Aug. 31, 2024

24 – 30 August

This week was a holiday week so had a few things on pause. We took a trip around a some Nordic areas from Copenhagen to Gotland to Stockholm, ending with a Swedish wedding. This isn’t a travel blog so I won’t say too much on the travels, other than… Danish food was excellent, meaning the quality of the food and preparation was really high. There must be some excellent chef schools there because it was all really delicious.

Gotland was recommended as a place to explore a bit of Sweden, I prefer countrysides and landscapes, so this was really nice for me. It’s a chill place where Swedes go for the summer where they all have holiday homes. Stockholm was also nice to visit, but as a tourist it didn’t quite compare to Copenhagen, which is smaller and much prettier. Stockholm is more a metropolis style city, still beautiful buildings, but they’ve built a lot more modern infrastructure over the top of it. 

Travels

Anyways, I remembered that the Nordic countries did a lot of knitting and designing themselves. The Danes have some really popular designers so I decided to do a bit of a knitting shop tour in each place I visited. I found 3 jumper patterns all from Denmark, I’ll link them here. This gave me lots of renewed inspiration to continue knitting! I’ve got rid of all my stash at home, so I felt this treat was deserved!

The patterns:

• Rikke Sweater
• Scotty Sweater
• Zipper Sweater Light

Two from petite knit, which I have never knit from before, and one from Onling, which I hadn’t heard from. With these patterns selected, i bought a jumper’s worth of yarn at each destination I went to, also opting for the local wool, in most part. 

For the Rikke sweater I’m using Sandnes Garn – 60% Alpaca, 40% Wool blend, which is nice a soft. I also bought a bunch of interchangeable circular needles, which I’ve wanted for a while. I keep sitting on my straight bamboo needles and I’ve broken over half of them, what a faff. Circular needles is the way to go, and must more likely let onto a plane hand luggage. I started knitting this during the holiday during any travel periods or down time. It’s knitted top down, which I haven’t done much before, and makes it so much more fun as it materialises in front of you. 

For the scotty sweater I bought in Gotland, which is full of sheep by the way. They are mostly this one type of sheep with tight ringlets, they had a lot of wool shops selling this type of wool. I don’t think it’s the best to knit with all the time, as the ringlets are more useful as a decorative purpose, but I got a blend of Gotland wool and merino blend. This I will then mix with kid silk, which I’ve never worked with. I have knit with mohair though.

The wool i bought (each a jumpers worth)

• Left: Rikke sweater – 60% alpaca, 40% nordic wool
• Middle: Scotty Sweater – One 100% Gotland wool, held with one or two strand of kid silk
• Right: Zipper Sweater – 100% Nordic wool

For the Zipper Sweater Light, I bought a pure wool blend in Stockholm, the wool is from Norway, and it got a rustic feel, probably the most scratchy as its 100% wool, but for this jumper I think it should be fine.

Left: Progress so far on Rikke – top down knitting. Right: Gotland sheep with curly wool

Lots of inspiration on this trip that I didn’t anticipate! So three new jumper projects to keep me going, and hopefully some nice additions to my jumper wardrobe. I actually managed to knit quite a lot during the holiday, the Rikke jumper is going well, but taking quite a while since it’s a rib and lace pattern. The other two patterns are simple knit so that’ll probably go much quicker.

In other updates, I didn’t manage to work much on my blog, am working on a bug at the moment relating to publishing. Once I’m through that, I think it should be another week of tweaks and features before it’s ready.

Final thing of note, while i was away i came across a kids costume shop. I’ve been thinking about making kid costume clothes for a while. My grandma used to make some legendary costumes for our school plays, and i want to continue this tradition. I haven’t yet delved into own pattern making etc so its very new for me. I took some pictures in the shop to see how they make them. There are some techniques i think that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Costume inspiration

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