Fond Memories of Iceland

It's inconceivable to me, but apparently I knit a whole sweater and didn't write about it on this blog the entire time I did it. I posted updates on my Instagram feed, but that's not the same, is it.

This sweater started last August when I found the yarn department at a grocery store in Iceland.

I was hoping to find some of the Lopi yarn Iceland is known for. I bought what I hoped would be a sweater quantity of a medium grey,

and a few colours to go with:

I didn't have enough sense to get a white or natural and had to order some after I got home!

It took me a while after I got home to get started, but by the end of September I had picked a pattern and gotten started. Seeing the Telja sweater on Instagram led me to Jennifer Steingass's designs. She has a lot of great colourwork patterns, but after admiring the rest, I stuck with the Telja design.

I decided to avoid colourwork that required three colours to be carried in one row.

I had done that on my Whistler sweater and decided next time it was required, I would skip the third colour and duplicate stitch it on after the knitting was done.

So that's what I did with the yellow and blue (above) and later in the pattern with the green. (I see in the picture above that I didn't wait until all of the knitting was done to start stitching. I think I remember a late night when I wanted to see how it would look.)

Here's the inside of the yoke after the blue and yellow were done:

Instead of three rows of carrying an extra strand, I just have one strand of blue or yellow going from one spot to the next.

Another thing I added to the sweater was a repeat of the colours from the yoke in stripes on one sleeve.

After knitting the first half of the first sleeve, it was obvious that it was going to be far too tight. I redid the sleeve starting with more stitches and re-figuring the increases so that I would end up with the same number of total stitches as the pattern at the same height of the sleeve.

I have made a few sweaters that have no real front or back (which is usually the case with yoke sweaters) and I always end up deciding one should be worn to the back (because of a seam or the colour jog) and then spend too much time trying to figure which is which when I go to put the sweater on.

So this time I took a small piece of red and wove it into the back in the same place a tag would be.

And then found out it wasn't necessary because the designer had added shaping to bring up the back of the neck and lower the front. (Obviously I knew there was shaping because I was knitting it, but I didn't know how effective it would be.)

Sweaters are a lot more comfortable that way. This picture also shows the I-cord bind off that cleanly finishes the edge of the neckline.

The sweater was worked from the bottom up; the sleeves were done first (to the underarm) and then the back and front together.

The pattern included waist shaping so the fit isn't quite so boxy. I ended up having to rework all of those decreases and increases as well because my waist is a different size than my bust and hips. I also shifted the side seam shaping above the waist so the front is wider than the back.

The sleeve cuffs and hem were started with a few rows of stocking stitch before a bit of ribbing.

This gives a rolled edge that looks like the I-cord on the neck edge.

Once I got going, this sweater really flew off the needles. It is a little thicker than yarn I generally work with, but it was still done on fairly small needles (3.75 mm). I really loved working with this lightly spun Icelandic woolly-wool.

Project Stats
Started: 28 Sep ‘18
Finished: 20 Oct '18
Pattern: Telja by Jennifer Steingass
Materials: Léttlopi in 57 Grey Heather (378g), 0051 White (42g), 1403 Blue (2g), 1703 Mimosa (9g), 9434 Crimson Red (9g), 1406 Spring Green Heather (1 g)

I've never recorded a video of a finished object before, but I was bowled over by all the noise the birds were making and this was my excuse to record them.