Knitting Olympics

As many others, I decided to join the 2006 Knitting Olympics, a really cool idea in my opinion! I decided I’ll make loop-d-loop’s lace leaf sweater:

However, since I am used to knitting in the round, I seriously oppose garments which are knitted in parts, and sewn together afterwards. Seriously. So I am going to adapt it to round-knitting hopefully without changing it too much from the original. In the weekend I went and bought yarn for it. I found this really soft “Eskimo” wool from Garnstudio in a nice blue color (but damn expensive!) and now I’m getting really excited to begin knitting!

(The color is much nicer in reality).

I’ve worked a bit on my lopapeysa (lopi sweater) and now I’m really close to finishing the yoke. I’m quite happy with it, I mixed elements from 3 different yoke patterns and I think it comes out nicely. Frank on the other hand hates the green color. He has strong opinions on many things! I’ve shown the sweater to a few people, who all exclaimed “Jeez it looks so small!”. My brother even asked if I was making it for a child. Of course the lopi sweaters are usually quite bulky, but that’s rather unfashionable these days. I keep answering that the sweater is small yes, but really, it’s supposed to be small. I even start making excuses that there’ll come a border for a zipper, and the zipper itself so it’ll add, like, 4cm to the width! People: It really is supposed to be small!

In the background you can see the lopi coat which I made in the autumn. It’s still missing buttons, although I finally managed to sew the second pocket down during the weekend.

Yesterday my lopi samples arrived by post. Yay! They look so beautiful.

In a way it’s sad that lopi is such a scratchy wool. I would not use it for a normal, “daily-wear” sweater due to that, but I just love the color selection so much. The colors are somehow so natural, not like the yarns which have this too perfect homogeneous color. I like a bit of variation.

At the moment I suddenly have many small projects started. This is not usual for me. I’m a bit worried that I’ll just work a bit here and there, lose interest and never finish anything. Let’s see. The wrist warmers are for example stuck. I wanted to put some beads on them, but I just cannot find beads with big enough holes so that I can use a big enough needle so that I can actually thread the yarn through the eye of the needle. It’s an annoying situation.

But soon the Olympics start, better get prepared!