Some projects take longer than others to come to fruition, and over the past several years my self-publishing has definitely fallen by the wayside. When I started my master’s degree in 2015, I had limited time to work on new designs, and as I started working with Quince & Co. around the same time, the majority of my designing time went to those patterns, or patterns for other third parties. Consequently I’ve had this collection on the back burner for years, visiting the patterns and working on them here and there, whenever I had a spare moment. So I’m positively thrilled to finally share Fog & Frost with the world: five new patterns inspired by the Norwegian landscape.

The inspiration for this collection is actually quite easy for me to pinpoint: in the summer of 2014 I spent two months in Oslo, and my friend Camilla and I went on a road trip over to the western part of the country, known as Vestlandet. The drive is a beautiful one, and the landscape once you reach that part of the country is gorgeous as well, and I took many, many photos. The photo above was taken somewhere near Flåm, and I love the deep, moody hues. The same goes for the following photo, taken in Hallingdal on the drive back:

It has the bonus of reminding me of the Snoqualmie Valley in western Washington state, where Tolt Yarn and Wool is located.

The photos from this trip planted the seed of the idea for this collection. Most of the pieces existed in some form or another, even if only as design ideas/sketches/swatches, before that trip. The photos and the idea for a collection became the motivation to finish some of those back burner designs.

The collection features two pullovers with colorwork yokes, a hat, a pair each of fingerless mitts and full mittens, and a lightweight cowl. The palette was deliberately chosen to evoke the feeling the inspiration photos gave me. I thought I’d share a little bit about each piece here on the blog, because I love the way the pieces in this collection show that ideas sometimes morph by the time they’re finished pieces, and that while our original plans for ideas don’t always pan out, taking them in new directions can lead to really cool results.

Mountain Hum began its life as a submission to Pom Pom Quarterly. Designers who submit to third party publications or collections always end up with more ideas that don’t get picked than ideas that do, and it’s satisfying to find a new home for some of those ideas. This was originally a sub for the spring 2015 issue of Pom Pom, which was issue 12. The mood for that issue was inspired by Scandinavian minimalism, and while this sweater didn’t get picked, my Swedish Pancakes mitts did make it into that issue. When I first sketched this design, I imagined it in the Quince & Co. Finch, and the motif was simpler.

The design inspiration was consequently slightly more obvious, as well! By 2015 I’d realized that a yoke like this would look gorgeous in the color-shifting Spincyle Yarns Dyed in the Wool, and I opted to pair it with YOTH Little Brother, a fingering-weight merino/cashmere/nylon blend. I decided to modify the chart at this fingering-weight gauge, in order to avoid super long floats between each petal motif. I love where this sweater ended up and it seems like you all do too, because this has been the resounding favorite of the collection since I started sharing teasers on Instagram.

The other sweater actually also began its life as a Pom Pom submission, although it evolved significantly more than Mountain Hum. Polar Night was originally imagined as a single-color yoked pullover with metallic embroidery on the yoke! The submission was for the autumn 2015 issue, and as it turns out, that ended up being one of my all-time favorite issues of Pom Pom (and it still is). So it worked out in the end!

While I still like the embroidery idea, I decided to scrap that and come up with a colorwork motif instead – and once I started playing around with charts, the ideas continued to morph and change, as they do. I considered a lot of different yarns for this one as well, swatching different options before finally landing on Magpie Fibers Domestic Worsted, which I brought home from Rhinebeck last fall. I played with shaping on this sweater, too – while the body doesn’t feature any waist shaping, I decided to combine raglan shaping with circular yoke shaping for the yoke of the sweater.

The pattern that spent the longest time on the back burner was West Wind, which features two versions of mittens with traveling twisted stitchs (fingerless and a full mitten). I wrote this pattern back in early 2014, knit and photographed samples, had it tech edited and basically ready to release, and then decided I needed to tweak the position of the thumb placement (and on top of that the dyer of the original yarn I used stopped dyeing). I put it on the back burner, where it stayed for awhile. Once I had the idea for the collection in 2015, I decided this pattern would be a good fit, and since they were worked up in DK weight yarn, YOTH Big Sister was a perfect fit.

I decided a hat that featured the same motifs as West Wind would be nice, so I came up with an alternating all-over pattern using the motif. Since this is a hat covered in twisted rib, essentially, I wanted to use a springy yarn with really good memory, so I opted to go for non-superwash for this pattern (in my experience, superwash rib tends to stretch out over time and not bounce back very well). Quince & Co. Chickadee was my top choice for that, and I’m so pleased with how it turned out. I love that it coordinates with the mitts/mittens without being a perfect match.

The last pattern in the collection was partly an excuse to play with crochet. I took a crocheted motifs workshop with the Shibaguyz at Knit Fit (sadly now defunct) in Seattle several years ago, and I fell in love with modular motifs after that. North Wind combines three different hexagonal/six-pointed motifs (two of each) with a scarf knitted on the bais, so that a long lightweight loop is formed when you join the pieces. I worked it up in two colors of Schoppel-Wolle IN Silk, but there’s a ton of creative potential with the motifs – you could work each one in a different color, or use multiple colors per motif, or even make a completely monochromatic version using one color for both the knitting and the crochet. I think many of us who are primarily knitters have dabbled in crochet and have expressed our desire to bring more crochet into our lives. So I hope that this helps with that, and I hope it means there’s more crochet on the horizon for me!

I had fun shooting these photos, which felt like a unique challenge. This collection was in progress when I moved to Norway in 2015, and given the inspiration, I had definitely planned on shooting the pieces there before third-party work kept pushing this collection to the side. By the time we left Norway, I’d yet to finish (or even start) all of the pieces and so it was pretty clear that I wouldn’t be able to shoot in Norway after all. I was pretty committed to the original inspiration photos, though, and eventually I realized that I could have photo backdrops printed – and so that is what I did.

My hope is that the incorporation of the backdrops helps give the photos the feeling that I get from seeing the original inspiration photos – it’s definitely not an attempt to make it look like I’m “in” Norway, but rather a way to bring a mood to the collection photos, one that’s more interesting than simply seeing the pieces in front of a blank wall. I’ve had a lot of fun bringing all the pieces of this collection together over the past couple of months, and I am incredibly grateful to my tech editor, my test knitters, and my friends and colleagues who’ve provided feedback and help along the way.

I’ll wrap up with just a couple more photos from that road trip back in 2014. Thanks for reading, and I hope you like this new collection!

Me in Voss, 2014