Yarn for days!

Hello everybody! I am back! I've been without a laptop for a week and a half now so it's good to be back and now able to watch my videos on a bigger screen with better speakers and a actual working keyboard! I serriously have no idea how people can go on with tables and smartphones only... They're handy and easy to carry around, sure, but they are so danged limited! I'd go nuts without my laptop for a longer period of time!

Anyways... I'm finally back after a very hectic and active week and a half. From monday to thursday, I've been in Oslo, the capitol of Norway with my mom and aunt and we've been walking around in blazing heat for four days! On tuesday we walked for 18km (11 miles)! We were all over the place...more or less. We did a lot of shopping of course and I managed to get me a good bunch of yarn...and other small things but they aren't really important for this blog.

First yarn purchase was five skeins of Alpaca from Drops. I love this yarn and I'm using it for another pair of leggings for my niece. I'll tell you guys more about that at a later time.

Next up is 10 skeins of this amazingly fluffy mohair yarn. Marks & Kattens Kid Mohair, 76% kid mohair and 24% polyamid. This is some old brand that I found a bunch of at a hobby store at a very low price. I just couldn't pass it up! I bought it all with the intention of working up another hoodie like the blue baked bean one. Just need to wait for another yarn sale so I can get some cheap alpaca or maybe even merino to go with it! This one will most likely be a huge Creeper reference so I will have to get black buttons! BTW, the yarn is bright green apple-ish in colour.

Lastly, we went to this store that has just about everything you'll ever and never need called Søstrene Grene. I did purchase some other things that I'll never need too (like paper napkins with the UK flag on it), but I was originally stopping by to pick up some cotton yarn. Søstrene Grene has so many interesting and unique colours compared to my regular cotton brands, and I've never tried these before, so of course I had to get some fresh ones! Just look at these! Ain't they beautiful?

And of course I've done some knitting too, not as much as I've liked to, but during the evenings and the train rides, there was enough time to get enough work done. I managed to finish up three dishcloths, all from new patterns made by Bittami. I'll probably get better pictures of them sometime later after I've weaved in the ends and whatnot.

I also brought my watermelon shawl with me and maneged to finish it up. I've yet to block it so new updates with better pictures to come, but I'm very pleased with the shape and size of it! Will most likely end up using my remaining Delano yarn for two more shawls.

 

BUT IT DOESN'T STOP THERE!!! Last sunday, I walked the "Dovrefjellsmarsjen" which is a path going up the mountains in Dovrefjell from Grønbakken to Hjerkinn. It's tiresome, expecially for me being the least active person on earth, but I managed to finish it, making it my fifth time ever to walk that path. One more time and I get the silver pin! But enough about that...when my mom and I reached the other side, we went to the cafeteria/resturant thingy for food, and they had a tiny section for souvenirs, which included this knitting kit for the Dovrevotten/Dovre mittens. It has the Pilgrimsleden symbol on it as well and my mom just had to buy it. Once we got home, she handed me the kit and told me to work them up for her. I love fair-isle, but I have little to no experience working fair-isle on DPN's, and it always turns out way worse than it usually does on circular. But I am a bit pleased with the result of this first mitten! It needs a good bunch of blocking to get the stitches cleaner, but it is not half bad. Will have to work up a bunch of these just to practice!

 And one last yarn related thing while I'm at it... My mom's boss gave this huge bag full of yarn to my mother some time ago. It was all a huge UFO of a jacket she had been working on at some point in the 90's if I were to guess. Apparently, she was so tired of it all and never wanted to see it again. My mom then handed the bag to me and told me to frog it and maybe work something else up with it all. Here's a picture of the back of the jacket. I was almost a shame frogging it all...

And frogging it was a total nightmare! Just look at all this! All these skeins had been worked on at the same time! That's a lot of work...

I hardly know anything about the yarn itself either. It's called St. Germain and looks really old. It's fluffy, kinda chunky and fairly thick. The label reads 96% Schurwolle, 4% Polyester and my guess is wool. If there's any german speaking people reading my blog, please, let me know if you know anything about this yarn, or can tell me what Schurwolle actually means...or confirm that it's actually just normal wool.
There's tons of skeins in these four colours as you can see in the pictures above. Several of the scrap skeins are really small, so I'm pondering the idea of making a granny square blanket of it all.

Phew! That's a lot of yarn speak! But that's what happends when you go so long without updating! See you guys later!

Two patterns up for sale!

The other day, right after my last blogentry, I finished up the pattern and got the PDF file ready and uploaded it all to Ravelry. Last night, I made my first sale and I'm super pleased! The pattern is called Ripley, you'll get the cookie if you get the reference. You can find and buy the pattern on Ravelry, here.

If that wasn't enough, I worked up the second dishcloth even before the DPF for the first was done! And today, I'm pleased to announce that my second pattern are live and kicking up on Ravelry. This one is named Aran, and again, cookie if you get the reference! You can find and buy the second pattern, here.

I'm designing patterns!

Yeah! You heard right! I am currently in the progress of designing, testing and writing up my very own patterns!

This is something I've been thinking about doing for quite some time now, but never really gotten around to do it...or found the courage to actually dive into it. I'm more of the "working from patterns" than "creating my own patterns"... But lately, mainly starting with Batman I guess, I've been redesigning my own things, so why not actually start designing new ones? And I'm starting small, with dishcloths.

Last night, I kicked my own ass and started with the first one. I drew up a chart, then worked it out with yarn and wrote up the description, designed the layout of the pattern and fixed some errors and now I'm just about done!

 What else, I've started a second one too! That one is just in the designing stage still though...

But I will be releasing these on Ravelry pretty soon! I will be selling them, but they will be fairly cheap. I'm not planning on ripping people off, but I kinda want to make a tiny bit of money on the side, so hopefully I won't get too much hate for not publishing these for free.

Also, they will be easy to make, atleast this first one should be possible for a beginner to work up.

Are you as excited about this as I am? Let me know in the comments if you would be interested in getting dishcloths patterns from me!

My Ravelry account is LARvonCL BTW.

WIP summer pullover!

I'm working pretty slow these days. So good not to have deadlines on my projects after stressing with one after the other since before christmas. But I do get some work done! Like today! I finished up the dishcloth I started the other day for one...

And I also managed to work up a scarf for Fibi! It even has frills on the ends! So fancy! Now he/she is only missing the ears! Almost done!

And then we got my summer pullover! I started the other part yesterday and finished it up today, and I just put them both on the needles again now to work in the round! The stitches add up so I'm very happy with this thing so far! The yarn is soft and light so I can imagine this pullover will be just perfect for those colder summer nights...or just as a everyday wear since I don't think it'll be very warm... Still debating if I should add the hood or not though...

Ugh, the people upstairs are having a rather loud party...so I guess I'll stay up all night working on this pullover... I actually think that these people are louder than the previous people we lived with...

Summer knitting!

Summer is more or less upon us allready (which reminds me that I should look into changing my blog design soon...again), and I'm not a fan of summer. I prefer the cold, snowy and dark nights compared to the sunny, warm and all to bright nights. But summer is more of a relaxing knit season. You can't really work on too big projects, execially not wool projects. Socks, hats, mittens, scarfs and so on usually just stand in line, waiting for the autumn to get here. So what do you knit during the warmer season? Well, anything cotton basicly! That's how it goes for myself and the rest of knitting Norway it seems. And I've allready started to feel the slowness. For a week now, all I've been doing is knitting dishcloths!

I've managed to knit six of the white birch ones from Bittami. Here's the two last ones from that batch

And after some time, I managed to finish up the heart one (not sure what the english name for this one is, but it's called "hjertebarn" in norwegian and can probably be translated to "children of the heart"), also from Bittami.

And then I started a goat willow dishcloth, form Bittami ofcourse... Both this one and the heart one areworked up with the Drops <3 You 1 mixed cotton that I bleached some time ago.

But I didn't finish this one up cause all of a sudden, I decided to start a summer pullover! Yeah! I've been drooling over this pattern for quite some time, but I finally decided to start it last night. I got a bunch of bamboo/acryllic yarn lying around that I decided to start using, and a summer pullover was the perfect project for all of this.

It's a slow work, expecially since it's worked in pieces. I'll be working it in the round cause I do not want to do all the purls. But it has splits in the sides, so at the beginning, I have to work it in different pieces... Fun time! It's looking good though!

Dishcloths and more bleaching!

Over the weekend, while I was at my brother's place, I decided to work up some dishcloths. It's easy, it's practical, it's fast and you can never have enough dishcloths! Also, I decided to start working up the cottons I've been bleaching. I love how they turned out!

I'll get better pictures of them later when the ends have been weaved in. These are so much better looking than the others I've made. The pattern is from Bittami, if you were wondering. It's my favorite dishcloth pattern of all time! Or...so far atleast... Turns out that Bittami is having another dishcloth knitalong this summer, starting in the beginning of june. I just can't wait! I joined the dishcloth knitalong she had last summer and I got 7 wonderful patterns out of that event!
She just released a pre-knitalong pattern yesterday and I'm dying to try it out...after I'm done working up this last one I got on my needles right now.

So, since this knitalong are closing in, I need more cotton! That is, I allready got cotton, but I need to bleach it all! Pretty cloths need to be pretty, bro! So I've just put six new skeins of my favorite dishcloth material in bleach... I dunked an extra blue and cream colored one in the leftover bleach sullotion...

...and they look amazing! I can't WAIT for new patterns!!!

The colors will get better when the skeins dry up...and the two red ones ARE different... For some reason, red colors take a lot longer time to bleach than other colors...but only with this brand, from my experience atleast.

Simple crochet dishclohts

During the past couple of days, I've been working on dishcloths, crochet this time actually. I usually prefer the thinner, more quality type cotton, but I had a total of four skeins of this thick, icky cotton I've got from my friends in North America. Three of these skeins was a brand called Bernat that I've gotten from Star. I've allready talked a bit about these since I had bleached one of the skeins and got a fancy camo effect with it. But as I started working with this yarn, I realised that I just don't like it. It's thick so I had to use 4,5mm hook on it, knitting with it was kinda out of the question.
The last skein was Sugar and Cream that I've recieved ages ago from Tiffany, and it is exactly the same as Bernat. The same thickness and the same icky feeling so I decided to use them all up at the same time.

 

The one with red is Sugar and Cream and the other three is Bernat. The one that appears blue in the picture was actually different shades of green. The lighting screwed me over whenI took the pictures...

In retrospect, I should maybe have used these skeins for pot holders rather than dishcloths, since they're so thick it would be good to handle warm things, but they work good for dishcloths too... Maybe a little too thick, but they wash well, I started using the lime green one earlier today!