the Branching Out scarf I've been working on. I'm not much in to making scarves, they get real boring real fast, but something about this one was different. Maybe it was the lace pattern, or the excitement of working with yarn I spun myself, but I really enjoyed making this scarf. I was originally planning on keeping it for myself, but decided that Granny would love it. And she did. Although she made sure to tell me to take it back when she goes.

She loved the colors (which are perfect for her), and was very impressed by the fact that I'd not only knit it, but also spun the yarn. That's the kind of appreciation for handknitted gifts you like to see!

Here's a close up. More details about the yarn and it's origins are

here

, but it was approximately worsted weight (varied between 11-13 wpi in three different skeins). I started off with two skeins, one thinner then the other. I weighed both skeins and the thinner one was also half the weight of the other. I wanted to avoided pooling and abrupt changes in the color sequences as well as minimizing any variability in the gauge due to thicker versus thinner spinning, so I used both balls at the same time, working 4 rows from the heavy/thicker ball and 2 rows from the lighter/thinner ball. I carried the non-working yarn up along the side, catching it up in the middle of the 4 row stretches so it didn't dangle off the edge. This worked out pretty well, but when I ran out of the thicker ball of yarn, the scarf wasn't quite long enough, so I had to spin up some more. Thankfully I had some fiber left!

Some pattern details:

Pattern:

Branching Out

from Knitty.com

Needles: US size 8

Yarn: BFL top handdyed from the

Hello Yarn

Fiber Club, spun on a Golding spindle

Started: er...sometime in mid-July

Finished: ~August 10th or so

Gauge: Hunh? Who cares, it's lace...about 7 inches wide and on the short side for a scarf.

Trip back on Sunday was uneventful except for Boo showing disturbing signs of wanting to be _that_ baby. You know the one, who screams non-stop for the entire flight and will not be mollified. Thankfully we were right next to the engines at the very back of the plane, and she eventually conked out.

Note: I'll be on a brief hiatus for the next couple of weeks - we're heading off to the UK tomorrow for a wedding and some time out looking at fossils on the Jurassic Coast. But back after Labor Day, and I've got a review of a bunch of different types of spinning fibers in the works for you.

* except for the lovely case of pinkeye I've picked up from my oldest child, for which I spent two hours at the doctor's office this morning trying to get some antibiotics. Thanks Dev!