Steeking and pictures from the trip!!

Well, well. This week was devoted to steeking. This was the first time a did it myself (with lots of help from Gummi, whose first time was also this!).

Before steeking the lopapeysa, I made a little exercise.

Harebell Fichu

Remember the Harebell fichu that I knitted a few weeks ago? As soon as I finished it and bloked it I had the impression that it had turned put to be TOO big to be held around any woman's shoulders. I actually tried it on several friends and yes... it is too big to tie it in front. So, I decided to cut the bands so it can be used wrapped around the neck and shoulders and maybe held with a brooch if desired.


This was the perfect moment to try to cut a knitted piece as a practice before cutting the big project: Eva's hoodie lopapeysa.

The first step: Using a sewing machine back and forth:

After that the place to cut is secured and ready for the action:

Now... scissors:

And voilà, the band is gone!:

After cutting I made a single crochet edge to make it look better:

And now it is REALLY ready to be used!!

So, after the little training we were ready to take the big task: Cutting the lopapeysa.

The steps are the same:

Sewing to secure the edges.

Back and forth on each purling.

Let the action begin!

Be careful with the blade of the scissor that you don't see... I almost cut the back of the cardigan!

Getting to the yoke.

Almost there!

And done!

Then the crochet edge:

Now it is ready to get the zipper!

I must admit that the idea of cutting the knitting sounds TERRIBLE and SCARY but it is not! The important thing, in the case of a cardigan, is to make the "path" where the sewing will go. In this case I made a colums made up of two purled stitches. Then the sewing machine dies it all! In this case I also made a double sewing on both edges so I could cut between them.

So, don't be scared of doing this! I think it is very difficult to mess it all.

Today I am going to visit my friend (who is a seamstress) to put the zipper... I think that dointg that goes a lot over my sewing skills... that are very little in fact :)

Finally, as I promised here are some pictures of my last trip to the East Fjords!

Alex gave the idea of making a clip... which was brilliant! Other wise I would have had to upload TONS of pictures! The only problem with the clip is that the resolution of pictures is lost a little bit... but I guess it looks alright :)

I hope you enjoy it!

Harebell Fichu: Finished!!

 The Fichu is finally finished and blocked!!

After blocking laying flat.

Against the light.

When I started it I thought it was going to be an easy project. Well, I was wrong. It took me a while to get it but once I did... everything went just smooth and fine.

Details:

* Pattern: Harebell Fichu.

* Book: Victorian Lace Today.

* Yarn: Einband (Icelandic lace).

* Weight: 62g (So it was one ball and a little more)

* Needles: 3.5mm

Pattern detail: I would say that these are flowers, aren't they?

Things I learned:

* How to make a picot edge.

Picot edge.

Picot edge detail against the light.

* Attatching the lace section to the band making joins along live stitches that lay perpendicularly to the direction of knitting (wow this sounds weird!). Look at this diagram I draw to (maybe) understand the idea a little bit better. The joins look actually really good. They are very even and somehow invisible.

Section. It is possible to see the joins that are right below the band (where the inverted V is)

Difficulties:

* First of all, to understand the pattern and the construction of the Fichu (Diagram).

* In terms of knitting I HATED making the S1K4togPSSO (Slip one stitch was ok. Knit 4 stitches together was TERRIBLE! And passing the slipped stitched over was a piece of cake :p)

* Blocking: This is the first rounded lace project that I knit and blocking it was a real challenge. The challenge was to have it even and nicely rounded and well proportioned. It took me over an hour to get it done (and a lot of sweating and pain in the knees and back!). I started by pinning the inner circle trying to have as rounded as possible.Then I put one pin in each picot trying to stretch it evenly. After having the outer circumference all pinned I just removed the inner pins... they were no longer necessary.

I think that the time, sweat and pain definetely paid off!

Blocking

Against the light.

Final thoughts: It was really nice to knit this piece even though all the difficulties (from which I learned a few new things :) The Fichu is very light and airy and the lace pattern is just beautiful. If you have the book... definetely give it a try!

Odyssey

I love living in Iceland and everything that comes with that but I am not sure if I have said before that sometimes it can be pretty difficult to find some things here in here... so everytime that I am thinking about making something I have to cross my fingers and hope for the best to find all the materials I might eventually need.

Taken from Wikipedia

Sometimes (or most of the times) it is an odyssey that requires going to many stores spread all over the city with the hope of finding at least something similar to what is needed. Well, actually, most of the times I end up getting something that is not exactly what I wanted and somehow I have to manage to make it work as I want.

I can get very disappointed and grumpy sometimes because of this. I REALLY need to learn to control that... but it is so hard! I think that living in Iceland has made me become a more patient person... even though in the eyes of other (and especially Gummi) I am still very impatient!

Let's see. The last odyssey was finding thread for bobbin lace. I already mentioned little bit about this last time. When I was visiting Asturiasm where I bought my set of bobbins, I bought just one 500m skein of cotton n°20: big mistake... I should have bought A LOT more. I didn't think it would be so difficult and expensive to get some good thread here.

I began searching for threads and managed to go to four shops with very little success. In most of them they had only polyester thread or very, very fine cotton thread. Most of the people I talked with looked at me as I was speaking chinese when I was telling them that I wanted some cotton thread, something from n°20 to 70 to make lace.

Taken from the website of Heimilisiðnaðarfélag Íslands.

I checked the website of Heimilisiðnaðarfélag Ísland (The Society of hand and homecrafts of Iceland) and according to it they had all the materials for making bobbin lace, as I mentioned in the previous post, I went there and they actually had linen thread but the woman working there didn't know much about what I was talking about... strange because I thought they were supposed to know what they have to offer. They really don't have a big variety of materials so I ended up buying just one skein of linen (with no number... ) and some more "un-numbered" thread for a terribly huge price.

Linen.

More Linen

Last week I went to take a look at Storkurinn, a shop downtown in Reykjavík that sells mainly wool and also has a section with quilting materials. For my surprise they also had a lot of cotton thread in wonderful colors! But only n°30! Anyways... I bought a couple (and for a very nice price: only 560 ISK or 3.5 € each). As soon as I came home I tried them!

Cotton 30.

This is what it is looking like so far:

The beginning.

Slowly growing :)

I really like how the half stitch torchon looks like with the spiders in it. The first time I made cloth stitch I didn't like it at all but now I think it looks pretty cool (it is also maybe because I know how to make it better now :)

Have I ever said how much I love lopi? One of the many reasons why I love it so much is exactly what I have been writing about now: It is possible to find it EVERYWHERE. And I mean EVERYWHERE and at an amazing price!

And talking about lopi... I finished the Harebell Fichu! Well, it is almost, almost done! It is now blocking and I still have to seam the ends. It looks like this now:

Harebell Fichu: Blocking.

More pictures soon!

Now I need to think about what to knit now! I am little clueless... I will have to dive into the books and Ravelry to find some inspiration!

Fichu: A learning experience.

After finishing the wedding shawl I felt that I needed to knit something small, not so complicated and especially quick to get some instant satisfaction. A few months ago i bought the book Victorian Lace Today and I still hadn't try to knit anything from it. So this was the perfect opportunity to do so!

After checking the book several times I decided to go for the Harebell Fichu.

Taken from Victorian Lace Today

It seemed to be the perfect project for the pink einband that I had in the stash. So, I read the pattern, the beginning seemed ok even though I had no idea how to make the  picot border that the pattern calls for. In the end it wasn't anything so terrible, at least nothing that reading some forums in Ravelry and a good video in Youtube could't solve.

So, for those who don't know how to make a picot the things is a simple as casting on two stitches (at the beginning of the wrong side) using the knitted on cast on method and then casting those two stitches off using the basic knit bind off. This video is very clear.

The real problem began after completing the garter stitch band. Now I had to knit the lace section and attach it to the band on the go following a set of instructions that tell what kind of join has to be made. This was a bit challenging. The way the edges are made in the patterns of this book are totally different from everything I had made before: picking up stitches and knitting or knitting separetely and sewing or grafting to the body.

Before starting it was even hard to see or imagine the structure of the Fichu. I made this simple drawing to show how it is worked:

Fichu schematics

In this technique the edge is knitted perpendicular to the border where it will be attached instead of parallel as I had always made it. So, in this case I am knitting the lace section which is only ca.30 stitches wide and every 2 or 4 pattern rows I am joining the lace to the garter stitch band following the pattern which tells what kind of join to make in order to avoid holes.

This is the way the joins look like. Pretty neat, isn't it?

At first I wasn't very sure about how this would work but now that I have already made almost half of it I must say that this works perfectly well and the joins look great! I am really enjoying the process of making this fichu. And one funny thing: I wanted to make a simple and quick project, ha! I was reading about this Fichu and it is apparently one of the most complicated patterns in the hole book, hehe.

This is what it looks like while knitting it.

A couple of weeks ago I received a message/surprise on Ravelry from Asun. She wanted to give me a couple of skeins of silk that she had left after finishing a project! How generous is that?! I felt really flattered about becoming the owner of those two skeins especially because I have never knitted anything with silk!

Well, the envelope arrived at the end of last week. I got this cute blue box with a little card, two skeins of black silk and two pens! I still don't have enough words to thank Asunción for this!

Now I already know that my next project will be made with silk... the question now is what. I still have some time to think about it since I am quite busy with the Fichu :)

About bobbin lace. I am almost done with all the excercises. So I decided to begin with the patterns section. I started with pattern number 1. I didn't do much of it because I thought I was doing something wrong and also because I think that the thread I am using was too thick for it. Anyways, I want to show you what it looks like:

Then I made the pattern number 2. For the color section I used embroidery thread. It was the only color thread that I had at home. I think it looks really cute:

Details: Cotton thread n°20, blue embroidery thread, 16 bobbins

And I also made number 3. But I think that this one was a total DISASTER. The thread is definitely too thick. It is cotton n°20. I think I should have used n°30 or 40 for this. Too bad I realized so late that tt was getting to chunky. For this pattern I got some help from Eva (thank you so much again!) because I was clueless about how to hand the bobbins to begin. Well, this is the chunky result:

Details: Cotton n°20, 30 bobbins.

I also got a new toy! Yes, another camera. This time a Zenit E which is very special because this is a version that celebrates the Olympic Games in Moscow  1980. The camera is beautiful: leather body and perfectly working, even the selenium cells for the lightmeter work like new!

These are some pics of the first roll I used with it:

Grótta

Hveragerði

JB

HF

And one last thing: Yesterday I went to Heimilisiðnaðarfélagið Íslands (Society of handcrafts of Iceland) to check some threads for bobbin lace because according to their website they had materials to make lace there. Well, they had some threads but only linen and just one number (and the price was not very nice: 17€ (2.800 ISK) for 500mt). They were also selling a pack of 50 bobbins and a bobbin lace pillow for 485€ (80.000 ISK). TOTALLY out of reality! I got my 50 bobbins for 25€ (4.000 ISK) in Spain and I made my own pillow with an Ikea table for only 30€ (5.000 ISK). So I saved 430 € (71.000 ISK)!! Unbelievable! I will DEFINETELY have to buy threads online!! What is it with prices here! That is something I really cannot get used to!