It’s ended up being a busy summer and I’m a little behind on sharing new work, but I have an exciting pattern to share today! I was fortunate to be asked again this year to contribute a pattern to the magazine for the Oslo Knitting Festival, and I was so happy to say yes. This year I designed a hat called Saltstraumen, and it’s a little bit of a love letter to northern Norway.

Saltstraumen is a maelstrom located in the county of Nordland (and I actually got to visit it last fall during our road trip around Nordland, blogged here). It’s a spectacular place with one of the strongest tidal currents in the world, where the water rushing through the bottleneck during the changing of tides creates whirlpools and white water dancing in circles. I adapted a cable motif from Norah Gaughan’s excellent Knitted Cable Sourcebook to mimic the swirling of the water across this hat, which is knit in beautiful indigo-dyed yarn from Lofoten Wool. Lofoten Wool, as you may remember from my Norwegian Wool post on the company, is also located in Nordland, and water obviously plays a huge role in the lives of the people throughout the Lofoten archipelago. I love the deep connection between the motif inspired by water, the deep blue of the indigo dye, and the wool from Røst, one of the islands of Lofoten furthest from the mainland – it’s not every day so many elements come together in a design like that.

Saltstraumen is knit up in Lofoten Wool’s Røst Collection 2-ply (look for “2 trådet” in their online shop) in the Brådjupt colorway. If substituting yarn, a woolen-spun sport weight would be ideal. The pattern is available in the Oslo Knitting Festival Magazine, alongside a pattern by Julie Knits In Paris (pictured above along with the Saltstraumen hat) and one by Anna Maltz. I believe the magazine is print-only, not digital, but if you have questions about that I’d suggest getting in touch with the festival organizers or perhaps asking in the new Ravelry group for the festival.

As a side note, I’m planning to make my pattern for last year’s magazine, the Rosenhoff mittens, available for individual purchase this fall. I’ll be sure to let you know when they’re available!