Aside from the new patterns I shared recently, it’s been a little while since I’ve actually shared any of my makes with you all. I thought it might be nice to have a little bit of a WIP check-in so I could share the main things I’m working on at the moment.

I’m very keen to finish up old WIPs this year, and I’m also really interested in working from stash for new cast-ons – an ambition that kind of fell apart last year once corona hit and I wanted to support businesses suddenly facing the loss of festival income. But I have managed to finish a couple of old WIPs since the start of the year. I started the Julenatt mittens (Ravelry link) pictured below back in December of 2018, when they were the advent mystery mitten pattern by Skeindeer Knits. It felt wonderful to finish a project started so long ago, and these will be a gift for a dear friend which somehow makes it even sweeter. I used Arctic Yarns Sølje in the Birch Leaves colorway (green), Arctic Yarns Vilje in the Snowman colorway (off-white), and some leftover grey Rauma Finull.

I also managed to finish my pair of Norah socks by Marie Wallin, begun in March last year at the very beginning of the first lockdown. I’ve yet to get a photo of the pair, but just the one still gives you an idea! I splurged on this kit the summer we moved to Trondheim – this particular pattern is only available in a kit with Marie’s British Breeds yarn. In one sense, that makes these the most expensive socks I’ve ever owned, but on the flipside there’s plenty of yarn leftover for future colorwork projects (and it is really lovely yarn).

The rest of my old WIPs are still very much in progress, but I’m getting there! I have another pair of mittens on the way to being finished, and these will also become a gift.

This pair of Trondheim Mittens by Sofia Kammeborn (Ravelry link) is coming along nicely now that I’ve made it past the second cuff. The cuffs are a beast due to knitting with three colors at once with some pretty long floats, but this photo gives you a glimpse at how I used a bit of a cheat to get through it: if you look at the half-finished mitten, you can see the rounds where I actually knit with all three colors per round on the cuff. Most of the buildings are just the red and mustard for now, but I’ll go back and fill in the windows using duplicate stitch. I did the same for the first mitten and honestly had a much nicer result that way than when I tried to knit the whole thing with three colors at once. I started these mittens in May 2019, back when I teased the news of us moving back to Norway on my Instagram, so this is another old WIP I’ll be very glad to have finished. I cast on from stash when I started these, so they’re a mix of Rauma Finull (the dark blue and mustard), Tukuwool Fingering (the red), and indigo-dyed Lofoten Wool (the light blue).

My other main WIPs are two newer cast-ons. Just over a month ago I pulled some beautiful Neighborhood Fiber Co Studio Sock out of my stash (the colorways are Anacostia and Charles Centre) and cast on a Valdreskofte, a traditional Norwegian cardigan I’ve wanted to make for a really long time. I’m using a pattern from a book for the numbers, but otherwise I’ve gone very off-piste, working it top-down instead of bottom-up, and making some modifications to the neck shaping and the button bands. Studio Sock is a superwash merino, so I’ll have to machine sew my reinforcements before I cut the steek, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how this one turns out. I have some buttons and ribbon (to cover the steek edges) picked out that I’m hoping to use when it’s ready for finishing, but we shall see if they work when I make it to that stage.

Lastly, I’ve also had scrap projects on the brain, as a little bit of stash reorganization last month showed me just how much leftover yarn I have kicking around my craft room. Lately I’ve been very drawn to scrap blankets, although I’ve never made one before, but I got an idea stuck in my head and decided to give it a go. I’m using Mina Philipp’s Pinwheel Scrap Blanket as the base for a kind of pinwheel/log cabin mashup. I’ll make blocks of 8-pointed stars and then seam them together at the end. I wrote on Instagram about how I’m approaching creating each block seamlessly, but I forgot to mention there that I’m working a smaller number of stitches for each central pinwheel block than Mina’s pattern calls for (I’m starting with 14). I’ve never done anything quite like this, so I’m having fun with it. I have a lot of Rauma Finull leftovers (did you notice how this is the third project of this post that makes use of them?) and think I could actually get a blanket out of just Finull, so I’m going to see how far I get with just my basket of Finull.

I still have several other WIPs just waiting for attention, so I’m hoping to keep the momentum up in the coming months. I’ll have to set everything aside for a pattern sample for a magazine in the very near future, but once that’s sent off in a couple of months I’ll be back to the WIP pile!