On My Needles.

First of all, thank you all for your kind words regarding my last post. The past year has been really hard for us like I wrote, but things are starting to look brighter. I personally believe that tabus don't help anyone so I have strived to be honest and tell people around me how things are with us. Our life is far from perfect and I don't see the point of pretending like it is. You don't get any help or support if you don't ask for it, and saying everything is fine with a fake smile serves no one any good. So again, thank you for being so understanding.

It's been ages since I last showed anything I've knitted, so maybe it's time to give you a glimpse of everything I have on my needles at the moment. You know me, never a monogamous knitter, so there's always a pile of WIPs waiting for me. I've been a bit restless lately, so I've been casting on for way too many things that I'm trying to juggle. At this moment I'm knitting two cardigans, one sweater, two shawls, a pair of socks and a hat for Theo, plus quite a many swatchees for various other projects I'm itching to start. But I do get things off the needles as well: yesterday was all about knitting buttons for my Siri cardigan and Theo's onesie. I'll show them as soon as I have time to take decent photos (the daylight is getting scarce and since I'm now back to work I don't have all day "free" to take photos as I please).

But back to everything I have under work. Let's start with the Loess shawl. I got two skeins of Hedgehog fibres Skinny singles in shade Teacup as a birthday present from my little sister and I started knitting the Tissé scarf by Julie Hoover with it. I spent literally hours working on it, quite a few road trips, many hours at the playground while Theo was playing with sand and multiple other occasions until I finally confessed to myself something I had known from the very beginning: I just didn't like the yarn with the pattern. Even though I really wanted to. So rip rip rip, back to a ball the yarn went, and I started again with a different pattern. Now it's becoming the Loess from Brooklyn Tweed's Wool People Vol. 10 collection. At the moment I'm waiting for my yarn order, because the two skeins I had weren't enough to finish it, but as soon as I get my yarn I'm back to working on this one.

The other shawl I'm knitting is the triangular Halligarth shawl that has been in my queue for two years. I'm knitting it in deep purple (fantastic color!) Holst garn supersoft wool. Triangluar lace shawls aren't really my thing to knit, but this design has something that I really really really love, maybe because it's a bit more minimalistic and graphic than many other lace designs, I don't know. Anyway, I'm reaaly excited about this, even though it doesn't really work as a TV time project. (I've fallen in love with audio books, yay for Audible app!)

The last two thing I'm going to show you today are the Valldal cardigan and my Speckled Space Socks. I've jumped on the speckled yarn bandwagon (thanks to the aforementioned Hedgehog yarns) and I've been so excited about the hand dyed Studio Meez sock yarn that I got earlier in the summer but just haven't dared to use until know. It's been sitting on the dresser where I've been able to admire it :) But now I'm turning it into socks. It's the softest sock yarn ever, maybe because it has some cashmire in it, and the colors are just very me, subtle, with light grey base and spots of dark green and navy blue.

I'm not very far along with my Valldal cardigan, but after knitting almost purely cables for the longest time I wanted to cast on for a stranded project. The cardigan has quite an interesting construction and it took me a while to understand what I was doing and if I was reading the instructions correctly. You start knitting the ribbing flat from the bottom up, then you put some stitches from both the edges on hold, cast on new stitches for a steek and continue the fair-isle part in a round. Later on you knit the button band stitches (the ones that were put on hold) and sew them to the edges of the steeked cardigan. Let's see how it turns out!

Here you can see the steek and the to-be button bands I have on hold.