Finished lopapeysa and some more bobbin lace

I finally managed to finish the lopapeysa for my friend!!

Martyna's lopapeysa.

I am very pleased with the result. I don't know why I always have so little faith in using just grays. It happened to me also when I knitted another lopapeysa for the friend of a friend. I met with the girl at the woolshop so she could take a look at the magazines and choose the pattern she liked and then I let her check all the colors that were available in plötulopi. For my surprise she chose grays... three shades of gray plus white. I wasn't so sure about it first. I thought it was a boring color combination. I always need a hint of colour (especially brown or green). I made the lopapeysa and the result was pretty cool! The same happened this time since my friend didn't want any brown or anything that too difficult to combine. I went for darker shades of gray and the result is very, very nice.

About the pattern, Órói, I had made it once before (it was actually the first icelandic pullover that I ever made) but then I followed the instructions step by step including the kind of lopi that I used (which was Álafoss lopi, not my favourite thing really because it is too bulky). This time, I used plötulopi (as I have said probably many times before one of my favourites!) and my friend decided to have it wthout the opening on the side: wise decision. I think it look MUCH better that way!

JC's lopapeysa: blockedþ

About the size: I didn't really follow the instruction in this. I just calculated my gauge and used the measurments my friend gave me. At least it looks ok, I mean well proportioned. I hope it will fit him well. I think it must be something between sizes M and L. Anyway, something I really like about wool is that is can adapt very well to the body shapes so most probably it will be just fine.

JC's lopapeysa: folded and ready to travel.

Now I just have to send it to travel all the way down to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Long trip (that I wished I could make together with the pullover...)

During the weekend I decided to finish my "home made bobbin lace pillow device". The pillow itself was ready since the beginning. I just had to embellish a little bit the box that holds it in place.

To make the embellishment I used the leftovers of the black linen fabric that I used to cover the pillow to cover inside of the box.

To cover the outeside of the box I used a new fabric: black with red dots. Pretty cool. I am really bad at sewing so Gummi helped me a lot here. He made a case that fitted perfectly the box so I had only to glue the inner borders of it.

Bobbin lace pillow, case and wedge: Ready to be used!

Once the box was done I came up with the idea of adding a little piece to it: a wedge in the front side so that the bobbins wouldn't be just hanging from the pillow. For that I bought polystyrene. I cut it with the shape of a  right angle triangle, covered it with foam and then with fabric. To keep in place I used velcro.

I think that the box looks much better now and it is actually pretty comfortable now with the wedge.

The wedge prevents the bobbins to ge hanging. It is very comfortable.

Now that I had my "bolillera" ready I started with the second exercise from the book.

The exercise consists of the same stitch as the first one (half stitch) but with the addition of half stitch diamonds. It took a me a little while to figure out how to make the holy diamonds... but once I got the first the second was very easy!!

Ready to begin the first diamond.

2nd exercise: Finished.

Detail of the diamond: It is really cool to see how the thread travels to shape it!

Until now, bobbin lace goes very well. But I think I will do this exercise one more time just to make sure that I got it right :)

Remember the new camera I got? The multilens called Supersampler? Well, I finished one roll and the camera it really cool. It is very fun to see what came on the negatives. Here I will show you some of them:

There are a few more in my Flickr gallery if you are interested :)