Report on the Nordic Knitting Conference
A few months ago, I asked who in this comm might be at the Nordic Knitting Conference in Seattle. You asked for a report, and so, at the risk of getting tacked up in knitting_snark, herein find my report on the conference, as well as my thoughts on Addi Lace needles, Malabrigo laceweight yarn, the Icelandic and Faroese shawl knitting books from Schoolhouse Press, and a Seattle yarn store that excelled in customer service.
The conference was a big enough deal to make the front page of the Living section of the Seattle Times.
These were the classes I got into--many more had been offered, but the conference filled up quickly. Many local knitters didn't even know this had been going on
Day One: Icelandic Shawl with Marilyn van Keppel
Marilyn van Keppel's claim to fame in the knitting world is that she has translated two books of shawl patterns from their native tongues to English. Outside of this, she is a retired Professor of Mathematics, which shows in her teaching style. Her classes focus on creating scale models of a shawl in a given style, that one might understand the techniques before applying them to a full-sized garment. This is helpful in applying her translations to the original-language works.
For the Icelandic Shawl class, we were instructed to bring four colors of laceweight yarn, three sizes of needles (US 2/3.0mm, US 6/4.0mm, and US 8/5.0mm), and one crochet hook (US F/3.75-4.0 mm) Today, we would discuss the shawls of Iceland, as described in the book Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl, or, in English, Three-Cornered and Long Shawls, by Sigríður Halldórsdóttir.
I thought I'd try new tools and materials to cover up the holes in my yarn and needle collections: 24" Addi lace needles for the smaller two sizes, but as the Addi Lace don't come larger than US 6/4.00 mm, for the US 8/5 mm needle, I pressed an already existing Addi Turbo into service. For the crochet hook, I settled on a Brittany crochet hook made from birch: the company is tolerably local to me and strives for good service and environmental responsibility in their products.
For my yarn, I chose Malabrigo's new baby merino laceweight in white, black, a pale grey/white ombre named "Polar Morn", and a bright red named "Sealing Wax".
For instructional purposes, as the paired books were not listed as a prerequisite to the class, we were given a handout describing a small shawl to be knitted in a fashion similar to the ones found in the book. This sample, like many in the book, is triangular (rectangular stoles are cited as "non-traditional" and "merely a fashion statement" by van Keppel): one begins the main body with a provisional cast on along the two bottom sides of an isoceles triangle and decreases throughout, and completes the main body by grafting the last few stitches together at top-center, which will rest on the nape of the neck when worn. The body is on a stockinette ground, and employs a fascinating single decrease (sl 1, k2, psso2) that I hadn't encountered before--NB that it's three stitches to two instead of two to one.
The other great benefit to having attended the class is the second handout: a bibliography of Icelandic knitting.
Once the main body of the shawl is completed, the provisional cast-on is picked up and a lacy border is worked and bound off by a crocheted chain. In an adult-sized version, the tails of the triangle should be long enough to wrap around one's self and tie together in the back.
While Marilyn van Keppel is a competent teacher, it was apparent that she's not as enthused about the Icelandic shawlmaking techniques as she is about the Faroese shawl. Still, I like her teaching style.
At the end of the session, she led the class through the simple algebra that could be used to expand the sample shawl pattern from doll size to adult size.
Book Review: Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl (Three-Cornered and Long Shawls), by Sigríður Halldórsdóttir, translated by Marilyn van Keppel.
When one buys Three-Cornered and Long Shawls from Schoolhouse Press, one will receive both the original Icelandic book and its English translation, and indeed it is impossible to knit from the English translation alone. The rights were only granted contingent upon the condition that the books be sold as a set, and that the charts would not be duplicated.
I'm not only a knitter, but an amateur scholar of Scandinavian Studies with some experience in desktop publishing involving medieval Germanic languages. As a result, I was also interested in a translation of the essay at the front of this book. However, van Keppel does not translate this: apparently it had taken so long to get the rights from the original author's daughter that the translator's interest had moved elsewhere. Another minor annoyance (and particularly obscure quibble) is that, in the translation, instead of a proper lower-case eth (ð), whoever did layout subsituted, incorrectly, either lower-case delta (δ) or the partial derivative (∂) (probably the latter, from what I know of Macs).
Neither of these detract in any way from the knitting value of the paired books.
Yarn Review: Malabrigo Lace
Malabrigo Lace is a spun single, 100% baby merino wool, theoretically available in all of their colors. However, there are some distribution difficulties, at least along the West Coast of the US. As such it can be hard to find in your Local Yarn Store.
This is soft for an all-wool, so soft that faeryl, my traveling companion, had to be shown a label before she quite believed it wasn't hiding angora among its fibers. Even before washing, the baby merino wool had appreciably bloomed--like, but not to the degree of, a mohair-bearing yarn. However, the fuzzy mohair-like bloom caused a small amount of welding--not enough to make frogging and tinking impossible, but enough to occasionally annoy. Even wrapped into hanks, before balling, this yarn has a tendency to stick to itself that can cause consternation and hair-tearing at the ball-winder, as I discovered when three of my four hanks skeined without a care, but the fourth took half an hour to come to order!
It will unravel (unlike mohair) but may argue and, rarely, refuse to cooperate. Two days later, I had to take my whole sample Faroese shawl apart and start over which went well enough until the cast-on row simply--wouldn't--BUDGE, and so had to be broken and discarded. Still, it comes with the rest of the Blessings of Wool: good stitch definition beneath the bloom, the bloom keeps you warmer for the trapped air, and so on. I liked it well enough, and Marilyn van Keppel was delighted over it, so I hope supply improves soon!
In a survey of my local yarn stores, plus one of the yarn stores of Seattle, I found a great variety of selection, but scant quantities.
Needle Review: Addi Lace
Addi has recently expanded their circular line to include wooden tips (the 'Natura' line) and another metal-tipped line optimized for lace knitting ('Lace'). I picked up a couple pairs of the lace-optimized needles, and I'm pleased with my purchase.
weds asks: "So, do these make a lightsabre noise when you remove them from the package?"
Yes! Not only that, but one may sharpen them on starlight and k9tog tbl with actual spiderweb from actual spiders with one swift motion!
No?
Well, all right, more seriously:
The lace-optimized needles are the result of a manufacturer responding to knitters' feedback about their product's viability for the task at hand. For all practical considerations, I can agree with this review in Knitters' Review, including the assertion that these needles make much less noise than regular Addi Turbos. I haven't compared them to the Knit Picks Options as the other reviewer has, but they worked well for the two shawls I knitted this weekend.
Day Two: Norwegian Traditional Design with Annemor Sundbo
Once upon a time, a young lady named Annemor Sundbø stopped by a shoddy mill--in its original definition, "shoddy" meant:
Woollen yarn obtained by tearing to shreds refuse woollen rags, which, with the addition of some new wool, is made into a kind of cloth.
--from there, it moved into the modern meaning, but this was one of the last of those mills in Norway. Ms Sundbø was a hand-weaver and wondered if the mill owner could teach her a thing or two that she could apply to her own work--he would, but only if she bought the mill!
In inspecting the piles of hand-knitted clothing that were the never-ending supply of raw materials for her new shoddy mill, Sundbø found thousands of garments, which became fodder for her two older books: Kvardagsstrikk. - Kulturskattar frå fillehaugen, translated as Everyday Knitting: Treasures from a Rag Pile and Lusekofta fra Setesdal, or Setedal Sweaters: The History of the Norwegian Lice Pattern.
The material in this class pertained more to just-released book, Usynlege trååar i strikkekunsten, or Invisible Threads in Knitting. faeryl took Annemor's "Magic Knitting" class the third day, which also covers material from this book in order to knit small cats, trolls, and huldrefolk (faeryl came away with a cat and a raven).
Unlike the two shawl classes, the idea in this one was to deconstruct something knit with traditional motifs and recombine them in a way pleasing to us.
To this end, Sundbø had photocopied several mittens from her library, and gave a stack of eight photocopies of the same mitten to each student. Also, there were several large (US Tabloid/11"x17") sheets with only plain knitting, or a simple lice-patterned* field. Our task, with scissors and glue, was to cut apart the mittens and assemble the motives any way we liked on a new field. In the afternoon, we were to draft these out into actual stranded knitting patterns--this was made harder by the lack of knitters' (or in fact any) graph paper, but we muddled through. The mirrors were to better visualize how a motif might look doubled--with two mirrors, one could see how it might look in radial, rather than bilateral, symmetry.
I have to admit, this one made me feel pretty self-conscious, but I got over myself. I like to think I got more of the point of the exercise than some of the others--at least one person glued eight photocopied mittens to a plain knitted field and declared herself done, while I cut apart the points of an eight-pointed star and scrambled them around for my amusement, sprinkling spider motives and smaller stars among the wreckage. In the end, I had a draft half-completed that might have made a cushion, or part of a sweater.
While we busied ourselves with scissors and glue, Ms Sundbø explained the symbolism of many of the motifs she had found in her research. This was somewhat of a mixed bag if one is primarily interested in Norwegian (or even overall Germanic) symbolism, as she mixes symbolism from many regions and times freely in Invisible Threads, without much regard for citation. On the other hand, in the book and in the class, she relates the tale of an interesting interaction with King Harald where she tries to explain how the reindeer motif is first documented in northern Italy--without openly disagreeing with her king about a motif near and dear to the Norwegian heart.
Anyway, among the things she had for sale on the stage included a more scholarly-looking paper that unfortunately sold out before I could pick up a copy--this may have the scholastic rigor Invisible Threads lacks. Also, I haven't read the other two books as yet, although I do own them.
* - Yes, that's right. Lice pattern: single stitches on a knitted field of a strong complementary color (black/white are favorite) are called lice. See lusekofta.
Day Three: Faroese Shawl with Marilyn van Keppel
As we discovered today, the Faroes are the real home of Marilyn van Keppel's heart.
Also, they are the home of something I, in my infinite something-or-other, have dubbed the Shawl of Existential Angst.
Wouldn't that make a good D&D item?
Whatever did a simple garter-stitch shawl do to earn such a daunting name? I'm getting there, but I have to do the rest of the report first.
The Faroese shawl shares a couple key construction details with the Icelandic shawl: both are roughly triangular, both are cast on from a long edge that works toward top-center-back in ever-decreasing rows.
Unlike the Icelandic shawl, however, the Faroese shawl is knit in distinct regions: an edge strip, the swooping wings, and a center gusset that narrows as it goes up. The constant "structural" decreases at the borders between these regions modify the shape from a strict triangle to a swooping wingform. Additional "shaping" decreases serve to hold the shawl to the shoulders by providing three-dimensional cups that an unshaped triangle, or even a wing shape, might lack.
In other books, e.g. Folk Shawls, one may find ever-increasing patterns that basically do all of this in reverse. These are adaptations, not taken from The Book--and here there is exactly one, a slender red-bound volume titled Føroysk Bindingarmynstur--or, in English, Faroese Knitted Shawls.
Book Review: Føroysk Bindingarmynstur, or Faroese Shawl Knitting, by the Home Industries Council of the Faroe Islands, trans Marilyn van Keppel
Føroysk Bindingarmynstur, like the Icelandic Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl, is only available as a English translation packaged with the original-language text through Schoolhouse Press. However, unlike the Icelandic book, Marilyn has translated rather more of the volume, and has learned some Faroese.
One would order this from Schoolhouse Press, but it's on backorder: the original distributor has become unavailable, and the replacement swears the books exist and are published but is having trouble finding them. Or they're already on their way; it was unclear at class time
I found the six-hour helpful in translating the patterns--and their translations--as tackling the books on their own can be daunting. (we're very near the existential angst, watch out or you'll step in it)
The cunning folk of the Bundnaturriklæðið (Home Industries Council) have found a way to get a whole lace chart into a fairly narrow band on a page. What's more, on that same page, there's room for a schematic that tells one, in general terms, where things like decreases ought to go. It's all the key bits of the pattern on one small page, or a spread at most, and it's terribly efficient.
However...
...the way they made the lace chart fit is that they only tell you where to put the yarn-overs. What you are not told is where to put these decreases, nor which decreases to use, although they do have some suggestions in the book's front matter, and MvK has a few of her own.
Elsewhere, an original mattern may say to decrease every fifth stitch on one of the shaping decreases--and the round will almost certainly not be neatly divisible by five. Four (or three!) will be left over.
The edge strip will go from, say, three stitches to two. The schematic will say that at some point, as it strikes you, you should do so. The schematic will suggest, but not direct, a place to do so, and it will be "oh, somewhere between these two shaping decreases". These are all left as Knitter's Choice.
I was suddenly very happy to have spent quite so much time plowing through EZ's work--who, as all know, strongly encourages independent thought in one's pursuit of knitting. It helped.
However, I still saw the crazed punchcard stack of the lace chart and went a mite spare before steeling my nerve. I regarded the handout, pencil in hand, and began to sketch in the decreases, with MvK's help and by her suggestion. It came out well, and was properly shaped--as patterned, the samples from either shawl class will fit a 12" doll.
Also, although MvK said that Faroese yarn as such is not available in the United States, this is not entirely so. Note, however, that that's not a US distributor, but the actual people on the actual Faroes, with their actual Faroese yarn from actual Faroese sheep.
Still, $7 US for six kilometers of laceweight single (3000m two-ply, 2000m three-ply) seems a goodly deal--if purchased in sufficient quantity to justify the shipping costs!
Yarn Store Review: Churchmouse Yarn and Teas, Bainbridge, WA
The next day, my hosts, travelling companion, were at liberty until we had to catch the plane back to California. We wanted to visit a local yarn store, but we only really had time (and host's forbearance) enough for one. We chose Churchmouse Yarn and Teas...because it served tea (to please our non-knitting, tea-drinking host) and needed a ferry to get there (to pleasing faeryl the travelling companion).
Churchmouse is a few blocks from the ferry station, just off Bainbridge's main shopping street, but be advised that these are uphill blocks. Ferry service is frequent (the store's website links to the ferry schedule).
Churchmouse is an open, airy store, with a wide selection, although rather skimpy when it came to laceweight. What I did find...
...was that they had just had the Hand Maiden ladies come through. Ah, Hand Maiden, the investments I have made while heeding the siren song of Sea Silk likely covered your plane fare...
But wait!
The prices were a little higher than I'm used to from SF Bay Area yarn stores, but this was more than countered by the level of service I encountered. They were much impressed by the novel lace maneuver in the sample Icelandic shawl (sl 1 pwise, k2, psso2) and by the hand and bloom of the Malabrigo laceweight yarn. It's also the first yarn store I've ever seen that had a bead display, although obviously with a focus on beads that highlight knitting and crochet (i.e., #6-8 seed beads). Also, prominently on display around the store was a particularly elegant beret--and their in-store pattern for this was free. Not free-with-purchase, mind: free. I've knitted two since; the designer is also competent.
I left, not with the Sea Silk I coveted, but with two skeins of Blue Sky Yarns Alpaca and Silk to make my own beaded beret. Alas, a tragic ball-winder accident left me with a alpaca-silk tangle that threatened to quite overwhelm the front of the store in a rising tide of black yarn.
Then the owner came to my rescue.
She swapped out the skein. For free. I had expected to be stuck to that ballwinder until the store closed and the last ferry was tooting mournfully at the dock, or to abandon the skein in favor of making the plane, only to be let off the hook entirely. Excellent service, and I can wholly recommend the store.
Keep in mind, though, that unlike the similarly-named Village Yarn and Tea, Churchmouse sells, but does not serve, tea.
Summary:
While I didn't get into the class that originally drew me (Mittens from Rovaniemi), I was happy to have attended the Nordic Knitting Conference in Seattle and, were it offered again, I would probably go--indeed, there were rumors that there might be another in two years. Strong coffee (it's the Nordic Heritage Museum; these are peoples known for consumption of caffeine and alcohol alike) and dainty pastries was available throughout, even if one were not on the box lunch plan (I wasn't). The instructors I had were knowledgeable and competent, and I hear this was so for others as well.
Malabrigo's lace singles are yummy, as are Addi Lace needles. If in Seattle, Churchmouse is a dandy yarn shop and worth your money.
Thanks for reading!
-- Lorrie
The conference was a big enough deal to make the front page of the Living section of the Seattle Times.
These were the classes I got into--many more had been offered, but the conference filled up quickly. Many local knitters didn't even know this had been going on
Day One: Icelandic Shawl with Marilyn van Keppel
Marilyn van Keppel's claim to fame in the knitting world is that she has translated two books of shawl patterns from their native tongues to English. Outside of this, she is a retired Professor of Mathematics, which shows in her teaching style. Her classes focus on creating scale models of a shawl in a given style, that one might understand the techniques before applying them to a full-sized garment. This is helpful in applying her translations to the original-language works.
For the Icelandic Shawl class, we were instructed to bring four colors of laceweight yarn, three sizes of needles (US 2/3.0mm, US 6/4.0mm, and US 8/5.0mm), and one crochet hook (US F/3.75-4.0 mm) Today, we would discuss the shawls of Iceland, as described in the book Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl, or, in English, Three-Cornered and Long Shawls, by Sigríður Halldórsdóttir.
I thought I'd try new tools and materials to cover up the holes in my yarn and needle collections: 24" Addi lace needles for the smaller two sizes, but as the Addi Lace don't come larger than US 6/4.00 mm, for the US 8/5 mm needle, I pressed an already existing Addi Turbo into service. For the crochet hook, I settled on a Brittany crochet hook made from birch: the company is tolerably local to me and strives for good service and environmental responsibility in their products.
For my yarn, I chose Malabrigo's new baby merino laceweight in white, black, a pale grey/white ombre named "Polar Morn", and a bright red named "Sealing Wax".
For instructional purposes, as the paired books were not listed as a prerequisite to the class, we were given a handout describing a small shawl to be knitted in a fashion similar to the ones found in the book. This sample, like many in the book, is triangular (rectangular stoles are cited as "non-traditional" and "merely a fashion statement" by van Keppel): one begins the main body with a provisional cast on along the two bottom sides of an isoceles triangle and decreases throughout, and completes the main body by grafting the last few stitches together at top-center, which will rest on the nape of the neck when worn. The body is on a stockinette ground, and employs a fascinating single decrease (sl 1, k2, psso2) that I hadn't encountered before--NB that it's three stitches to two instead of two to one.
The other great benefit to having attended the class is the second handout: a bibliography of Icelandic knitting.
Once the main body of the shawl is completed, the provisional cast-on is picked up and a lacy border is worked and bound off by a crocheted chain. In an adult-sized version, the tails of the triangle should be long enough to wrap around one's self and tie together in the back.
While Marilyn van Keppel is a competent teacher, it was apparent that she's not as enthused about the Icelandic shawlmaking techniques as she is about the Faroese shawl. Still, I like her teaching style.
At the end of the session, she led the class through the simple algebra that could be used to expand the sample shawl pattern from doll size to adult size.
Book Review: Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl (Three-Cornered and Long Shawls), by Sigríður Halldórsdóttir, translated by Marilyn van Keppel.
When one buys Three-Cornered and Long Shawls from Schoolhouse Press, one will receive both the original Icelandic book and its English translation, and indeed it is impossible to knit from the English translation alone. The rights were only granted contingent upon the condition that the books be sold as a set, and that the charts would not be duplicated.
I'm not only a knitter, but an amateur scholar of Scandinavian Studies with some experience in desktop publishing involving medieval Germanic languages. As a result, I was also interested in a translation of the essay at the front of this book. However, van Keppel does not translate this: apparently it had taken so long to get the rights from the original author's daughter that the translator's interest had moved elsewhere. Another minor annoyance (and particularly obscure quibble) is that, in the translation, instead of a proper lower-case eth (ð), whoever did layout subsituted, incorrectly, either lower-case delta (δ) or the partial derivative (∂) (probably the latter, from what I know of Macs).
Neither of these detract in any way from the knitting value of the paired books.
Yarn Review: Malabrigo Lace
Malabrigo Lace is a spun single, 100% baby merino wool, theoretically available in all of their colors. However, there are some distribution difficulties, at least along the West Coast of the US. As such it can be hard to find in your Local Yarn Store.
This is soft for an all-wool, so soft that faeryl, my traveling companion, had to be shown a label before she quite believed it wasn't hiding angora among its fibers. Even before washing, the baby merino wool had appreciably bloomed--like, but not to the degree of, a mohair-bearing yarn. However, the fuzzy mohair-like bloom caused a small amount of welding--not enough to make frogging and tinking impossible, but enough to occasionally annoy. Even wrapped into hanks, before balling, this yarn has a tendency to stick to itself that can cause consternation and hair-tearing at the ball-winder, as I discovered when three of my four hanks skeined without a care, but the fourth took half an hour to come to order!
It will unravel (unlike mohair) but may argue and, rarely, refuse to cooperate. Two days later, I had to take my whole sample Faroese shawl apart and start over which went well enough until the cast-on row simply--wouldn't--BUDGE, and so had to be broken and discarded. Still, it comes with the rest of the Blessings of Wool: good stitch definition beneath the bloom, the bloom keeps you warmer for the trapped air, and so on. I liked it well enough, and Marilyn van Keppel was delighted over it, so I hope supply improves soon!
In a survey of my local yarn stores, plus one of the yarn stores of Seattle, I found a great variety of selection, but scant quantities.
Needle Review: Addi Lace
Addi has recently expanded their circular line to include wooden tips (the 'Natura' line) and another metal-tipped line optimized for lace knitting ('Lace'). I picked up a couple pairs of the lace-optimized needles, and I'm pleased with my purchase.
weds asks: "So, do these make a lightsabre noise when you remove them from the package?"
Yes! Not only that, but one may sharpen them on starlight and k9tog tbl with actual spiderweb from actual spiders with one swift motion!
No?
Well, all right, more seriously:
The lace-optimized needles are the result of a manufacturer responding to knitters' feedback about their product's viability for the task at hand. For all practical considerations, I can agree with this review in Knitters' Review, including the assertion that these needles make much less noise than regular Addi Turbos. I haven't compared them to the Knit Picks Options as the other reviewer has, but they worked well for the two shawls I knitted this weekend.
Day Two: Norwegian Traditional Design with Annemor Sundbo
Once upon a time, a young lady named Annemor Sundbø stopped by a shoddy mill--in its original definition, "shoddy" meant:
Woollen yarn obtained by tearing to shreds refuse woollen rags, which, with the addition of some new wool, is made into a kind of cloth.
--from there, it moved into the modern meaning, but this was one of the last of those mills in Norway. Ms Sundbø was a hand-weaver and wondered if the mill owner could teach her a thing or two that she could apply to her own work--he would, but only if she bought the mill!
In inspecting the piles of hand-knitted clothing that were the never-ending supply of raw materials for her new shoddy mill, Sundbø found thousands of garments, which became fodder for her two older books: Kvardagsstrikk. - Kulturskattar frå fillehaugen, translated as Everyday Knitting: Treasures from a Rag Pile and Lusekofta fra Setesdal, or Setedal Sweaters: The History of the Norwegian Lice Pattern.
The material in this class pertained more to just-released book, Usynlege trååar i strikkekunsten, or Invisible Threads in Knitting. faeryl took Annemor's "Magic Knitting" class the third day, which also covers material from this book in order to knit small cats, trolls, and huldrefolk (faeryl came away with a cat and a raven).
Unlike the two shawl classes, the idea in this one was to deconstruct something knit with traditional motifs and recombine them in a way pleasing to us.
To this end, Sundbø had photocopied several mittens from her library, and gave a stack of eight photocopies of the same mitten to each student. Also, there were several large (US Tabloid/11"x17") sheets with only plain knitting, or a simple lice-patterned* field. Our task, with scissors and glue, was to cut apart the mittens and assemble the motives any way we liked on a new field. In the afternoon, we were to draft these out into actual stranded knitting patterns--this was made harder by the lack of knitters' (or in fact any) graph paper, but we muddled through. The mirrors were to better visualize how a motif might look doubled--with two mirrors, one could see how it might look in radial, rather than bilateral, symmetry.
I have to admit, this one made me feel pretty self-conscious, but I got over myself. I like to think I got more of the point of the exercise than some of the others--at least one person glued eight photocopied mittens to a plain knitted field and declared herself done, while I cut apart the points of an eight-pointed star and scrambled them around for my amusement, sprinkling spider motives and smaller stars among the wreckage. In the end, I had a draft half-completed that might have made a cushion, or part of a sweater.
While we busied ourselves with scissors and glue, Ms Sundbø explained the symbolism of many of the motifs she had found in her research. This was somewhat of a mixed bag if one is primarily interested in Norwegian (or even overall Germanic) symbolism, as she mixes symbolism from many regions and times freely in Invisible Threads, without much regard for citation. On the other hand, in the book and in the class, she relates the tale of an interesting interaction with King Harald where she tries to explain how the reindeer motif is first documented in northern Italy--without openly disagreeing with her king about a motif near and dear to the Norwegian heart.
Anyway, among the things she had for sale on the stage included a more scholarly-looking paper that unfortunately sold out before I could pick up a copy--this may have the scholastic rigor Invisible Threads lacks. Also, I haven't read the other two books as yet, although I do own them.
* - Yes, that's right. Lice pattern: single stitches on a knitted field of a strong complementary color (black/white are favorite) are called lice. See lusekofta.
Day Three: Faroese Shawl with Marilyn van Keppel
As we discovered today, the Faroes are the real home of Marilyn van Keppel's heart.
Also, they are the home of something I, in my infinite something-or-other, have dubbed the Shawl of Existential Angst.
Wouldn't that make a good D&D item?
Whatever did a simple garter-stitch shawl do to earn such a daunting name? I'm getting there, but I have to do the rest of the report first.
The Faroese shawl shares a couple key construction details with the Icelandic shawl: both are roughly triangular, both are cast on from a long edge that works toward top-center-back in ever-decreasing rows.
Unlike the Icelandic shawl, however, the Faroese shawl is knit in distinct regions: an edge strip, the swooping wings, and a center gusset that narrows as it goes up. The constant "structural" decreases at the borders between these regions modify the shape from a strict triangle to a swooping wingform. Additional "shaping" decreases serve to hold the shawl to the shoulders by providing three-dimensional cups that an unshaped triangle, or even a wing shape, might lack.
In other books, e.g. Folk Shawls, one may find ever-increasing patterns that basically do all of this in reverse. These are adaptations, not taken from The Book--and here there is exactly one, a slender red-bound volume titled Føroysk Bindingarmynstur--or, in English, Faroese Knitted Shawls.
Book Review: Føroysk Bindingarmynstur, or Faroese Shawl Knitting, by the Home Industries Council of the Faroe Islands, trans Marilyn van Keppel
Føroysk Bindingarmynstur, like the Icelandic Þríhyrnur og Lansjöl, is only available as a English translation packaged with the original-language text through Schoolhouse Press. However, unlike the Icelandic book, Marilyn has translated rather more of the volume, and has learned some Faroese.
One would order this from Schoolhouse Press, but it's on backorder: the original distributor has become unavailable, and the replacement swears the books exist and are published but is having trouble finding them. Or they're already on their way; it was unclear at class time
I found the six-hour helpful in translating the patterns--and their translations--as tackling the books on their own can be daunting. (we're very near the existential angst, watch out or you'll step in it)
The cunning folk of the Bundnaturriklæðið (Home Industries Council) have found a way to get a whole lace chart into a fairly narrow band on a page. What's more, on that same page, there's room for a schematic that tells one, in general terms, where things like decreases ought to go. It's all the key bits of the pattern on one small page, or a spread at most, and it's terribly efficient.
However...
...the way they made the lace chart fit is that they only tell you where to put the yarn-overs. What you are not told is where to put these decreases, nor which decreases to use, although they do have some suggestions in the book's front matter, and MvK has a few of her own.
Elsewhere, an original mattern may say to decrease every fifth stitch on one of the shaping decreases--and the round will almost certainly not be neatly divisible by five. Four (or three!) will be left over.
The edge strip will go from, say, three stitches to two. The schematic will say that at some point, as it strikes you, you should do so. The schematic will suggest, but not direct, a place to do so, and it will be "oh, somewhere between these two shaping decreases". These are all left as Knitter's Choice.
I was suddenly very happy to have spent quite so much time plowing through EZ's work--who, as all know, strongly encourages independent thought in one's pursuit of knitting. It helped.
However, I still saw the crazed punchcard stack of the lace chart and went a mite spare before steeling my nerve. I regarded the handout, pencil in hand, and began to sketch in the decreases, with MvK's help and by her suggestion. It came out well, and was properly shaped--as patterned, the samples from either shawl class will fit a 12" doll.
Also, although MvK said that Faroese yarn as such is not available in the United States, this is not entirely so. Note, however, that that's not a US distributor, but the actual people on the actual Faroes, with their actual Faroese yarn from actual Faroese sheep.
Still, $7 US for six kilometers of laceweight single (3000m two-ply, 2000m three-ply) seems a goodly deal--if purchased in sufficient quantity to justify the shipping costs!
Yarn Store Review: Churchmouse Yarn and Teas, Bainbridge, WA
The next day, my hosts, travelling companion, were at liberty until we had to catch the plane back to California. We wanted to visit a local yarn store, but we only really had time (and host's forbearance) enough for one. We chose Churchmouse Yarn and Teas...because it served tea (to please our non-knitting, tea-drinking host) and needed a ferry to get there (to pleasing faeryl the travelling companion).
Churchmouse is a few blocks from the ferry station, just off Bainbridge's main shopping street, but be advised that these are uphill blocks. Ferry service is frequent (the store's website links to the ferry schedule).
Churchmouse is an open, airy store, with a wide selection, although rather skimpy when it came to laceweight. What I did find...
...was that they had just had the Hand Maiden ladies come through. Ah, Hand Maiden, the investments I have made while heeding the siren song of Sea Silk likely covered your plane fare...
But wait!
The prices were a little higher than I'm used to from SF Bay Area yarn stores, but this was more than countered by the level of service I encountered. They were much impressed by the novel lace maneuver in the sample Icelandic shawl (sl 1 pwise, k2, psso2) and by the hand and bloom of the Malabrigo laceweight yarn. It's also the first yarn store I've ever seen that had a bead display, although obviously with a focus on beads that highlight knitting and crochet (i.e., #6-8 seed beads). Also, prominently on display around the store was a particularly elegant beret--and their in-store pattern for this was free. Not free-with-purchase, mind: free. I've knitted two since; the designer is also competent.
I left, not with the Sea Silk I coveted, but with two skeins of Blue Sky Yarns Alpaca and Silk to make my own beaded beret. Alas, a tragic ball-winder accident left me with a alpaca-silk tangle that threatened to quite overwhelm the front of the store in a rising tide of black yarn.
Then the owner came to my rescue.
She swapped out the skein. For free. I had expected to be stuck to that ballwinder until the store closed and the last ferry was tooting mournfully at the dock, or to abandon the skein in favor of making the plane, only to be let off the hook entirely. Excellent service, and I can wholly recommend the store.
Keep in mind, though, that unlike the similarly-named Village Yarn and Tea, Churchmouse sells, but does not serve, tea.
Summary:
While I didn't get into the class that originally drew me (Mittens from Rovaniemi), I was happy to have attended the Nordic Knitting Conference in Seattle and, were it offered again, I would probably go--indeed, there were rumors that there might be another in two years. Strong coffee (it's the Nordic Heritage Museum; these are peoples known for consumption of caffeine and alcohol alike) and dainty pastries was available throughout, even if one were not on the box lunch plan (I wasn't). The instructors I had were knowledgeable and competent, and I hear this was so for others as well.
Malabrigo's lace singles are yummy, as are Addi Lace needles. If in Seattle, Churchmouse is a dandy yarn shop and worth your money.
Thanks for reading!
-- Lorrie