FO: Var

My obsession with all thing Icelandic continues.  While I won't be stocking deliciously fragrant Hakarl any time soon, I am loving lopapeysa sweaters.  Casual, functional, warm colorwork pullovers and cardigans were my go-to this winter.  Now that it is springtime, I still wanted to wear one, so I decided to fight my fear of zippers once again and make a jacket that is still warm and weatherproof without being too swampy-pits on.

The great thing about Icelandic sweater patterns is they all follow a very basic formula for men and women alike- a tube for the body, two tubes for the sleeves, then you join the whole mess when it hits the yoke and decrease down to the neck.  They are perfectly unisex, and while you can add waste shaping for a more flattering fit, I opted not to.  I found a yoke pattern that I loved but it didn't match my gauge (Var), so I mashed it up with another sweater that did (Frost) and added a steek in the front so I could install a zipper.  Both patterns are found in the Istex Lopi 29 book, which is full of patterns that you can just adapt and run with your own creation.

I wanted a longer sweater, a bit oversized, so I know this isn't the most flattering length on someone with curves.  I wanted function over fashion this time around though, and having something that reaches you hip makes for a really warm jumper.  I also added a hood.  It just felt right to be able to have a built-in hat on something that I would wear in such changeable spring weather.  Plus, I've never made anything with a hood before and was long overdue.

I am also getting so much better at installing zippers.  This one I got right on only the second try!  It's practically bulge-free, and the whole process went so smoothly that I have conquered my fear and I'm zipper-ready for anything.

The pattern for the hood also said that you should roll the edge of the hood under and seem it in place, but it does that naturally without any help from me, so I left the edge unfinished.  If you were really inspired, you could do an i-cord edging on it, or extend the button band up and around it, but I think it was fine as it is.

I used up almost all of the Rowan British Sheep Breeds that I had in my stash.  The colors:
White= BFL
Black-Brown= Black Welsh
Brown-Grey= Jacob
I also used small amounts of Grey Suffolk and Moorit Shetland, as I was just down to scraps with those and still wanted to put them to use.  

It's just fascinating to feel the different wool characteristics in this way.  The BFL is by far the softest and silkiest and I want to buy all of it in the world and live in a house made of it.  

I am quite pleased with it.  It's just suck a simple design and only took a few weeks to whip up with no real intense effort needed.  I'm quite sad to see it done, as this is the very last of the instant gratification projects for a while.  On to sock-yarn pullovers!

FO: Riddari, with an acceptable amount of buldge

I have spent way too much time on this beast.  

The actual knitting took me no time- maybe two weeks start to finish?- and it looked just dandy until I took the scissors to it.

The idea of it was an Icelandic-style jumper done in 100% British Wools:  it was fascinating to combine these wools, to get a feel for each one.  The Black Welsh was the roughest to work with- it's rustic and full of lanolin, but it will look like new forever.  The grey Suffolk was a bit softer, but I obsessively picked wires of guard hairs out of it.  The moorit Shetland, lovely and lofty, the BFL silky and soft.  Each is their natural color, making a nice sample of the natural variety of colorful sheep.  I dubbed this "the Cod Wars" sweater- the UK had a series of bullying encounters with Iceland over fishing rights in the rich waters around Iceland, and from the 1950's to the late 70's, the UK would send trawlers there under the protection of warships to fish around Iceland.

 Like I said, the problems started when I took the scissors to the front.  See, the pattern was written for a much lighter weight yarn, but I loved the yoke pattern so much that I did the math and followed the instructions for a child's extra small size knit in a rather tight gauge.  The fabric is dense and impenetrable to wind and water, but perhaps a bit to warm for anyplace but Iceland.  A bit of air conditioning was in order and I decided to run a crochet steek up the front, snipped it into a cardigan and installed a vintage brass zipper.  That's when I started having big problems.

The zipper would not lay flat, creating big lumps and bumps up the front.  Huge ones.  After twice hand-picking and trying to ease the lumps out, frantic calls to tailors and friends were made.  I debated trying to sew it back up and save it as a cardigan, but the colorwork would have looked all wrong.  I decided to outsource, and took it to Susan at Sharpworks down in Herne Hill.  Susan wouldn't do it for me, but advised me to take out the crochet steeks, which was adding a tight line of stitches and extra fabric that was distorting things.  She also advised me to stretch the fabric taught along the zipper to minimize the zipper tape bunching.

I went home, took out the crochet steeks, and eased the zipper in one more time, trying to stretch out the lumps without turning it into a dress.

Ta dum!  An acceptable amount of bulges!  Since I had to stretch the fabric, it's a bit longer then I intended- I could have stretched it more and ended up with a dress.  It's not perfectly flat, but it doesn't look like a tumor is growing under there either.  Oh!  and it's warm enough to be outerwear.  And you know, now that I've been struggling with this for more than a month now, I've noticed that a fair amount of commercially made zip-up sweaters have zippers that don't like perfectly flat as well, so instead of drowning in a river of tears of frustration, I said this is good enough and walked away.

The kicker?  No way no how are Icelandic Lopapeysa traditional to Iceland.  They were developed in the 1950's to make use of the abundance of Icelandic wool, and they are based on styles of traditional knitwear from far-off places suck as Turkey, Sweden, South America, and Greenland.  They quickly became a favorite of tourist and locals alike.

 I do need to clean up my edges a little bit more- I don't have a perfectly clean line running up the front.  What's a few more hours with needle and thread?  I promise you I won't un-pick the zipper again.  Part of the raggedness around the edges are due to the fact that I've tinkered with this way too much and edges began to fray at the same rate as my temper.      

 It's not going to get cold enough here in the South of England to ever need something this fantastically wooly.  A trip to Iceland is in order, or perhaps, one day, a Maine winter will be endured.

The pattern is Riddari.  The yarn is Rowan British Sheep Breeds Chunky, a yarn much bulkier than what was called for in the pattern, but I've been determined to knit down my stash instead of reaching for my bank card every time the urge to knit a sweater hits.

The Butcher of Sheepy things

Like I said in a previous post, I somewhat lost my knitting mojo after then holidays.  Once I got all the gifties sent out to the four corners of the globe, I sat down and looked around and just couldn't find the inspiration to do diddly.

I dislike unfinished projects in general, which is why I was disgusted with myself for having a hat brim sitting on the shelf for more than a month.

A long stretch of simple knitting in the round was abandoned in favor of just not wanting to deal with it for 14 inches.  

I did chip away at a crochet blanket for a while:

The Babette, the best way I could think of to use up all the scraps of sock yarn that I've accumulated the past few years.  A memory of socks and shawls and sweaters, slowly being pieced together in a colorful spread of clown barf.  However...I now need to create more scraps as I'm running out of yarn for it.  

Part of this big stall was the fault of this jumper:

An incredibly warm men's Icelandic lopi sweater called Riddari, knit in the natural colors of sheep of the Birtish Isles: Black Wesh, moorit Shetland, white BFL, and steel gray Suffolk.  It was lovely to knit- the wool was rustic and had a lovely sheepy smell, and it was comforting and joyful to make.

Once I was done and blocked, I decided I didn't want it to be a pullover- a zipper install to let it be worn open would be a good idea since it was extraordinarily warm. So I crocheted steeks, slicked it from nave to throat, and basted in a lovely vintage brass zipper.

Hours later, I was in a mass of ripped seems and bits of thread.

No matter how carefully I install a zipper, no matter how many tutorials I read and follow step-by step, I can not get the stupid giant bulge out.

 Really?

I'm at a loss as to what to do- after picking it out and re-sewing it, trying to keep the fabric loose and the tension even, the bulges would not go away.

Should I try again, send it off to a pro to pic, or try to sew it back up and call it a pullover?

Isolation

Parts of Iceland are really well traveled. A marketing dream come true is the Golden Circle- a series of natural wonders linked by paved roads that can be seen in a day with Reykivik as the home base. Oodles of tour buses line up along the route and it seemed like a bit of a zoo. Since we were moving from one huge city to the next big city, we opted for a much more quiet route to the south east coast. I'm glad we did. I found a good deal on a rental car out of the airport. Fuel was prohibitively expensive. It cost about $80 US to fill the tank of a compact, and we ended up refueling 3 times on the trip. Ouch. It is probably the one place in Europe where the tiny smart cars and sub-compacts were popular. We saw a lot of enormous pickup trucks with extra large wheels. With good reason...there is a lot of unpaved roads. We came across a few sizeable villages outside of Reykavik, and then, without warning, civilization dropped off. A lonely farm would show up here and there, but there was really nothing but tundra. Oh, and volcanoes and glaciers and waterfalls.

At one point, we hit an ashy dust storm that made the white car real pretty afterwards.

It was some of the most spectacular scenery I'd ever seen. You could see the devastation of a recent lava flow and flood. A somewhat common occurrence is that a volcano will heat up under a glacier, causing it to melt and unleash in a sudden flood. It clears the landscape completely. It looks like you could be on the moon at times. We didn't see a farm or a settlement for at least an hour once we hit this spot. Because of the lack of civilization, it can be tricky to have a place to stay the night. This website came in handy. Staying at a working farm is really your only option aside from camping. I felt like it might be a little chilly for me to want to tent out for the night, so I found accommodations at a farm called Houlmer. I don't know what was the better selling point for me: the fact that there was a glacier in the backyard or the freshly-borne lambs frolicking around. I died and went to cute heaven just then.

FO- Republic Hat

My A-Z stashdown continues! Now with even more Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Bulky!

Anyway.

I had what I thought was a full skeins of Lamb's Pride Bulky in a pretty light gray. This yarn was re-claimed from my most fantastically ugly fair isle skirt:



Then I skeined up the yarn and gave most of it away. Half of it was Renyold's Lopi Icelandic yarn, which matches the brown sheep perfectly when it comes to gauge.

I cast on for the Republic hat. Just as I was decreasing for crown, my yarn ran out.



I had to make some emergency calls, but a friend who I gave some of the skirt scraps to still had some on hand. I finished the hat in Lopi, which matched color-wise perfectly. The only thing is that the lopi has a lot of dark black wiry guard hairs that bloomed up, while the Lamb's Pride has more of a silver mohair halo. I trimmed up the guard hairs with a pair of sharp scissors and I can't even tell where one begins and the other ends.



I got the giant button at M&J trimming.





This got wrapped up and shipped up to Northern Maine for my Grandma's birthday. She's a pretty classy lady, and her mother used to own a hat store in Rochester, NY. She still loves hats.

The Specs:
The Republic Hat, which is a knock-off of a Banana Republic design. It's also a free pattern on this blog. I used about 100 yards of bulky weight yarn on a size 10.5 needles.

I decided not to go to Maryland Sheep and Wool this year. I checked the forecast a few days before and it was supposed to be near 90 for the weekend. I went to the beach instead. I love Rhinebeck because it really gets you into the sweater-season mood. You're outside in the chill fall air all day and it makes buying wool seem completely sensible. I just couldn't see myself getting into the sheep and wool spirit while wallowing through heat and humidity.

Plus, I still have this rather gorgeous Cormo fleece from last year that hasn't seen the spinning wheel yet.



Anyway, here are some pictures from last year. It wasn't quite so hot, but we had some rain and then some crazy swampy humidity.


Blue Face Leicester ewe. I think she looks kind of bashful.


Getting ready for the show ring


One of the things that MDSW has that Rhinebeck doesn't is lambs. Baby animals make me go "awwwwwwww".




Jacob lambs


Cotswold


Corriedale


This was a really friendly Blue Face ram. He was gorgeous but I couldn't get a picture of him since the second I scootched down to his level he would shove his face at me for petting.


Angora kids. Curly awesome sproingy goats.


I wish I had faster photo reflexes because this llama was about 3 seconds away from spitting.




Maybe next year we will get a nice chilly spring weekend for MDSW.

Seven bucks later...

Sunday a carload of Brooklynites piled into a car and drove out to the Garden State Sheep & Fiber festival. It was a pretty sweet little event. It was very small but it had some quality vendors- lots of small farms from Jersey and PA that don't make it to the big festivals. Attendance wasn't really high so it was nice to be able to stop and chat and not feel rushed.

There were lots of sheep:



Icelandic and Shetlands made up the majority of the breeds, but there were also some BFL, Cheviot, Romneys and CVMs. This moorit CVM caught my eye:



And there were alpacas:



That's a Huacaya on the left and a Suri on the right.

And there were bunnies. Fabulously soft angora buns:





These are like human babies, but softer and cuter. Added bonus that you can spin from them. I'd like to see you try and do that with a human baby.

There were also mini-donks, which made me think they could flap their ears and fly away:



I can not resist the power of cute.

They did have fleeces for sale. The one that spoke to me was an 11 lb white cormo. Long staple, super crimpy, free of VM. I kept going back to it trying to justify it, but I still have a whole lot of my MDSW cormo fleece at home needing a good spinning, so I walked away. They had a few nice Shetland fleeces, and I do have a weakness for Shetland. It's the opposite of cormo- straight and silky, and the colors in each fleece are pretty amazing.

What was surprising was the amount of crap fleeces I saw. The majority of fleeces up for sale there were dirty, full of second cuts, matted and felted, not skirted (!), sunburt or worse. Granted, most of these fleeces were priced accordingly, I found the fleece auction to be underwhelming.

My sole purchase for the day was some angora fiber, which set me back $7. I have never been able to get to a fiber festival and come home just seven dollars poorer. Also, instead of spending my Sunday night washing fleece in the bathtub, I went for a walk, knitted in the park for a bit, made dinner, spun, caught up with a friend.

Maybe I'm just atoning for future purchases.