Earth and Sky - Stephen West's Mystery KAL

I participated in the Mystery KAL organized by Stephen West that took place in August. Since I had over 2 weeks off in August, it was perfect timing for me. I knit at least half of this shawl while I was in Iceland. I finished casting off last Saturday and I blocked it today (also Saturday).



The pattern is called, Earth & Sky, and is supposed to be made with fingering weight yarn. However, I didn't have any fingering weight yarn in 3 colors that I wanted to use for this project. I did however have a lot of Icelandic lace weight yarn, Einband, so I decided to use it with white as the main color and yellow and turquois as extra colors.

This is clue nr. 1:



Already we had intarsia! Yep, this pattern has intarsia in it. It's a very simple intarsia, but intarsia nonetheless. (It's a lot of fun to write the word intarsia).

The clues came every Monday (except for clue number 3 which came on Friday and included the bulk of the knitting). This is clue number 2:



And clue nr. 3:



You could knit the shawl in 3 different sized (small, medium, large) depending on how many repeats of clue 2 and clue 3 you did. It was very tempting to do a large size, since I´ve been wanting a larger shawl and I'd made a good progress while I was in Iceland.

It was not easy to knit this shawl unless you could focus on it and have a lot of space. With the exception of the white stripes, you had 3 balls of yarn going and this yarn (Einband) sticks together like it's made out of Velcro! But I got more and more used to handling the yarn and the yarn tangling up was less and less of an issue. It was never a very portable project though.

Finally, one of me wearing it.



It was a lot of fun participating in this KAL, along with over 2000 other people!

Cooler weather - socks number 4

Yay. The weather is cooler. Instead of being 28 - 35 °C (82-95F), it's more like 14C (57F) and rainy. We can start wearing our woolly goodies. First wool thing: socks.

I made these socks out of dk/sport weight leftover yarn in July, and now I can finally wear them.



The pattern is 'International Sock of Doom' which was a pattern made for the Sock Wars with the intent of being super quick to knit.

This reminds me that I never finished blogging about the socks I've been knitting this summer, plus lots of other stuff too. These are the 4th pair of socks I've knit since the start of summer out of a total of 5 pairs! Socks are great traveling, summer kind of knitting :)

10 lbs of yarn

Have you ever wondered how 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of yarn look like?

That's how much yarn I brought back to the US from my trip to Iceland in August.

Here is the plötulopi (unspun Icelandic wool):


I put the yarn in a small suitcase, but didn't end up using that suitcase. It was funny though that it filled up a whole (tiny) suitcase.

Here is the rest of the yarn stacked up:



Here is how it looks all vacuum packed. That's how I fit it all in one suitcase (along with the unspun yarn).



Most of it is Icelandic wool, but a little bit of Norwegian and Danish yarn slipped in too. I have a lot of knitting ahead of me :) Not all the yarn is mine. I bought most of the unspun yarn for my friends in the US.

Finally I have a picture of most of my Icelandic wool stash:



At the top is a blanket (throw) I have in progress made out of Kambgarn, which is Icelandic yarn, although it's not made out of Icelandic wool. It's merino wool, dyed in Iceland.

The top most box is full of Álafoss lopi (10x 100 gr skeins), which is the bulky weight Icelandic wool. The next one has my lace weight yarn (Einband), and the bottom one my plötulopi (the unspun) and létt-lopi (the worsted weight). Good times :)