…If he is smiling, then I am smiling…

Olympic Sweater Success!

Pattern:  Dale of Norway Liberec 2009
Yarn: Reynolds Whiskey in natural and navy
Needles: Size US 1, 2, 3
Started May 2009 / Completed December 2009

I finished seaming at 10:35pm on New Year’s Eve – about 1.5 hours shy of my “deadline” of the new year.  I did not count the initial blocking into my deadline, so I blocked over night and let it sit out for the morning and got photos this afternoon.  (If I had finished this one day before, I could have had snow pictures, but it melted pretty quick!)

Aside from the Olympics knitting, this is the fourth year that I have made an annual “my man” sweater – with Christmas, his birthday, and our anniversary falling within two weeks of each other, it seems like a good time to make a big project like this.  By far, this is the biggest project of all!

Probably the biggest undertaking of my knitting career – but what a great sense of accomplishment!  There are only a few very minor things that I am not happy with (the raglan decreases are pulling across the chest, even after a good blocking…)  but I am thrilled with the fit and overall look of the sweater.

The yarn was a decent substitute, as my yarn shop did not have the colors of the Dale yarn that I wanted for this sweater.  I used Reynolds Whiskey.  It seems to be a good sturdy yarn that will last awhile.  Kris wears his clothes pretty hard, so this will be a good test!

…and I think he may actually wear it without me asking him too!

Countdown to Vancouver Olympics – 41 days!

(in other words, 41 days to finish MY Olympic sweater!)

Perhaps I was too focused on the ultimate goal of just getting this sweater finished that I misread the instructions… My raglan decreases in Kris’s Olympic sweater were just not cutting it, and my stitch count was off.  While I think Kris could totally rock the off-the-shoulder pullover look, it may not be most fashion forward item for the workplace… and I want to have a great finished product that shows all the work that went in to it.

This is my “before the rip” photo – my stitch count was 50 or so stitches off, and there is no way to fix that… so on Christmas day, at my parents’ house, I just bit the bullet and did it.  On the photo above, you can see:   I ripped back to the purl ridge rows right above the main snowflake motif.

Luckily, I had some good time to fix my mistakes and catch up.  So, I spent the 27th and 28th catching up, and even surpassing.  Now, I started the neckline decreases, and I am only a few rows away from the turtleneck.  Wow, it feels good to be so close!  I really think it may happen before the new year rolls in!  *Fingers crossed*

As I am knitting, I have been listening to audiobooks – I am lucky to have a good library that has so many titles on hand.  It is truly a gift to be able to do my two favorite things at once!  Especially nestled up in front of the fire… now, that is a perfect day!  I will share some book reviews with you in the next post.

I enjoyed your snow stories sooo much!  and I had a few emails telling me that they enjoyed the stories as well.  It’s amazing what kind of memories snow can bring up.  The snow that we had last weekend has since melted (I want more!) but I will definitely be returning to this post to read the stories again.

As for the winner – congratulations to Kimberlyn at Bungalow 312!  Her name was randomly chosen for the Classic Elite Snow Day booklet!  K, email me with your address!

Be back soon with more progress shots and some great book reviews

Sleeve vs. Sleeve

Olympic sweaters – all the time around here.  While looking at the official Vancouver Olympics website, I realized that there are only 70 days until the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.  Is there any way I can finish these two sweaters in time?  I am hopeful.  Kris’s sweater is the ivory striped cuff, and mine is the navy one.  This is the second sleeve of Kris’s sweater, with only this and the yoke remaining.  Of course the yoke is where all the complicated charted colorwork comes in, but I am looking forward to that.  Even on tiny needles with small gauge, colorwork does seem to go a little faster.

If I keep up my pace, I think there is a chance that I can have Kris’s sweater finished up by the end of the year.  That seems like a nice end note on a pretty good year.  Keep your fingers crossed for me as I try to knit like the wind!

I started my sweater later than Kris’s, so naturally I have more to go, but I am pleased with my progress.  When I left for California, I only had 1.5 inches of the body.  By the time I got home, I had 14 inches.  Pretty decent for 260+ stitches on size 2 needles in the round!  Of course, I still have several more to go before I start the colorwork and then the *dun dun dun* steeks!

This year’s Dale Vancouver sweater has a great feature with the ribbed sides – it’s much less boxy than previous designs.

Plus, I like how it looks like a ski slope!

The bottom hem will be tucked under, where I will run an elastic cord through.  It came with the official patch and zipper

–

The plans for the Vancouver trip are really starting to shape up.  We are so excited because we have 8 event tickets – 6 of them are hockey tickets (is that a surprise?), a freestyle ski event, and a curling event.  Unfortunately we didn’t score specific Team USA or Team Canada tickets (they sold out in seconds!), but we still have a small chance to see one of them in the 2 playoff game tickets we have.  So, if Canada advances like everyone expects them to (very well could be the Gold medal winners – such a strong team!) we could see them in those games in the second week playoffs – one is for preliminary playoffs, and the other is for quarterfinals, which is right before the Bronze medal game.  We have tickets to see primarily Team Russia since my favorite player, Evgeni Malkin, is Russian.  We also get to see Team Sweden who are the defending gold medal champs, Slovakia, Germany, Latvia, and Czech Republic.

The freestyle ski event is going to be north of Vancouver city at Cypress Mountain.  It is men’s aerial skiing – so flips and jumps!  that should definitely be fun.  Hoping I can get some photos!

…and curling!  I am excited to see it because I know so little about it.

Wish me luck and speed as I work to finish these sweaters!  I figure with the holidays and time off from work, I may be able to make a dent.  Knitting posts may be a little sparse considering that these two sweaters are the only projects I am working on, and 3 inches of stockinette doesn’t feel special enough to warrant a blog post… but I may get a bit desperate!

…and if you are excited about the Winter Olympics and want to join the chatter and knit-along plans, please check out my Vancouver 2010 group on Ravelry!

As you know, I am wading through the deep water of the sleeves of Kris’s Olympic pullover, working towards that fateful day when I can join the body and the sleeves and yoke it all up together.  A few rows here and there…

With any hope to have my Olympic sweater done for the Games in February, I had to cast on for my very own sweater… luckily, I had some support in the form of a class at my yarn shop.

I haven’t taken a formal knitting class since I learned to knit nearly six years ago, but I figured that a big project like this would be a nice camaraderie knit – and honestly, I wanted some “hand holding” during the steeking process!

Here I am at last week’s class choosing my third colorway – my first choice, the turquoise at the end of the third row, was discontinued unfortunately – but I decided to go with the close match, the robin’s egg blue at the beginning of the fourth row.  Not quite the same “POP”, but pretty close!  We have met twice now, and my classmates and I are all cast on and ready to knit a few miles of stockinette for the body before we reach the colorwork sections in the chest.

The part I am pretty “chuffed” about is the OFFICIAL Olympic patch and zipper:

The knitting is a bit slow on the small needles – size 3 and 3.25mm – but every little bit counts.  With some roadtrips coming up in the next month, I trust I can make some significant progress.  The first inch of the knitting – in the rib pattern – is actually a hem facing that gets tucked under later.  There is an elastic cord that came with the zipper kit to run through the bottom of the sweater.  It will make it look like a real ski fleece!

These Olympic sweaters are probably the biggest thing I have ever taken on – and I am excited about them!  Kris’s is much closer to the finish line than mine is, but I feel good that at least mine is on the needles and ready.

And with all of this work still ahead of me, I am also thinking of how great the new official Canadian Olympic gear is – the designs were released last week, and my mind is already buzzing about how quickly I could knit up something similar to the lovely Cowichan-inspired design… it is a large gauge… so, it may be possible to knit *after* I finish these, right? (it appears that the designs have set off a controversy with the “Cowichan” word choice… but I figured that “Cowichan-inspired” was safe enough, right?)

A quick search of Cowichan-inspired sweaters turned up this number by Rebecca… I think I could cardiganize it pretty easily, and maybe add some colorwork motifs…

…Okay, I am getting ahead of myself… let me finish my Dale sweaters first

And a new theme for Project Spectrum!

Looking WEST
Color: Blue
Material: Glass
Season: Autumn
Element: Water

This theme is really interesting to me – very unconventional, I think it is the West/Blue/Autumn mix. I am hoping that this is a theme that will bring a new wave of creativity to those of you participating in Project Spectrum Cardinal Directions (oh my, it is the last direction! how does it always sneak up on me like that?) and you will welcome the challenge.

My interest in this theme piqued a few weeks ago, as I started working on my mother’s Sienna.  That lovely shade of periwinkle blue really got me excited about the possibilities with this new theme.

… Luckily, one of my other big unfinished projects fits in pretty well with this theme too …

Navy on natural stranded colorwork for Kris’s Olympics pullover.  What a wonderful feeling to make it through 15.5 inches of stockinette on size 2.5 needles and then introduce this lovely navy blue for the colorwork… First is the little “lice” pattern (or as I call it “the tick pattern” because that seems more fitting for me…) and then the intricate snowflakes.  I reached the point in the colorwork chart where I set aside the body and start the sleeves, only to yoke it all up later for the rest of the chest and the neckline colorwork.  Putting the body of the sweater on waste yarn, I asked Kris to try it on.

The funny thing about Kris is that he can be quite photogenic… but when he doesn’t want his photo taken, he can turn in to an 11-year old kid (think:  sticking tongue out, hand gestures, bad posture…) but this photo fills the intended purpose of showing you the progress and the fit – and also a little bit of Kris’s modesty   To his credit, the stockinette portion was rolling down, and I wanted to show the colorwork!

The fit isn’t too bad, but it will benefit from a good blocking to make it a little more cozy around the middle.

This colorwork chart is a lot of fun and requires a good amount of concentration.  I am always amazed when it comes out looking like it is supposed to!  I especially love the way the stranding looks along the back:

As you may recall, this Dale of Norway sweater (the Liberec pattern) is my big project for our trip to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  If all goes as planned, I will have enough time to make myself a Nordic stranded pullover too… and I just recently figured out which pattern I am going to do!

I initially thought that I wanted to go with this lovely Dale pattern (and I still want to make it!).  On a trip to my LYS, I started talking with the owner (another Dale of Norway fan) and she said she was planning to do a fall class for the official Olympic sweaters.   Naturally, I was very interested.  Participants in the class can choose from the 5 commemorative Canadian patterns, or  from the official Vancouver Olympics sweater.  After a lot of contemplation (I was *almost* sold on Le Massif, and still hope to make it some day!) I decided to do the Vancouver sweater.  I am planning to modify it a little – I don’t really like the deep v-neck, but would rather have a zipper neck (like the men’s sweater, on the left); however, I like the shaping of the women’s sweater… so I am planning to combine the two elements into one sweater.  My rationale for choosing “Vancouver” was that the simpler look would be more wearable and would (hopefully) be easier to knit between now and February 14th (the first day of the Olympics).  So, with that part down all I needed to do was sign up for the class at the LYS and figure out my color palette.

Many thanks to Mary Ann at Two Strands – she made this part much easier!  She charted the pattern on her computer and played with the Dale yarn colorways to figure out a palette for her own Vancouver sweater.  One of her choices (well, several, actually) inspired me.  I narrowed it down to #10 and #11 – and #11 won in the end.  So, my main color will be indigo – with natural and turquoise for the OXO colorwork.  Not too shabby, eh?  I am pretty excited!  And the planned colors should really go well with the PS theme for blues!

My class starts in 3 weeks, so I am using this time to really make progress on my unfinished knits – both Kris’s pullover and my sister’s cardigan.  September will have a finished sweater… I am making my mind up for that right now! 

Juggling this project along with a few others has not been too hard - this is my easy-peasy knit, my knitting-while-watching-TV knit.  And I actually have several inches to show for it now.  I just started my third ball of Reynolds Whiskey – a lovely yarn, by the way – and am rounding about 12.5 inches.  A few more to go before I start the stranded colorwork band across the chest.  Then, I need to make the sleeves and yoke everything together before finishing up the top.  I am pleasantly surprised to have so much progress on size US 1.5 needles, and I know that once I get to the colorwork, it will fly by…  Can’t wait to get to that point!  It is just two-colored, but this yarn has all sorts of little heathery bits in it.  I think it will look great.

Dale of Norway finally released their Vancouver designs (full PDF here).  For each Winter Olympics, the Norwegian design/yarn company comes out with a set of ski sweater patterns (and matching accessories) to commemorate the Olympics. In previous years, this design has incorporated regional and cultural influences of the Olympic location.  There has been a little bit of criticism on this point this year; several people have noted that this design has nothing that evokes “Vancouver” about it.  It seems like the designers had a lot of things to pull from for this design, but they are right that it doesn’t necessarily look like the traditional designs – there is very little about it that says “Vancouver” or even “Canada” about this sweater.   Not even a maple leaf or some sort of nod to the theme of the First Nations.  No incorporations of Canadian natural features, etc…

That being said, I do like the design.  I like the simplicity of the colorwork.  It makes it more wearable and versatile to me.  Plus, I think the colorwork on the shoulders is a nice feature.  It’s unique, as I don’t recall seeing many other stranded designs like this one.  The women’s pullover has a deep v-neck which is also a new look.  I appreciate the innovation and the updated look and I don’t think it looks as dated – it is more flattering to many figures (the ribbed sides) and has a nice silhouette.

The owner of my LYS has knit the last four Olympic pullovers, and she tells me that they are planning a class on knitting this one.  Although the pattern is not what I expected, I do still like it, so I think I might sign up.  The class is not until next winter though, so it will probably be done well after my trip to Vancouver…

 So, my plan worked.  Kris’s Dale pullover, the Liberec 2009 design, and the one I am planning for myself (Dale #150 booklet) will be perfect for our official Vancouver sweaters. 

…of course, I need to get plugging on my gift knits (mom’s! Mimi’s!) before I can start my own pullover!  Must get knitting!

Kris’s Olympic Sweater is underway!  I stopped by my LYS and did a little browsing.  They did not have the full line of colors for Dalegarn Heilo, the yarn that the pattern calls for, so I looked around for a decent substitute.   Kris liked the original colors of the pullover, so I wanted to stick to that – natural and navy.  I was really pleased when I found a near perfect match in Reynolds Whiskey.   

In the interest of actually getting this thing started, I cast on the same night I bought the yarn… and I have actually made a lot of progress considering the extremely small gauge (size 1s for the ribbing and 2s for the body) and the large number of stitches in the round.

I cast on for the 42″ size – and actually went down a half-needle size, because I want more of a 41″ for Kris – little bit of ease, but a nice fit. 

260 stitches in the round
approximately 40 rows / 3.5″ of progress
= 10,400 stitches thus far

This few inches is about half the total number of stitches of some of the other sweaters I have  made!  The funny thing is that all of the things I have done so far are just the little bits at the bottom – easily overlooked.  In the picture of the garment from the pattern pamphlet, the part I am working on right now is actually folded under on the model… no complaints, really, just noting that “traditional knits” often have this very small gauge.  I am a modern knitter who deeply appreciates the tradition, so here I go with the tiny needles.  So far so good!

This sweater is truly a test of endurance!  fortitude!  patience!  resolve! Those are qualities of an Olympian, right?