I don’t think I wrote about Lyngen on the blog earlier this year. This is a pullover I designed for issue 5 of Making magazine (the COLOR issue), which came out this past spring. Making is a beautiful print publication and I was very happy to be included in such a bright and inspiring issue (I highly encourage you to head over to Ravelry to check out the other patterns in the issue). You can still get the pattern for Lyngen in that issue, but I’ve also just published it as an individual pattern on Ravelry, and it felt like a good time to share a little bit about it with you all.

This was one of those designs that took a really long, meandering path to the final result. When Carrie first reached out about designing a pattern for this issue, I came up with two main colorwork sweater ideas, both of which were round yokes. One idea was inspired by the super colorful Hungarian embroidery from Kalocsa – the idea featured bands of motifs in different bright colors on a white background, and I think we were initially going to go with that idea. But then Birkin came out, and I emailed Carrie with a photo and said, “Is this too similar?” (Side note: this probably happens more often than most knitters realize, especially with regard to yoke designs. I’ve gotten two emails myself from other designer pals along similar lines after releasing some of my other yokes. Great minds, etc.) Even though we though it wasn’t too similar, Carrie ended up deciding that my other idea would be a better fit for the issue. That idea featured a very similar chart to the one that ended up on the yoke of Lyngen, though I made some changes once we finalized the color palette. My proposal was a very me sort of palette – greys, with minty shades of turquoise and teal. Predictable. Carrie already had a project for the issue lined up in similar colors, though, so she proposed an alternate colorway, in four shades of Quince & Co. Finch: Maple, Petal, Clay, and Malbec. We continued waffling about color placement until finally deciding that Maple should be the main color of the body. Once we got there, I tweaked the yoke chart a little bit and decided to add small bands of colorwork to the bottom of the body and sleeves of the sweater as well.

After all was said and done, I realized two things: firstly, that I loved this sweater. Secondly, the motifs made up of lots of single stitches in this particular color combination brought to mind the flowering heather I’d come to associate with early autumn in northern Norway. This gave the sweater its name; “lyng” is the Norwegian word for heather, and the mountains to the east of Tromsø are known as the Lyngen Alps. I’ve written before about how working with third parties such as magazines often means getting out of my color comfort zone and using colors or color combinations I wouldn’t normally have chosen for myself, and that often leads to designs that are really satisfying and refreshing for me. I had no idea I would fall in love with Quince’s Maple colorway in particular. I had no idea that I would fall in love with this sweater.

I got my sample back from the magazine in April, around the time the issue was released. But I didn’t have a ton of time to wear it before Montreal was getting too warm for knitwear. So when we headed to Norway for a week or two in September, I brought it along, knowing it would get some wear. It was the only sweater I brought and I lived in it. And then we came home and I have just continued living in it. (If you’ve seen my latest YouTube video on colorwork books you may have noticed I’m wearing it there too.) A fingering weight yoke is such a perfect everyday kind of sweater – it’s easy to wear indoors without overheating, but it layers up very well for going out in colder weather.

One of the things I love about knitting is that there are always ways for knitting to surprise me. It’s such a joy to fall in love with a piece that you didn’t expect to. I’m considering knitting up a second version of this sweater for myself, perhaps in Rauma Finull this time – but for now, I will continue to wear this one to death.

Have you ever had a knitting project surprise you that way?