Last of the Projects from My Trip

 

I’m late in posting these photos for the usual reason of not taking photos. But the remaining two projects from the trip are now completely finished.

I finished the project I started with the yarn I purchased in Richmond. The yarn is lovely and works really well with this pattern. I had earmarked the pattern when I first saw it but had not been able to find a skein of variegated yarn on my travels in Europe so was very happy to find yarn in the UK. The pattern is Just Keep Swimming and was easy to memorize. The important change I made was to wrap yarn three times around the needle on the row before the first slip stitch row so that the slipped stitches did not distort the cowl. The yarn is Plump Sock DK from Ainsworth & Prin.

 

 

The other item finished was the hat I started for airplane knitting. I could have saved this for future travels but as the WIP along is ongoing I decided to finish it. The yarn is Smooshy from Dream in Color and I am including a few photos so that you can see how much the skein changes in colour. It works well for this hat but I’m not sure how I would have felt if I had made a pair of socks with it. The pattern is a mash up of various double layer hat patterns.

 

Third Time’s the Charm

 

I recently finished a project using yarn I was given when I left Calgary. It has not been sitting in my stash all this time as it has already been two other projects. Obviously, I had been trying to force it into something that wasn’t going to work, but I really wanted to use the yarn. To be fair, I really liked the first project, I just never wore it.

Here is my blog post from January 2014 showing the first finished item which was eventually frogged in November 2019, recast on in May 2021 and frogged again in December 2021. This isn’t the oldest yarn in my stash but close and as I want to use or remove my oldest yarn I have been thinking about patterns. Despite my original assertions that this yarn should not be a shawl, I had come to the conclusion that a Clapotis would be a good idea. It’s a simple pattern that would highlight the yarn. And then I saw this pattern on a video podcast and knew it was the one. So much so that I started it almost straight away.

After a few rows in, the pattern was easy to memorise and work on. So it became my take along project. I didn’t feel that I worked very much at any one time but it was finished in less than three weeks. And I am very happy with the result.

 

Older Projects Finished

 

It might seem as if all I am doing is knitting by the amount of finished projects I am showing. But the reality is that I had many projects close to being finished and each required a little work to be a finished item. Thus two more projects to show.

Both of these are projects that were started early in the year but not taken on the trip.

First is the crochet hat that I keep in the car. I started this in January when I met up with knitting friends and I forgot to take my knitting with me. I know that sounds surprising, in that I left the house without knitting but I left it on the hall table. Luckily, I keep yarn and a crochet hook in the car and was able to start a basic hat. And then it just stayed in the car. I always have a charity hat project in the car and at the end of the year when the WIP MAL is taking place I always make sure to finish whatever hat that is in the car.

 

The other finished project is a pair of slippers that I started in February. I started these because I wanted some easy knitting, although I knew they wouldn’t be easy for the whole project plus I wanted to use older yarn. The yarn has been in my stash since 2015 and I had two skeins of the black and one of the white. The yarn is very soft but I knew a hat wouldn’t work for me but I did want a project that would use most of the yarn. I looked at what other people had made with this yarn and one pattern that came up was a pattern for slippers that I already owned. The downside of using this yarn for this pattern was knitters saying that they had just enough yarn – and were they right!

The yarn is aran weight and I worked it double on 6mm needles for the foot and 6.5mm needles on the leg. 

And I have to include a photo of the yarn label as it shows the sheep (Andy) the yarn came from.

 

The Magnum Opus is Finished

 

My Mitred Square Blanket that is. Which I started in January 2018 and finished this month so a couple of months shy of eight years. The good thing is I love it, the bad thing is that I like it so much and I still have loads of scraps, I want to make another. I will try to be sensible and not do that until I have added these older left overs to my scrappy crochet blanket.

My blog post in 2018 when I first started this, said that I hoped to finish it by the end of 2019. What I didn’t take into account that as it was left over yarn this project did not take any priority as I worked with unused yarn first. Many months went by without picking up a square. At the beginning of 2024, I decided that was the year to finish all the squares. And this I managed and blocked them all. At the end of that year I purchased the black yarn for the borders and started joining in 2025.

On returning home, I finished the projects started on my trip and then returned to working on the blanket which was nearly finished – I was on the last border. Dealing with the ends did take quite a while.

Here it is in all its glory. 

 

All the Finished Things

 

In my last post I mentioned that I had completed projects with all the yarn I took on our trip apart from the airplane knitting project. So how about I show them all – two hats, mitts, a shawl, and the cowl and socks I made with yarn purchased.

My criteria for choosing these projects was that they had to be relatively easy but still hold some interest and I couldn’t worry about running out of yarn.

The hats and mitts were knit from yarn I had purchased in 2021. They are the same colourway, the hats in DK weight and the mitts in fingering weight. I thought instead of taking hats and gloves I could knit them on the journey and have them ready. I used two different hat patterns – Lonely Hearts Club, which I have knit before, and Chevron Rib Beanie which I ended up having to modify because as written the pattern makes a pointy hat.

 

 

The mittens were also heavily modified, which I was expecting before I even started. I like gloves with a top flap as you can keep your hands warm but when necessary, you can use your fingers. But I do not like the flapping flap on this style. Searching for patterns I came across one with a fold over flap but looking at the finished pictures, I liked the style but not the fit. I bought the pattern anyway so I would not have to think work out the construction while travelling and completed one mitt to see how it fit. I then worked out how many stitches I would need for my hand, frogged the original and worked two that fit to my liking. If I knit these again I would adjust the length before working the thumb hole.

 

 

I had some yarn I had purchased on the 2019 yarn crawl that I thought would work for baby knits, but it never happened. When searching on Ravelry for pattern ideas for that yarn, a lot of people had made the Virus Shawl, but I had already made one of those and didn’t want to make another. So with a bit more searching I came up with a shawl that used granny stitches and the virus stitch. And the beauty of the pattern is you can work any number of repeats of each pattern. The yarn is Katia Stella and the pattern is Starting with a Granny. 

 

 

The other two items were knit with yarn purchased while we were travelling. There is a yarn shop in Bergen railway station. Obviously it caters to the residents of Bergen but as there was time between having to leave our accommodation and board the train I was able to have a quick look around and buy some sock yarn. It’s not the most exciting yarn and I’m not really sure why I chose the colour. I was determined to cast on before we left Norway and the socks were started on the bus to Sweden! I didn’t want to make plain socks but nothing too complicated either so I chose Moldau by Caoua Coffee. 

 

And the other item was a cowl using yarn and pattern that my sister had given me and some yarn I purchased in Sweden.