17.03.2016

Travel knitting for my 19-day trip to Iceland and Norway! :D :D :D

Before anybody says anything, I do recognize the silliness of being a Canadian buying American wool while in Iceland … but in my defense it was my first face-to-face meeting with Brooklyn Tweed yarns and the colours are extraordinary (so to nobody’s surprise I walked away with 67% grey, ha). And of course I also picked up some Lettlopi to do a hat for next winter! So the great Icelandic wool will still be enjoyed!

I wanted a mindless project that I could work on while travelling, during bus tours and boat rides etc. I think the basic pattern of Tailwind will be excellent! Planning to do some stripes/intarsia/colour block patterning, sort of a la my dear departed sedimentary scarf, rather than the stripes as written. I got my colour inspiration from the colours of Iceland’s lava fields: grey and black volcanic rock covered in the brightest green moss. Weird and incredible and wonderful.

05.04.2016

Got back to Berlin yesterday, bound off today :) Couldn’t have asked for a better travel project! The garter stitch was just the thing, because who wants to be looking down at stitches when there are mountains and fjords to see :D And the colours kept it exciting! This was my first time doing a shawl with this construction, and I really like how the rows never got super long - even at the end I think I had fewer than 200 sts.

Mostly I placed the colours pretty randomly, but in one section I happily gave a nod to the super-cool Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik. (That section is down near the skinny end, with five grey columns of decreasing height on a charcoal field.) The architects of the church took inspiration from Iceland’s supercool basalt columns, which I also got to see! Also, loved working with Loft, what a wonderful yarn!