My husband has warm feet

So as Australians, it is a bit of a cold shock to visit Europe in winter. Our hand knitted socks have been in high rotation, and I finished these ones for the Fireman on the flight from Sydney to Hong Kong.  Their first day out was a visit to the Musée Jacquemart-André, one of my favorite small museums in Paris.  I tried to persuade him to pose with the socks closer to the art, but this shot was the best I could extract.

We are now in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and the sock model was feeling a tad more co-operative – the absence of museum guards, and the the lure of a glass of red might have helped.  Don’t be fooled by the pose into thinking that the weather has been warm – when the socks were hanging on the line today after a wash they froze!

Technical details here.

I went to Iceland in January and I didn’t buy any yarn

In Iceland, there is yarn for sale in lots of places, but so far as I could see – it was all Lopi. As a wool lover, I feel like I should really like Lopi, but, I really don’t.

Part of the problem is that I was knitting this scarf while I was in Iceland.

It doesn’t look like much in the photos, but the yarn is the softest I have ever felt.  When I went to the Nordic Knitting conference in 2009, I felt the original Raha scarf as knitted by Nancy Bush, bought the yarn, and let it age in my stash.  Last October, my mother and sister went to the Nordic Knitting conference (without me! the traitors!) and I thought that the time was right to knit up my qiviut.

I followed the pattern pretty closely, but did a provisional cast on and made it into a cowl.  I pretty much knitted until all the yarn was gone. More technical notes on Ravelry.  It is the softest, lightest cowl and feels like an angel is caressing my neck. You can buy some here.  I finished it last night in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and wore it today.  It makes even slightly scratchy yarn very difficult to contemplate.

More striped socks

These were commuter socks. Inspired by a lot of beautiful stripy socks around including Sabs, Linda, and Siow Chin.  After quite a few years of knitting socks, I think that the Regia promise of 10 years is a reasonable one – these socks are 6 years old and are still going strong.

I only found one skein of the Regia at Spotlight when alerted (I think by Donna) to the fact that it was on sale there for a ridiculously low price.  I think I paid $1.70 for one 50 gram skein?  The Wollmeise leftovers from these socks padded out them out.  I will be very interested to see the relative wearing properties of the two yarns.

 

The dog decided to add his foot for scale.

Speaking of Regia – I am now knitting socks using the first range of Arne & Carlos Design Line.  They are the prettiest faux-isle patterns that I have seen to date.

Roositud Socks

 

I don’t knit as much as I would like these days.  I write a lot, but all in corporate litigation practice (and I’ll spare my gentle readers from the delights of that vocabulary).

Writing this post makes me remember fondly learning the Roositud technique in Estonia.   These socks were knitted out of Wollmeise, with enough of the contrast coming from a taste of Wollmeise pack.  As my sister points out, Roositud is just reverse fairisle, and it makes a very nice pattern on the socks.   The pattern is  Roosimine, and includes a very detailed tutorial on the inlay technique.  More technical details here.

They were entered in the Sydney Royal Easter show, and I was surprised (the Roositud is quite uneven on the first sock)  to receive a third prize.