December

Busy times before Christmas, so I have not found time to take photos and write new blog posts. Socks and mittens have left the house without a photo, but here are some of the newest knittings:

The socks are "just normal socks" but the mittens are both traditional patterns I figured out from originals knitted by my Grandmother in the 1950's. The one on the left I have later found online but the one on the right is so far my own secret.

Here I experimented with a Latvian Braid, which was easy but time consuming.

Baby socks in pink merino wool.

Fabric baskets in coarse linen and Christmas prints and antique crocheted lace.

And finally more fabric baskets, filled with chocolate pralines for some special people.

I wish you all a peaceful holiday season, good health and no stress. See you next year! 

Anyone still there? ...

It has been such a long time, and much has happened since September and my last post here.  We have moved, and this is how my sewing room is now arranged:

Not quite finished yet. No place for every item just yet. But I have been going through my belongings, binned an amazing amount of ancient textiles and saved another amazing amount of textiles. I have found trash, and I have found treasures, like this lonely mitten, 

all felted in snow and sweaty fingers, with a hole showing how much it has been used. Why on earth is this a treasure? Because it was knitted by my Grandmother, and I have saved this years and years back when I was still living with my parents. I knew some day I would want to knit mittens like she did, warm and comfortable. Her patterns were not from magazines, and I have only found one of them on a Finnish knitting blog, written down as a traditional pattern. 

With a sewing room in a chaos like that, I have spent time elsewhere with yarn and needles, and so I tested and tried out stitches and found out how Grandmother had knitted that mitten.

It is a lot like this other pattern she used much, but over two stitches where as the second pattern has a repeat of four stitches.

I decided to knit a sample of that pattern too for my knitting pattern archive.

And then there is Grandmother's third favorite, extravagantly in three  colors. This is the only pattern she knitted in the round, and again the reason must be that she didn't like to purl!

 

Knitting in the round makes my little sample is so narrow, with the same number of stitches as the other samples.

All these patterns look more complicated than they are, because they only use one color at a time, and the slip stitches make the mitten close-knit and warm. Not even tiny fingers will poke through stitches here!

Naturally I needed to test my newly found pattern, and here is the result:

Settling in our new home in an old house is still a learning experience. We get exercise while learning the new places of our pots and pans and plates, or going through the cardboard boxes when looking for something not yet unpacked. I hope to find more time for reading blogs and posting on my own as well. Take care, stay safe.

More socks and mittens

Little Miss Yellow's set is here. Very basic socks here on virgin snow.

The mittens are striped with the rainbow yarn I used for some socks and mittens already before Christmas, and some navy blue also from my old stash. I call this pattern "Grandmother's three colour pattern" as I have not seen it anywhere but in the half finished mitten I have inherited, and of course in my memories from the time I had such mittens.

 

Little Miss Purple's mittens from my previous post in a closeup. This is a new version of "Grandmother's two colour pattern" that I have in fact found on the Internet under the name of Ailin lapaset, but they make no gusset for the thumb like my Grandmother and I did. Using a third colour makes a big difference ...

... because the bicolor version has clearly vertical stripes:

Both of the Grandmother's patterns only use one colour at a time for each row, and the lifted stitches make them dense and warm.

Custom order not too tight not too itchy socks for a friend. Self-striping Step yarn from Austermann.

I wanted to show you a better photo of the other chemo cap from last week. This pattern is perfect for the 50/50 cotton and wool yarn I used:

It was a free baby hat pattern I just enlarged for an adult size.

December 15 - Splash of colour

My needles have not been idle. I have used rest yarns to make small socks and mittens. This is a new pattern where I used my mother's idea of sufficiently long cuffs for mittens, and tamed the rainbow coloured yarn with a dark blue.

The same mitten in red. This was taken in poor light in our kitchen a couple of days ago.

Here is the same yarn in daylight on fresh snow, this is the true colour. I added my Grandmother's mitten stitch pattern to the long cuffs from my mother's knitting and think this is the perfect, warmer than usual mitten.

Quilter's block

Once again, I seem to have a "quilter's block", which doesn't mean that I'm producing quilt blocks day in, day out, but quite the opposite. There are lists of quilts I would love to make, great patterns and lovely own design thoughts, but the fabrics stay in their boxes, rulers are sadly hanging on the wall, and the sewing machine gathers dust.

My way of dealing with this problem is, naturally, knitting. And doing it like my mother did with her knitting and sewing, trying to get the most of a small amount of material, and still pleasing the eye. Here I used rests of some yarns I used earlier this Autumn for men's socks. The mottled green and the dark green were very close, so making wide stripes with just those two would not have looked good. I separated them with thin grey stripes. Then I still needed the very last meters of the dark green for alternate rows with the mottled one to cover the toes. There it is, the biggest possible pair of socks out of those yarns.

Next there was the dark blue from the lime and dark blue socks, and the greyish blue from some other projects. I just knitted the legs as long as the lighter blue allowed. There is nothing of it left, but the dark blue will reappear in some stripes later.

Here I used the "knit as far as the yarn allows"  method again, this time it was the light grey that needed to be used up. This is the first project where I have used the second one of my own grandmother's traditional patterns which I managed to repeat and put in writing . They make a warm knit without having to run two yarns at the same time, and without long loops on the reverse. If you click on the link, you can find the pattern in the text.

As you can see, our black and wet landscape is covered in white snow for at least some days. It started snowing during the night, and it continues. Every day is 4 minutes shorter than the previous one, but in a few weeks the sun begins to set at the same time every day, in preparation for the winter solstice on the 21st of December.

Farmers' Market, flower fence, and knitting again

This year the (very un-)traditional flower arrangements in Järvenpää were chairs fastened to the ugly fence. You may remember the wellies from 2013,

the bags from 2014,

and the bikes from 2015.

This year they used old, donated chairs. I didn't have a chance to take a photo of the whole fence, but after the chairs were taken down earlier this month, they found new addresses where to stay as long as the flowers are pretty. This one found a new home outside Lentävä Lapanen, the Flying Mitten. One of he owners is active in the movement that makes the flower project possible.

Yesterday a storm was sweeping across the country, leaving 200,000 households without electricity for some time, but we enjoyed a sunny and relatively warm, windy day. The beautiful weather brought thousands of people to the pedestrian area and the park by the lake in Järvenpää where the annual Farmers' Market Maa elää was held.

The market was filled with the autumn's harvest from fields, gardens and forests as well as craft rooms.  Delicious chanterelles:

and lingonberries.

There was an info desk with wild mushroom samples. The ladies from the local equivalent of a Women's Institute (or something like that) were there to help people identify different mushrooms and especially to separate the good ones from the really bad ones.

After this point the street was too crowded for me to get any photos, but there were over 130 tables or stalls. Beautiful flowers, home made cordials and jams, bread, cakes and flour, carrots and potatoes, handmade clothes for dolls as well as children or women, hand woven rugs and many more crafty things.

It has been some time since my last post so a lot of knitting has been going on. A pair of mittens to go with the peppermint candy striped socks, using my grandmother's favourite pattern which makes them thick and warm and yet not stiff.

I had little balls of yarn left from sock knitting so I combined them and  tried my hands on the bubble pattern I used for my grandson's blanket two years ago:

Those bubbles felt a bit too big after all (six rows high) so I reduced their size and used finer yarn and just two colours. Sea-hawthorn berries without the thorns?

This pair will take an evening or two to finish, but every time I finish a pair I feel so happy the pair is finished, both socks or mittens are the same size, have the same number of rows, and I can start a new pair, not just a new sock or mitten and trying to knit it the same way.

New Sampler QAL

This week I finally started a new quilt. Not just any quilt, but a year-long, 100 block mystery Quilt-A-Long by The Splendid Sampler. Simone gave me the link and I looked at the blocks already published, and immediately wanted to join. Guess what? I'm going to use proper quilting fabrics this time. Not just scraps, but real large pieces of unused fabrics. Here are the main fabrics I'm going to use throughout the quilt. They are all from my stash, and there is so much more to take from.

My first block Hearts Aflutter

and number two,Wings. The yellow butterflies need some details to be stitched.

Block three is Lots of Love. I think I'm going to make this again as it is not quite 6½" like it should.

Block 4, Happy happy needs the stems of the flowers stitched.

Block 5 is Simple Simon

This is the last block I have made, Focal Point.

The next block will be a stitchery, and I have two more block patterns waiting. Next block will be out on Sunday so I'm not going to catch up very soon, but like they said on  the Splendid Sampler website, this is not a competition and the patterns will be available until the end of the QAL.

Last night we had some new snow so I took my knitting photo shoot outdoors:

A tiny pair from the leftover of the previous pair.

And two pairs using the knitting pattern my grandmother used on our mittens. The boys had gray with blue or green, and we girls had gray with red or yellow. There ought to have been four girl colours but I don't think grandmother had them. Maybe we had large and small versions in the same colour.

New knitting finishes and a new way to make a pompom

I had some leftover yarns from knitting mittens and socks for two little girls, so I wanted to knit matching hats for them. I bought some pink yarn to make the purple hat prettier, and naturally little girls' hats will be lovelier if they have a pompom. I tested a new (to me anyway) way to make a big pompom. I have always cut two circles of cardboard and used a needle to wind the yarn through the centre hole and around the circle. For the newest pompom before this I used a plastic pompom maker that works just like the old cardboard version but is reusable and comes in three sizes. This time I needed a big pompom, and the new trick promised just that. First, you need an empty kitchen roll core cut in half or two toilet roll cores. No needle needed, just start winding your yarn around both rolls like this. It goes really fast!

 

When you think there is enough yarn for the pompom, cut your yarn. Take a longish piece of strong yarn and tie it between the roll cores around the pompom yarn. I made a slip knot.

Take your good big scissors and cut at opposite sides of the roll core pair through all layers of yarn.

 

Tighten the slip knot really tight and tie the ends of that yarn twice around the centre of the pompom and make a knot or two. Hold these long tails  and trim the pompom. Use the tails to fasten the pompom where you want it.

Here are the hats finished. The yellow hat has "my grandmother's mitten pattern", and for the purple hat I used a star pattern my mother once used for my hat. It was pink with white stars, and a wonderful white pompom that wasn't so heavy that it would pull your head back.

My mother was the little girls' great grandmother, and I hope these hats will bring the knitted love tradition of our family to the newest generation. My mother used to call her knitting "time bent to curves", referring to the form the yarn takes, but I'd like to add love to the time.