Vacation Installment 1 – Or, a knitterly thing we did!

Posted on | August 12, 2007 | 4 Comments

Our vacation in review will be brought to you in installments. It was just the break that we needed and we squeezed an awful lot into a week and a half (not the least of which – 60 miles!). We made so many happy memories along the way and there is just too much good stuff and great photos to squeeze into one post. I will save the 3Day write up and the contest results for tomorrow (we did the drawing this afternoon – I’m so excited!!), that whole experience is still sinking in and I need some more time to format pictures etc.

So, the first knitterly thing, on the very first day of our vacation, was my birthday gift (my birthday isn’t for a couple weeks, but since we’re restricting our buying, we’re using special occasions for those indulgent purchases that are difficult to justify otherwise.) Since we were going to be in New Hampshire, we dispensed with the surprise and mystery, and Tad and I made the trip over to Durham to visit Debbie of Nordic Fiber Arts. I cannot say enough about this fine lady, folks. If you have any interest in Norwegian colorwork, she supplies some amazing yarns and kits from Norsk Strikkedesign and Solveig Hisdal’s Poetry in Stitches (which are both in their last printing, two absolutely amazing books!) among others. She was very kind and accommodating and I really enjoyed talking with her about the patterns.

I had a couple of kits in mind, in keeping with my goals for 2007 and my admiration of the incredible designs in these books – I was specifically looking at the cover sweater from Norsk Strikkedesign, and the Wedding Sweater from Poetry in Stitches. I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to see the kits though; the colors were a little different than I remember them in the books. Debbie actually has a couple different kits made for the cover sweater from Norsk Strikkedesign, one with the actual colors called for and another that more closely matches the colors in the book. I was pretty certain that I would leave with one of those, but then she pulled out a sample sweater of another Solveig Hisdal design, in bright Fuschia with purple and blue accents – absolutely incredible, I wish that I had had the camera, the workmanship was stunning. I liked the colors, but not enough to knit a whole sweater in them. Then she pulled out the pattern and showed me the yarn for the cream and blue version, and I was sold! Click here to see a picture of the sweater in both color schemes, Debbie said that it was new and she hadn’t had a chance to add it to her website yet, so look for it there in the near future! The style is very similar to the Wedding Sweater, but what really drew me in was the band across the bottom, it’s so rich and the colors have so much depth.

I plan to wind a few of the skeins and do some swatching later in the month – Stay Tuned!

Comments