A Study in Red

Or a study in knit and purl stitch. Just before Christmas last year, some balls of Rowan Silk Wool Dk was turned into a Christmas-present for my mother: a simple scarf out of just knit and purl stitches. With a thin black edge, in a sewn tubular cast-off, just to add something a bit dramatic to the red.

I made a sort of "lock" that is often used on scarfs knitted to small children, where a knotted scarf can be to bulky around a small throat.

To me, red and black are my mother´s colours.

The Silk Wool was nice to knit with and it blocked very well. This project was totally ad-libbed; I started without no clear plan and it soon turned into a study in knit and purl. And that was all that was needed.

SpringWinter

We are in the transition between winter and spring, that wonderful time of the year called vårvinter (springwinter). During the lovely sunny days the snow and ice melts visibly, everwhere you can heare the sound of dripping water. The children are busy playing in the streams of water that are flooding down towards the lowest points in the landscape, and they came home dripping wet everyday. This time of the year it´s hard work to be a tumble-drier!The birds are singing. And the other day I found the first snowdrops in the garden! Growing up through the snow they came, so brave, so lovelly! Not long after that the aconites started to shine their yellow joy in another part of the garden.

But the night still belongs to the winter! The temperature rapidly drops below zero when the sun sets and soon all the streems of water freezes to ice again. And while the wind is howling around the house, I`m cosy inside with my knitting, a mug of tea and maybe a doughnut...

These are knit in Rowan Pure Wool DK and the pattern is from "Knitted Cakes" by Susan Penny.

Time to Exhibit

Keep knitting...

Still knitting for the exhibition, there´s 1½ "project" left to do. I knit and I knit. My brain amuses itself with new ideas, with the future, what to knit afterwards, while my hands are busy with the present.

While Knitting

In March my knitting will appear at an exhibition at Hantverksstallet -where I´m a member. I have spent some time planning what to make for this occasion, then I
made up my mind, bought a lot of tempting Rowan Pure Wool DK in all the colours that caught my fancy and now I´m knitting. But I´m not going to show it here yet.

Yesterday I went into a bookstore and found this:

"Norrtullsligan" has been on my reading-list for some time and of course I bought it. And started it on the way home from work. Often when I read books considered to be "classics", I get disappointed. After all that has been said about them, after all the films and tv-series, the poor books have a hard work to live up to their reputation. This book is a Swedish classic. It´s written in 1908 by Elin Wägner (Wikipedia-link), feminist, writer and a fighter for woman´s suffrage.

"Nortullsligan" is, in short, about the life of some office-girls in Stockholm in the beginning of the twentieth century, about their hopes and fears, their lack of money and possibilities. They are paid 1/4 of the male wages, are not allowed to vote, but have to pay tax- of course! They are fighting to make the ends meet, are dreaming of meeting Mr Right, but feel loneliness and ill health waiting round the corner. And their attempt to fight for their rights are crushed with easiness.

The book is very good, it´s hard to put it down - this is a classic that actually hasn´t got the attention it deserves! While reading I realize that if I had been born at that time, I possibly could have been one of these girls. I also realize, that while my situation is so enormusly better than the average office-girl of 1908, the maxime "Equal pay for equal work" certainly isn´t in force yet! Not in my office, anyway!

Untangle Me!

The winter is showing us its evil side: it´s plus-degrees outside, it´s raining, blowing hard and the world is gray, gray, gray. So it´s really excellent that my two big hobbys in life - knitting and litterature - are both best executed indoors, in a comfy sofa!

I spent some frustrating hours some days ago trying to wind some yarn I bough to comfort myself with. The yarn is eco-cotton from Regnbågen and as soon as I saw it I got a picture in my head of adorable little kids-sweaters with some sort of lacy edge. The first hank was wound in a jiffy, but the next two must have been sent to me as a punishment for some very horrible act of mine (I wonder what that could have been...), they took hours and hours!


They where totally tangled up...

and even had knots in them! Not knots as in two ends of yarn joined together, but totally unexplainable knots!

It´s the first time I buy this yarn and I must say, that I´m not in a hurry to buy it again! I have two more hanks to wind, but I`m not in a hurry to do that either. Hopefully these two monster-hanks where a yarnely example of måndagsexemplar (a bad specimin - possibly manifactured on a Monday, when the producer hasn´t quite recovered from the weekend yet- of a product that is usually quite well made).

One of my orchids is challenging the grayness of the season and has bursted out in a joyful explosion of colour. The orchids are utterly boring when they´re "in between", but they certainly make up for that when the buds open up.

Starting New Project-Time!

Somehow the switching from one year to the next starts a lot of processes in my mind. No, I´m not going to start a completely new life, I´m perfectly happy with the life I have! No impossible New Year-promises are made and I have no grand plans for 2011. BUT I have quite a lot of small ones! And a lot of old ones still waiting to be worked out. Like the eleven or twelve balls of Rowan Cotton Glace that has been with me for a long time, originally bought for a project long abandoned. Suddenly I got the itch to make a cotton cardigan, mabye a bit along the lines of Jinny (Ravelry link) from Rowan 39. Not actually Jinny, but a v-necked cardigan with someting interesting for the edges - and someting interesting happening inbetween...

I´m very fond of the Cotton Glace, although this colour isn´t really my colour. Since I was the one who bought this yarn in this colour, once it must have attracted me...

It has turned and every day the daylight gains a few minutes. Today the sun went up at 9:39 and went down at 15:13, tomorrow the day will be three minutes longer. So it´s still very dark... All this dark time is excellent to spend knitting and watching something interesting. At the moment I´m watching

"Colditz" - terribly exciting with very good actors, among them Jeremy Kemp!

I actually made one little New Year-promise: to knit more swatches. At least one a week, knitted without relation to any project, just to try new things. Mabye I will display them on the blog as "Swatch of the Week".