Tag: nordic

inspiration: kristin drysdale / scandiwork

DiannaLeave a comment

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It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an old-school inspiration post (something I used to do more often years ago), but I was browsing the Ravelry designer page for Kristin Drysdale earlier this week and I was reminded how much I love her work, and how much I adore one pattern in particular:

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I need to think of someone in my life who has a child I can knit one of these for, because it is just. too. perfect. I love it so very much. This is her Little Swedish Dress pattern, and while it’s my favorite of her children’s dress patterns, the Midsommar Dress and the Little Dutch Dress are super adorable as well.

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You may have encountered Kristin’s work on Instagram, either on her own feed (where she is @scandiwork), or perhaps like I did – via the feed of Lori Ann Graham, who has knit a few pairs of Kristin’s Hansdatter slippers. Kristin’s array of beautiful stranded slipper designs is slightly dizzying, and it’s hard not to want to make them all. She uses relatively traditional colors in her stranded patterns but makes them feel very fresh in an incredibly pleasing way, and my favorite pieces of hers are the ones where she uses assorted motifs grouped together to great effect, as in the dresses above or the pillow below, the Swedish Christmas Pillow.

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She recently released a few adult-sized garments as well, which makes me excited to see what else she’ll be coming up with. Dagna is a circular yoke pattern available as a cardigan or as a pullover, and I think it demonstrates really well the traditional-yet-fresh thing that Kristin has going on.

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There are too many beautiful slipper patterns to pick a favorite, so I encourage you to head over to Kristin’s Ravelry page and take a look yourself. All of the ones pictured at the top of this post are available individually or as part of the Norseknits ebook. And if Kristin’s work tugs at your heartstrings the way it does mine, you should check her out on Instagram at @scandiwork as well. (Bonus: she’s also a fan of Scandinavian baking!)

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Slipper photo by Scandiwork, Little Swedish Dress and Dagna photos by Ben Lehnardt.

noteworthy: nordic knitting & wool

DiannaLeave a comment

I’ve been collecting some interesting links and resources in the past couple of months related to Norwegian wool and knitting and the Nordic wool scene more broadly – and I thought it’d be nice to share a few of them with you here.

First up: I wrote recently about the fantastic Bladet Garn, a new Norwegian (and Norwegian language) knitting mag that I’m super excited about. Another new Nordic magazine has joined the scene as of December, and those of you who aren’t Norwegian speakers may have already heard about it, because this one’s published in English: Laine Magazine, which is based in Finland (incidentally, “laine” is the French word for wool but apparently means “wave” in Finnish – I would be curious to hear more about the choice of name from the creators). Laine is dark but rich; luxurious and beautiful, like the last rays of sun coming through the trees of a forest in winter. I finally got a copy this week and while both the magazine and the patterns are gorgeous, the “& lifestyle” part of the “knit & lifestyle magazine” might get me the most excited: articles covering topics like a farm in western Finland dedicated to two domestic sheep breeds (pictured above), a feature on Helga Isager, a travel guide to Lisbon with its color and pattern inspiration, an interview with Stephen West, and some seriously delicious-looking recipes (chocolate cake with dried flowers and flaked sea salt, anyone?) – and that’s not even covering everything. In a way it’s much more like a book than a magazine, justifying the cost, which makes it somewhat of a luxury. But it is the perfect luxury for a long, slow weekend morning and I can’t wait to spend some more time with the articles. My favorite patterns from issue one include Piece of Silver by Veera Välimäki and Siv by Heid Alander, but you can check out all of the patterns on Ravelry here. Laine is set to be published twice a year, I believe, and you can keep up with them on Instagram, or find a stockist near you on their website.

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Simone of Temple of Knit has started a new interview series on her blog called Nordic Makers, with the intent to share conversations with the people and the businesses shaping her “immediate fiber world” – or more specifically, the fiber community that spans the Nordic region (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and to an extent, Greenland). Simone herself is a Dane living in southern Sweden, and her first interview of the series is with Louisa Bond, a Norwegian based in Oslo, whose blog Worn Values is a welcome addition to my daily blog reader. I highly recommend checking out Louisa’s blog as well as Simone’s, and Simone’s introduction post to her Nordic Makers series is a good one to read, too. Louisa’s recent posts on three ways to mend your knits and this guide to ethical shoes were both particularly interesting and useful.

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Husfliden, the Norwegian Folk Art and Craft Association, is putting on a conference about Norwegian wool this April: Ullialt – Konferanse om norsk ull. This one is definitely for Norwegian speakers, and with my thesis work I doubt I’ll be able to go (sadly!), but it’s taking place April 20-23 in Stjørdal, just outside Trondheim (effectively right next to the Trondheim airport). The description roughly reads: “We invite the whole wool supply chain to come and join in as we build enthusiasm and knowledge about Norwegian wool – in industry, in design, in agriculture and handicrafts. How can Norwegians make better use of our own domestic wool?” It’s exactly the sort of thing I get excited about, so I hope this won’t be a one-off thing. Hat-tip to Norwegian wool hero Tone Tobiasson for the heads up.

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These natural grey wool fabrics from Norway Cloth / Varp og Veft are making my heart flutter. The wool comes from Grey Trønder sheep (Grå Trøndersau) and both the yarn and the fabric are produced here in Norway. It’s almost enough to make me want to give sewing another proper try… But on a related note, if you want to get a feel for the wool from the Trønder sheep, Selbu Spinneri sells trøndersau yarns (although I don’t know what their international shipping policy is). In any case, this particular pattern is my favorite of the fabrics from Norway Cloth. They also sell finished objects made from the fabrics, like cushions.

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There’s more to share, but I’ll save that for another day!

mittens in may!

DiannaLeave a comment

6b9aaaa36e31badc-traditionalmittens

Hello everyone! Just a quick post today to let you all know there are still a few spots available in my upcoming workshop at Tolt Yarn and Wool, Mittens in May. This is the traditional mittens workshop I taught at the Nordic Knitting Conference last fall, and I’m so excited to be teaching it again. The workshop will be May 3rd (that’s a week from Sunday) from 11-4.

We’ll be talking about traditional mittens from the Nordic and Baltic countries, and you’ll get to choose a mini-mitten to start working up in class to try out some of the techniques we’ll be discussing. I’ve been working up new samples of the mini mittens in Rauma Finullgarn, a wonderful woolen-spun fingering weight yarn from Norwegian company Rauma:

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From left to right, the mittens are: Latvian (focusing on a seamless lined cuff), Estonian (with a vikkel braid), Norwegian (with a Norwegian thumb gusset), and Bohus (in the style of Bohus Stickning, from Bohuslän in Sweden, focusing on combining knits and purls in colorwork with more than two colors per round).

As you can see, all of the mini mittens involve stranded colorwork, so you should have some familiarity with colorwork and knitting small circumferences in the round to take the workshop. Other than that, there’s a wide range of skill levels represented – the Norwegian and Estonian mittens each only use two colors, and you can elect to skip the braid on the Estonian mitten to keep things super simple if you wish. The Latvian mitten brings in a third color, but there’s still never more than two colors per round which keeps the colorwork simple and manageable. It’d be a great stepping stone if you’ve never worked a third color into your colorwork. The six-color Bohus mitten is a beast, I’ll admit, and routinely uses three colors per round in addition to switching between mitts and purls, but there’s also a two-color chart included to keep things simple if you just want to give the knit/purl combo in colorwork a try.

All students will leave the workshop with a booklet containing information about these different traditions, and the mini mitten patterns are included, so you can work up the others later! You’ll be able to apply the techniques for the mini mittens to full-sized ones down the line.

You can stop by the store or give them a call at 425.333.4066 to reserve your spot! Check out the page about the class on the Tolt website for info about materials, etc. here. Tolt carries Rauma Finullgarn so it’ll be easy to pick up supplies for the class there as well. This is a fun, choose-your-own-adventure kind of class I hope to see some of you there!

inspiration: scissors for a brush

DiannaLeave a comment

A few weeks ago I stopped by the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle to check out one of the rotating exhibitions. It’s called Scissors for a Brush, and it’s an exhibition of work by Danish-Norwegian artist Karen Bit Vejle. Her artwork is all papercut, or psaligraphy, done with paper and scissors, and it’s pretty amazing to behold. Intricate, delicate, and sometimes astonishing in scale.

The exhibition features somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 different pieces, and it’s been traveling since 2009. If you’re in Seattle, the exhibit is up through June 16th, and it’s absolutely worth seeing. It was hugely inspiring and it made me wish I had that kind of patience.

The images below are from Karen Bit Vejle’s website, papercutart.no.

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[click the image to make larger]

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the 2012 nordic knitting conference

DiannaLeave a comment

Every other year, the Nordic Heritage Museum in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle hosts a Nordic Knitting Conference, and it’s something I look forward to with great anticipation. I love the chance to take a few classes and learn something new, to make new friends, and to nerd out about two of the things I love most in this world: Scandinavia and knitting.

As if “nordic knitting” weren’t enough of a niche already, this year the conference had a theme: mittens! Instructors were flown in from around the U.S. and the Nordic countries, and for three days conference-goers had the chance to learn about all aspects of mitten-knitting from across Scandinavia and the Baltics. The conference is topped off with a Saturday night banquet and keynote speech each year, and for the scholar in me, this is one of my favorite parts of the conference.

This year I elected to take two day-long classes, and I enjoyed them both very much. The first was a Latvian mittens class taught by Sandy de Master and Mary Germain (both teachers at Sievers School of Fiber Arts in Wisconsin). Sandy and Mary are wonderful teachers full of stories, and at the end of the day we’d learned all the necessary skills to knit a fully-lined Latvian mitten (and how these characteristics differed from other countries’ traditions). In a class like this you get a lot of history, personal and otherwise: there were tales of how Sandy and Mary started learning about Latvian mittens and got involved with their local Latvian community, a history of where the features of the mittens came from, and the role that mittens like this once played in Latvian culture. There *might* have also been some stories about the artificial insemination of sheep and knitting in jail. We all left for home with mini practice mittens in hand (I’ll be hanging mine on the Christmas tree, I think).

The other class I took was one I was looking forward to very much: Traditional Norwegian Design with Annemor Sundbø. Annemor is now recognized as a national treasure in Norway for her work and research in knitting, and the documentation and preservation of traditional Norwegian design. Over the course of the conference I was able to learn much of her backstory, and how she wound up doing what she’s doing, and anyone interested in textile & knitting history should take a peek around her website and maybe pick up one of her books. The short version of her story is that she amassed tons of old knitted garments while running a shoddy mill in southern Norway, and this “rag pile,” as she calls it, is the root of her work. She brought a very small piece of this rag pile to Seattle for the conference, which was on display during her classes and featured during her keynote speech on Saturday evening.

Annemor has collected different animal motifs she’s found on garments in her ragpile and knitted them all up in large panels, like a giant stitch dictionary.

In short, Annemor’s kind of a hero of mine, appealing to all of my senses as a scholar and a knitter & knitwear designer. It was a joy to hear her talk on Saturday evening and to take her class on Sunday. The premise of that class was to discuss the rules and guidelines that traditional Norwegian design followed, and to design our own mittens using those guidelines and the traditional motifs and patterns generally found on Norwegian knitting. I charted out and worked up my mitten, pictured below (still thumbless):


And my splurge for the weekend was treating myself to Annemor’s newest book, the fully bilingual (in Norwegian and English) Strikking i Billedkunsten / Knitting in Art:

From the back cover: “This book shows how artworks can be used to discuss knitting history even if the artists didn’t have that in mind when they painted. … Artworks also contain invisible lead threads tied to stories about knitting not immediately apparent in the pictures.”

I would be content to sit around and read this book all day, I must admit, but I’ve got things to get done and so that will have to wait. And on that note… I’m off to get some of that work done!