Thank you, thank you! It was nice to hear from you after such a long time. I did not realize that you would still be here to read, I am truly surprised and happy. xx
Here on the other side of the screen, I am little bit struggling with the writing, and wondering if it is because I feel that my days are so quiet and ordinary (and dull? maybe), that there is very little interesting to write about.
But then… has it ever been anything but ordinary and my ordinary, daily life is all I have to share. If I am going to keep writing, it is this ordinary I keep recording… Mostly home life from day to day.
I did make one trip this month. My daughter and I drove down south to Jyväskylä Knitting Festival. There is a nice, little video on Youtube, about 4 minutes by Nupunupun Finnish Videopodcast recording snippets of the festival. There are no words, but in the end (about 3 minutes) you can see me knitting with my daughter, sitting on the steps in front of a yellow building. Here is the link for it if you’d like to see. I cannot say enough good words for the Festival. We stayed from Thursday to Sunday and I took two nice classes by Aleks Byrd, here a link to Aleks’ pages.
I am always touched by my surroundings. I have favorite months and seasons, but it seems that decades here have adjusted my mind to accept even the less favorite months… oh, not exactly the truth, I still have some work to do with April and do complain about it… and July is not at the top of my list either because of the color of the month. This probably sounds odd, but I don’t like the deep, grayish grass green that takes over the world in July. Everything is this too saturated green. I know underneath this overpowering green are tons of tints of green that are lovely and there are all those various browns there too, but at a quick glance it is this same green.
Luckily (- I know, I know, the fall is coming too quickly around the corner, if only these warm days would stretch for a bit longer!) there is little bit of yellow already amongst the heavy green. And I do love a good yellow.
We yellow lovers are soon in for a real treat!
This week has been rainy, and yesterday the winds came all the way from the cold north. I came home from the town, stepped out of the car and for the few seconds from the car to the house, the wind blew right through me and I was cold to the bone. It was the night to light the fire and I realized how much I have missed the warmth of a fire in a cold evening. It took a good while of sitting in front of the fire wrapped in a blanket to warm up. I thought I was getting sick, but no, just plain freezing and I have not felt that for a while. Summer has been quite lovely (little bit too hot for just a few days) up here.
I am grateful for all the wools I have. This one I finished in June I think. They are telling us that we are heading for a cold winter because of the shortage of energy.
My yard does not look as nice as previous summers, it is little bit overgrown and would really need a good tidy-up. I injured my back early this summer while we were putting up the deck to the lake. It was quite bad for two weeks but it is getting better; the yard though is suffering from my poor back more than I. I am quite comfortable in my daily chores but anything heavy will bring back the pain. I don’t enjoy looking at the neglected corners of the yard. It feels that they are screaming at me.
But the shawl… It is Curvette, another Curvette shawl, design by Stephen West. This is the second time I knitted it. It is a lovely pattern: stripes - who does not love stripes? - little bit of lace to interrupt the monotony of garter stitch - huge semicircular shape that is easy to wear. It is like a big woolly hug and we all need hugs, woolly hugs. It is really simple to make but with different yarns and colors one can make it really one’s own kind of knitting experience.
I used various Shetland wools (some really old Alice Starmore’s and Jamieson’s). Few odd balls were really short and I wet spliced all these odd balls into bigger balls, reds, blues, greens and worked from them. Some of the colors were too bright, so I overdyed them.
I do remember dyeing some yellows into these grayish purples, that I started and finished off the shawl. There were few very bright greens there too, that needed to be bathed in gray.
The pearl gray mohair that I used for the lacy thin stripes was a really old find from the bottom of my stash. Do you remember those scratchy mohairs from decades back that used to be harsh and not at all like these soft kid silk mohairs? This prickly mohair is Vivaldi by Drops and I still have some left. But then these Shetland wools are not very soft either, so they were a good match and it is a good shawl for layering on top of a winter coat.
Some knitters and crocheters pick yarns based on the softness but I seem to go forward with the color on top of my list. If the color is good, I will adjust in a way necessary to be able to use that particular color. And my color choices are conversations between my surroundings and me. Or I am other way in need of a certain color. If I pick up a color out of curiosity, like a challenge, the knitting becomes quite a struggle and I seem to lose my compass in my color world. I recently made a shawl forcing me to learn something new and struggled through a big shawl, I will show it to you later.
But there are already quite a few shawl pictures here, so this will do for now. I hope you will have a good weekend, I plan to finish my shawl… although I would really need to attend the outside work too, so let’s see what happens. Until I return, be well and be safe and stay healthy.
And - if it is not sweltering where you are,
Wool with you,
Lene
