Things have gotten very busy lately, but I wanted to pop in to say hello and share a few things.

First up: Pomcast, the podcast of knitting & crochet Pom Pom Quarterly, has a new episode up featuring an interview with me! I a live interview with Lydia at the Oslo Strikkefestival, though the audio unfortunately didn’t make it, so Sophie caught up with me via Skype after the fact (we largely covered the same questions, so don’t feel too sad if you missed out on the original interview, and don’t expect it to be wildly different if you happened to be there!). Still, it was fun to do an interview in a room full of lovely people knitting while we chatted and I enjoyed the novelty of wearing a “Britney Spears microphone,” as Lydia called it.

Secondly: while we’re on the topic of the Oslo Strikkefestival, I have a couple of FOs to share that I knit up using yarn I bought at the marketplace! I finished my Lupine shawl, which I wrote about in my last post, and I’m so pleased with how it turned out.

The pattern is by Cory Ellen Boberg of Indie Knits and the yarn is the gorgeous gradient I picked up from Squirrel’s Yarns, which was one of my impulse purchases at the festival (the Pécan Fing base in the color Hématite). If you like gradient yarns, I can’t recommend Lisa’s gradients enough. The transitions are impossibly smooth and the finished shawl is so pretty to me in its simplicity.

The other FO is also knit up in one of my marketplace purchases: it’s a Simple Hat by Hannah Fettig in the spælsau yarn I purchased from Værbitt. This was the first time I’ve knit with a 100% spælsau yarn, so I wanted to knit something simple that would get a lot of wear and let me really get a feel for the yarn knitted up in a fabric. I also didn’t want the pattern to compete with the subtle variation in the colorway.

I have to say, I love the finished hat. This yarn’s a little bit rustic and it feels slightly wiry in the hand – it’s very strong – but it’s also surprisingly soft considering that, and when washed and blocked it developed a bit of a lovely halo that adds to that soft feel. This hat has gotten a lot of wear already and I think it’ll continue to do so.

Lastly: we’ve all been impatiently waiting for the snow in Tromsø, as last week we passed the previous record for the date of the first snowfall of the season (that means in recorded memory, it has never been as late as this year: yikes). But finally, on Saturday evening, the snow started falling. It kept coming down through Sunday, when I got to take a walk down to my favorite park. It’s nice to revisit the photos, because Tuesday turned suddenly warm again, bringing rain, and the snow started to melt almost immediately. Between the rain clouds and the fact that we bid farewell to the sun last week (it won’t rise again until January), it’s been very, very dark this week. Hopefully before too long it’ll cool down again and the snow will come back, but for now, enjoy these photos from Sunday’s walk.