Hiihdä, hiihdä, vihdo, vihdo, jeeeee!*

*) Finland's official 2010 Olympic support cheer as is demonstrated here:


I'm not much of a sports enthusiast - indeed, I usually only watch the opening and closing ceremonies of Olympic games, and even those only when the hosting country is somehow interesting or significant to me.

The night of the Vancouver games opening ceremony I found myself once again suffering from insomnia, so I gave up trying to sleep and watched the live 4am opening ceremony instead. I love Canada; I spent six months there in 2005 and found the nature beautiful and the people extremely friendly and hospitable. Seeing the Rocky Mountains in the horizon wherever I went grounded me in a way that I had never experienced in Finland (which is very flat). The only annoying thing about Canada is the fact that sales tax is not included in price tags!

The (other) reason I was looking forward to the opening ceremony was Ravelympics. No, it has nothing to do with dance raves. Ravelympics are the "alternative Olympics" at Ravelry, spurring knitters into producing wonderful things with sticks and yarn. One is allowed to cast on once the Olympic fire has been lit and hands must be off the needles when the flame is extinguished. I am pleased to announce that as of now, I have earned four medals for Team Finland, and have another two medals pending!

I took part in Scarf Super-G with two entries: a scarf for myself and one for Tristan.

You may remember the scrumptious Manos del Uruguay Silk Blend that I received in my Christmas swap package. Originally I had other plans for it, but it was just begging to be a scarf. Hey, I never met a silk and merino scarf I didn't like!

When handling the yarn it made me think of seashells, and I knew I had the perfect pattern for it. The Spiral Scarf from Knitting Nature by Norah Gaughan consists of (in my case) 17 hexagons, each one a stitch smaller per side than the one before. Although it may look complicated, it is actually a very simple pattern and excellent TV knitting. I hate picking up stitches because I suck at it, but since the stitches of once side of each hexagon were picked up from the previous hexagon, I learnt to live with it and maybe even got a bit better at it.

I knitted Tristan a cable scarf last year for Valentine's Day but underestimated the required length - usually a good scarf length is the recipient's height. This time I played it safe and the scarf ended up 2½ metres long! Despite the length, the scarf was started one day and finished the next, thanks to the bulky yarn (Rowan RYC Soft Tweed; 56% wool / 20% viscose / 14% polyamide / 10% silk; colourways Oatmeal, Twig and Slate Blue; discontinued).

The pattern is Men's Rustic Scarf by Joelle Hoverson from the book Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. The scarf is knitted lengthways and it is pure garter stitch. Very meditative. The problem is, Tristan loves the scarf and so do I! I may have to knit myself one too.

I had grand plans about making a fine-gauge alpaca hat for myself as a Ravelympics project; unfortunately the scarves kept me too busy to even consider it. However, I were still able to partake in Hat Halfpipe and Single Skein Speed Skate with another quickie project, namely a Calorimetry (pattern by Kathryn Schoendorf).

Half a hat, half a headband, this... thing is excellent if you, like me, often wear your hair up and still want to be snug in the winter weather. It is constructed by using short rows, a technique that I had previously not really tried, so yay. The pattern says to repeat the short row sequence 15 times but I only did 9 as my yarn of choice was bulky and also I preferred to make a slightly narrower band.

The yarn here is Schoeller+Stahl Cornwall (70% virgin wool / 30% acrylic). The project only took three hours from cast on to bind off, so it would be an excellent project for a beginner!

In addition to the above new projects, I entered Aerial Unwind with two projects. Aerial Unwind is perhaps the quickest event to take part in; it involves unravelling (or "frogging") a previously knitted project. My two projects were the Un-Lucky Clover Lace Wrap (a cardigan in fingering weight cotton that I worked on and off on since June 2008; a study in how one should not keep knitting if there is a nagging voice in the back of one's mind saying that it looks awful!) and the red hat that I knitted last October.

Why oh why, you ask? I know, I loved that hat. In fact, I loved it so much that I wore it almost every day. What I didn't take into account is the fact that silk doesn't stretch, therefore it is very poor in bouncing back. The hat, with its ribbed edge, kept growing and growing and GROWING until it was more like a bag and would regularly fall off my head. Sad.
I have interesting plans for the yarn though, as I've been tossing the ball from hand to hand, imagining new (non-ribbed) things that it could yet become. And that, my friend, is the beauty of knitting.

Finished: Veera's Hello Kitty Sweater

I finished Veera's sweater a good while ago, but I haven't gotten around to taking photos of it until now. After finishing the sleeves as per the pattern, I measured them, unpicked the bound off stitches and added another four or five centimetres. I also made the body quite a lot longer; It doesn't hurt to err on the side of big with a growing girl! In general, I was surprised how small the pattern was, considering it was supposed to fit a 6-8-year-old and Veera is only turning 5.

I am rather pleased with the result; the Hello Kitty face (which I lifted from a scarf pattern) is recognizable and fun with the fluffy yarn. It was a pain to stitch on, but a good exercise in working with different kinds of yarns. The Novita Jasmin mentioned in the previous post really didn't work with this, so I ended up using black Novita Nalle (75% wool / 25% polyamide) instead. When I bought the main pink yarn for the sweater, I had no idea how many skeins I should get. I ended up getting 5, which was a lucky guess - I had half a skein left at the end.

Now I'll wrap the sweater up in wrapping paper and put it away until December. Let's hope the birthday girl likes it!

Veera's Hello Kitty Sweater

My niece, Veera, turns five next Christmas Eve. She loves Hello Kitty - last year her top wish from Santa was a packet of Hello Kitty band-aids! And like all nearly-five-year-old girls, she loves the colour pink. When she saw me knitting a few months ago (I was working on a chocolate brown Lucky Clover Wrap from Stitch'n Bitch Nation, a project I am now considering frogging despite having worked on it for a year), she was intrigued. (Yes, I do plan on initiating her into the art of knitting at some point.) Last time I saw her a few weeks back, she asked if I had finished the project yet and if I would knit her a pink sweater.

Now, you have to cross me pretty bad for me to say no to a knitting request, especially such a small one, so I started pondering and planning what her pink sweater could look like. I had a few prerequisites:

1. It should be a top-down project. I'm not spending half the time sewing fronts and backs and sides and sleeves together.
2. It should be machine washable. This one is a no-brainer considering she's going on five and five-year-olds do messy things.
3. It should be soft and comfortable, not itchy.
   
4. It should not be 100% acrylic or any other synthetic fibre that is likely to melt on her should it catch on fire.

I rummaged through the excellent pattern search engine on Ravelry and found a suitable top-down pattern for a little girl's top (minus the stripes and the bell sleeves). Turns out that Novita Samos (50% cotton / 50% acrylic) knits exactly to the gauge and ticks all the boxes that I set for the yarn. For a fluffy Hello Kitty face, I decided to use Novita Jive (100% polyamide), with the red bow-tie made from the Novita Luxus Cloud from my cardigan and the black outline done with Novita Jasmin (60% cotton / 40% acrylic; not on the website as I believe it's a seasonal yarn).

I cast my stitches on and the project was going ahead swimmingly... until I came to the part where I wanted to start the intarsia. Now, usually intarsia is worked on flat pieces, in which you work from right to left, then left to right, then right to left, etc. etc. This makes carrying yarn relatively simple. However, when you're working in the round (right to left over and over again), intarsia becomes problematic, as you leave the yarn on one side and then arrive on the opposite shore with no way of reaching said yarn. I found an excellent tutorial on intarsia in the round and, although I've never worked intarsia even on a flat piece before, decided to bite the bullet and try it out. After all, how hard can it be?

Pretty hard I tell ya, especially if you're working with four colours at once (with two of those colours split into two smaller balls each), your main intarsia yarn is a very very elastic one and the rest not at all. I completed approximately seven rows of the Hello Kitty pattern, decided that there was no way those stretched-all-over-the-place stitches were going to do, and frogged the lot. I have no pictorial evidence of this offending piece, but trust you me, it was pretty offensive.

So I frogged it, re-knit those seven rows, lost two stitches in there somewhere (no idea where as there are no dropped stitches - maybe missed two raglan increases?) and prepared for the tedious prospect that is the knitting of a sweater body in plain stocking stitch. At least it's a small body, and the yarn is pretty chunky, so it's quick going.


Here's where I am at the moment. It should take me another 2-3 evenings to finish the sweater, and then I get to the interesting part: duplicate stitching the Hello Kitty face on! The pink yarn underneath should give it the sturdiness to stop it from stretching all over the place like it did before. I'm also considering stitching Veera's name onto the sleeve, but maybe that's a bit too much? I just remember how I loved everything with my name on it when I was her age.

I might just knit everyone's Christmas presents this year. I'll be sitting on the train a lot this autumn thanks to my other university being in a different town, so I'll have a lot of time to kill. What, studying? What's that?