Christmas is coming...

I´ve been busy creating different things lately.

The first thing I want to tell you about is our new advent-candle-holder. I really love driftwood and I found this beautiful piece in the north of Iceland about 2 years ago. I took it with me because I loved it, without knowing what I was going to do with it. Right now, I´m so glad I did! 

Using my pretty piece of driftwood, old candle-holders with a needle at the bottom - the ones you would normally use for candle-wreaths (like those) & tiny wooden stars I bought at Laugarvegur (púkó og smart) I made this really simple and natural-looking advent-candle-holder. :-)   

Ooooohhhh how I love it...

Kría

The second thing I want to tell you about is my second Kria-shawl - what a wonderful project... you can work on it everywhere and in almost every situation (except maby while driving or sleeping)... 

you can take a look at my first one in this post and on Raverly. 

yarn: my own, handdyed einband (icelandic wool), dyed with different kind of plants

made for: my lovely friend Rodrigo for his birthday

Button: from my "button-stash"

And now to my nr. 3: my candle-decorating. 

How I did it: 

1. I found some lovely pictures on pinterest (you can find them over there in my "jól" board), printed them out (normal paper, landscape layout, with black ink only) 

2. Cut the picture out in the right size, depending on your candle

3. Finally, I mod-podged my candle about 3 times, glued the picture on the candle and mod-podged it from the outside. 

It has been burning for a few days now, the paper has still not gone up in flames and we really love the way it looks... 

I´m thinking about making some special designs, using Illustrator as Christmas-gifts...

Kría

I think crochet-projects like shawls, collars and squares make the most perfect on-the-go-projects. It´s just one hook, one strand of yarn and you can easily choose a pattern that´s just a constant repetition... you can therefore easally work without counting and making mistakes all the time AND it fits into most handbags. 

Because of this, I started making my first crochet shawl during a campingtrip this summer. It´s the wonderful pattern "Kría" from the beautiful book "Þóra heklbók" by Tinna Þórudóttir Þorvaldsdóttir.
Making this shawl is totally addicting - once you´ve started, you can´t stop and now that I´ve finished one, I can´t wait to make another one in different colours!! Crazy! What I really like about this shawl is, that I was able to use my leftover-natural-dyed-yarn... it´s so hard to find use for leftover einband (lace)... and the strange thing is, that no matter how many colours you use for this project, it will always look nice (that´s not the case for knitted lace shawls).
I added a scalloped edging (5dc each) and I´m so glad I did - it makes it even more pretty!

My new shawl reminds me this wonderful summer I had with my boys, all the fun campingtrips, nature and sun... thanks to all those memories and the warmth of the colours it will keep me and my soul warm on cold, dark winterdays.

Details: 
Yarn: icelandic einband (lace), dyed by myself with many different plants
Hook: 3,5
Repeats: 62 since I like bigger shawls 
Modifications: I added a edging
Resumé: love this pattern, love this book!

amazing and surprising how the combination of many different colours really works for this shawl

love the size...

so warm and cozy!

love those colours... 

scalloped edging

Shawlette

Over a week ago I finally finished my Echo-flower-shawlette. Rodprjonar, Gummi and me did this one as a Knit-Along in our little Knit-Along-group of three... you can take a look at Rodprjonars shawl here.

This shawl really looks a lot more complicated than it really is, and if you aren´t knitting about 20 other things on the side like I did, it shouldn´t take too long. I really love the nupps, the flower-chart and the way the main-chart and edge-chart flow perfectly together. I wouldn´t be surprised if I made this one again one day...

Details:
yarn: einband, dyed with blueberries, I picked in the lavafields with my mum last fall
needles: 3,5 (I have a really loose gauge, when knitting lace)

and here you go:

A really good day

I finished a new, very simple shawl yesterday called "vinkonusjal" (Fleiri Prjónaperlur). It´s the second time I knit this one and I really like the pattern - it´s so easy, quick and so very different every time, depending on the yarn and needles you use. This time I used the soft, icelandic "kambgarn" and needles 3,5. The piece is really small and cute- it´s more like a bactus or a shawl for a little girl.






I also have to tell you, that today was a really good day. It all started with a cup of coffee with a very dear friend, who sent me home with a black garbagebag filled with rhubarb for my yarn-dyeing... but I´ll probably make sume rhubarb-jam, pie and some other things with it too, since it really is a lot! She also gave me a small owl for my collection and some owl-napkins which I love:

On my way home, I stopped at a thriftstore and got a really beautiful retro-oil-lamp, a HUGE pot for my yarndyeing (my biggest one so far) and a candle-holder which I´m going to use for special project I´ll show you later... I just couldn´t believe my luck:

Aeolian Knit-Along - done

I finally finished our (Rodprjonar and Gummi) “little-knit-along” Aeolian-shawl. One of the practical things about our Knit-Along was that everytime one of us had a problem we could ask the other 2 people who where working on the same project for advice. It was also very exciting to see, how different one pattern can turn out, depending on the knitter and the yarn. It was so much fun doing this, and I hope we´ll repeat this with another project in the future. Rodprjonar was the first to finish his really beautiful shawl - you can see that here.

Details on mine:

Pattern: Aeolian shawl size, wide edge

Yarn: einband, colours: my own (2 different kind of lichen; brúnir tónar: skófir; guli: hreindýramosi)

Needles: 3.5 mm

- Began knitting with a 2 stitches garter stitch tab on a provisional crochet cast on.
- 7 loops nupps

Me and Gummi made:
- 12 repeats of the Yucca chart (R. made 6).
- 2 repeats of the Agave chart (R. made none).
- 1 repeat of the final Agave chart (R. made 1).
- 1 repeat of the edge chart (R. made 1).

My shawl is really HUGE – I couldn´t believe how huge it was when the blocking was done!! But I LOVE exactly that about it and everything else too – the colours, the pattern and the fact that it was made in our own little knit-along! I also couldn´t agree more with Rodprjonar when he says on his blog: "The transitions between section look amazingly pretty and in harmony and the edge is breathtaking".
I can´t wait meet G. and R. to see with my own eyes how there shawls look like!!

Our own little Aeolian Knit-Along

The other day, when knitting with Rodprjonar and G. we were talking about how we all wanted to knit the Aeolian-shawl - and that´s when we decided to make our own little Aeolian-knit-along. The interesting thing about our knit-along is to see how different one shawl can look, depending on the yarn, implementation and knitter! I just can´t wait to see how R. and G. shawls look like! Here you can see Rodprjonars version.
So far, I´ve learned a lot by knitting this piece - for example nupps... they look really pretty but I hate making them... knitting those 7 stiches together is so hard to do!
I´m using my own hand-dyed yarn in 2 brown shades for the main-charts and 1 yellow/brownish shade for the edge-chart (dyed with 2 different types of lichen). I love the way the colours look - they are quite uneven and alive... really hard to describe and you can´t really caputure them on pictures. (If you click on the pictures, you can see them fullsize)

Progress on Kyrrð

I just finished the 9th (out of 22) repeat of the scarf-part of Kyrrð... and the more I knit, the more fun I have! And of course, I'm always getting quicker and quicker. I´ve never started a project until now, that I just can´t stop working on. I´d love to make another Kyrrð when I finish this one, using my own hand-dyed yarn!

Springtime Bandit nr. 1

It was quite tricky starting this shawl because I really didn´t get the first 7 rows! But after meeting RodPrjonar in a small Café in Álafosskvos, who showed me how to do this it was really simple! Thank you RodPrjonar! :-) The pattern is really nice: simple and quick but at the same time really beautiful. It took me about 2-3 days to finish it and I was not knitting all day and night.

Of course, I used my own hand-dyed yarn for this project. The 2 orange shades come from onion peel and the yellow (at the end of the shawl) from Rumex longifolius (Njóli). I really love how the colours look in a shawl and now I´m totaly hooked on knitting shawls with this yarn - I´m afraid everybody I know will be getting a shawl next christmas!

Shawl in a day

Yesterday I realized I had to frogg a shawl ("Kyrrð"), I´ve been knitting day and night since last week. This shawl, which I really LOVE, has a hood that was far too big for me because I had not been knitting tight enough.
This was soooo frustrating, that I had to knit something else, before I start all over again. I decided to make a birthdaygift for a friend of mine, who had birthday last month - there are three of them but I wont tell here which one will get it! I started knitting a new, really simple but beautiful shawl, called "vinkonusjal" (Book: "Fleiri Prjónaperlur").
I did expect it to be an easy and fast knit - but to my big surprise, I managed to finish this shawl (which I started at about 13:00) at 23:00 yesterday... I can´t believe I was able to finish a whole shawl in just one day... (I must say, that I really was knitting all day long). This really gives me hope, that I will finish my frogged "Kyrrð"-shawl in the next few weeks...

I used my own, icelandic, hand-dyed einband-yarn for this project. The mossgreen comes from Lupina, and the yellow from Rumex longifolius (Njóli):

Hálfskák

Remember this post about me, knitting lace-shawls? Well, I reached my goal and I still can´t believe it! Rodprjonar, Jóhanna and knittingmydayaway´s beautiful Kyrrð where really motivating and helpful, thank´s to them, I managed to knit my first lace shawl, "Hálfskák" in about 4 weeks, thank you two!!! I used brown yarn from Þingborg. The amazing thing about icelandic yarn like the one I used from Þingborg, and the similar "einband" from istex is what happens when you wash it:
1. your knit suddenly looks so nice and even!
2. the yarn get´s so soft - it´s like magic!

I just loved making this shawl and I have the feeling, I won´t be able to stop knit shawls for the next few months.

I found it very hard to get good fotos of the shawl, but here you go anyway:

My boy´s loved this shawl, because they think it looks like wings!