Paper-tiger.net Website Review

Paper Tiger

I've been taking some time to look back, as one is wont to do at this time of year. Yesterday was the winter solstice, which means this year has almost drawn to a close. 2018 has been quite a year. I released a lot of patterns this year. I knew I had done more work than usual, and kicking it up a notch in the first full calendar year after finishing my master's degree was the plan, but still, when I sat down to count out how many new designs I actually released, I was stunned to realize there were twenty-four of them. 24 new patterns in 2018! Fif of those came in the form of three collections. I am absolutely astonished at my own productivity. Of course, there are some things that helped make this achievable – working with third parties always makes the work less for me, and tied to that is the fact that the work for some of this year's releases was actually done in 2017 (or in the case of Fog & Frost, even earlier). Sample knitters also knit a few of these samples. These are all things I'm grateful for as someone designing and writing knitting patterns. But here's a look at my 24 patterns of 2018 (a list with links will follow in case something piques your interest): From left to right –Row 1: Frost Flowers, Lyngen, Alice MittensRow 2: Mountain Hum, Polar Night, North WindRow 3: West Wind, Cloud Pine, AdrianRow 4: Opal, Dorthea, TurloughRow 5: Drumlin, Weekend Walking Mitts, CaithnessRow 6: Tremblant Toque, Le M if Scarf, Sutton SlippersRow 7: Stoneham Poncho, Bromont Mitts, Brave at HeartRow 8: Just and Loyal, Wit Beyond Measure, Great Ambition The collections are definitely all highlights – Fog & Frost, the Chalet Collection for Espace Tricot, and Lion, Badger, Eagle, Snake. The reception for the latter two in particular has been incredible, and I don't know how to say thank you in a way that actually conveys my gratitude. But thank you.  A few of these patterns were published in books, and it is always exciting to see my name and my work in print. Opal and Dorthea were published in the Norwegian book Ruter og Lus: Retrostrikk fra Salhus Trikotagefabrikk (which I wrote about here) and I still can't quite believe the museum wanted me of all people to be involved with that project. And then Caithness was published in Kate Davies's new compilation of hat patterns, Milarrochy Heids, and it means a great deal to me to be included in those pages and to call Kate a colleague and a friend.  I also returned to teaching this year, giving a few cl es at Espace Tricot and teaching a full weekend of workshops at Twist Festival in Saint-André-Avellin, Québec. I spent eight months of this year working at Espace Tricot as well, getting to know local knitters and making friends and generally becoming a part of the wonderful fiber community in and around Montréal and Québec, so being invited to teach at Twist was a highlight. All the cl es I gave were colorwork related, and it brings me so much joy to share my love and knowledge of colorwork with other knitters. From top to bottom: teaching my Traditional Mittens workshop, being interviewed by Transistor Media (you can listen here), and hanging out with buds in the Knitting It Up Yarns booth (first two photos by Sébastien Lavallée for Twist Festival, third photo courtesy of Annie of Knitting It Up) While I've been invited to teach at a few retreats and events in 2019, I'm not anticipating very much teaching in the coming year, I'm sorry to say. The reason for that is that I'm likely looking at another big move next summer (which can make event planning difficult-to-impossible), but more on that at a later date. Plenty of other things have happened this year – I read 30 books, I learned a new craft, I traveled to some new and exciting places as well as some old and familiar ones. I feel I have so much to be grateful for right now. Given the year I've had, I'm taking it easy for the last few weeks of the year, and I'm looking forward to spending the Christmas holiday with family and friends. I am especially grateful to you, my readers, followers, customers. You all are a m ive part of the wonderful year 2018 has been on a professional level, and I can't say thank you enough. My birthday falls on the first of the new year, and some of you may remember I held a birthday sale on patterns last year – keep an eye out, because I plan to do the same this coming year. It's such a nice way to say thank you for the year just gone by. Whatever the end of 2018 holds for you – travel, festive celebrations, time for quiet reflection – I hope you enjoy it. And I'll see you in the new year.

Paper Tiger

This fall is shaping up to be my busiest ever for new releases, and I'd like to periodically share some of them here on the blog. Today I'm very excited to tell you about a book project I had theopportunity to be a part of, called Ruter og Lus: retrostrikk frå Salhus Tricotagefabrik. I want to let you know up front that it's a Norwegian book, which means the patterns are pretty inaccessible to anyone who doesn't live in Scandinavia or understand Norwegian (and it's written in nynorsk - the less common written standard of Norwegian - which adds another barrier for non-native speakers). Nonetheless, it's a very cool project, so I hope you enjoy hearing about it all the same. Back in July I wrote a blog post about the Norwegian knitting industry museum in Salhus, outside of Bergen. If you haven't read that post, I recommend checking it out, because it will provide some background for this book project. The museum is located at the old Salhus Trikotasjefabrikk, or knitting factory, and I mentioned in that post that the museum maintains an archive of different patterned fabrics, with some of the patterns perhaps never actually being put into production.  The museum decided a couple of years ago that it would be nice to revive that archive of patterned fabrics, and the way they decided to do that would be to take a selection of motifs/fabrics from the archive and hand them over to hand knitting designers, who would then create original designs for modern knitters using these fabrics from the archive. Since Salhus typically produced the kind of sweater known as an islender (or Icelander - I wrote a little bit about the origin of that term in my post about the museum), the motifs are all relatively small and repetitive, and would typically be used in an allover pattern on the sweater. This is represented in the name of the finished book: Ruter og lus. If you're familiar with Norwegian knitting, you may recognize lus as the first word in the compound lusekofte, and it refers to what we often call a lice pattern in English (lus meaning louse). Within the context of knitting, lus refers to small repetitive motifs, often a single stitch or pair of stitchs worked in a diagonal. Ruter is slightly more difficult to translate in this context – it essentially refers to squares and patterns with strong perpendicular lines, but it is not in itself the normal word for square, either. Plaids, ginghams, and other grids could all be described as rutete (an adjectival form). Nonetheless, the most typical islender is made up of repeating motifs of what are essentially squares and lice, and I ume that this is where the book's title comes from. But on to the patterns! I feel incredibly grateful to have been asked to take part in this project, and I'm quite proud of my two contributions: a sweater called Opal and a hat and mitt set called Dorthea. I found working on these designs an interesting creative challenge; I was one of the last designers to sign on for the project, and most of the motif options had already been claimed by then. So the two motifs I ended up with weren't my first choice, but I'm very pleased with what I was able to do with them in the end (which is very satisfying). Opal was a challenge to work on at first because I found the original swatch photos pretty uninspiring, to say the least. Salhus thinks this particular motif in the archive is from the 80s, and as far as they know they don't have any record of it being used for any of the knitwear they created. The motif uses four colors in total, and I decided to try charting up the motif with three colors from the same color family, and one from a different color family altogether. I love the blue version we ended up going with, which makes use of complementary colors, as three blue shades are accompanies by a golden yellow. I also swatched for a version with red/orange tones, making use of the same golden yellow contrast. I love the finished sweater (huge thanks to sample knitter Torgun, who actually knit the sample) and I'm so glad the museum chose to go with the blue version, which feels very, very me. We chose to knit this one up in one of my favorite yarns, Tinde from Hillesvåg Ullvarefabrikk. Because of the bold, graphic nature of the motif, it's possible to use a variety of shades that are relatively low contrast compared with other stranded colorwork, which makes the palette of Tinde (which is dyed on a natural grey base) really lovely for this. The other pattern is a hat and mitt set called Dorthea, and once again I was not wholly enthused by the original swatches in the archive. I decided going fully monochrome might be a way to make this 5-color motif look a little bit less like sprinkles on a birthday cake, so I swatched up a greyscale version first. I didn't even realize until I'd finished the swatch how much this motif suddenly recalled traditional Setesdal-style patterns. With a black base and five shades of grey, it was also a perfect opportunity to work a corrugated rib as a gradient – I feel like it makes a wonderful finishing touch. We also worked up the hat in an alternate colorway, using five shades of blue and blue-green. We used Rauma Finull for this pattern, which feels like the perfect yarn for this with its m ive palette of colors. One of the things I love about this book is that the editors made it a priority to use Norwegian wool yarns for the patterns. While they didn't exclusively include yarns made from Norwegian wool, they've still featured Norwegian wool pretty heavily, and it makes me so happy to see a Norwegian pattern book prioritizing that. The beginning of the book also features some information about the history of the mill/factory, so all in all the book feels like a really natural part of the recent revival of traditional Norwegian patterns and Norwegian wool in the Norwegian knitting community.  If you're curious about what the rest of the book looks like, you can check out the other patterns on Ravelry here. The photos were shot at the museum, which I love, and while the collection of patterns as a whole does have a retro vibe (as the subtitle implies), I also think the designs feel very fresh and modern.

Paper Tiger

Montreal has already had two snowstorms this month, so winter has definitely arrived in this corner of the world. It feels early here, and even though I love winter I admittedly love it less in this city than I did in Norway, so there is a small sigh along with winter's arrival. Nonetheless, I will aim to make the best of it. December is nearly upon us (tomorrow!), so we're entering the season of twinkling lights and joy and love and that is something to celebrate. I do love the transformational power of fresh snow, and will go out of my way to seek it out in this city of millions. (I'm very grateful for parks.) At any rate, I wanted to pop in to tell you about a couple of exciting things that happened in the month of November. The first is that I was finally able to unveil a pattern I've been very excited about since I first knit it last December – I have a hat design in the new book from Kate Davies, Milarrochy Heids. My hat (or heid, a Scots word for head) is called Caithness, and it uses five shades of Kate's lovely yarn Milarrochy Tweed. Unlike most of Kate's books, which are full of her own lovely designs, Milarrochy Heids features 15 hat patterns from 13 designers, all worked up in Milarrochy Tweed, a weight blend of 70% wool and 30% mohair in a palette of 15 shades. I actually purchased the initial pack of 12 shades that was available when the yarn was introduced, and that is what I used to knit my Caithness. The yarn comes in 25 g , and the pack had one ball of each color, so it was absolutely perfect for colorwork. I had first planned to self-publish this design, but then Kate asked about including it in a book of hat patterns she was planning at the time and I was over the moon. And so here we are! Some of you will know I've been a huge fan of Kate's for a very long time, and I've followed her forays into yarn production (and ready-to-wear) with great enthusiasm. It means a great deal to me to be included in this book alongside so many other wonderfully creative designers. I highly encourage you to go check out the other patterns here on Ravelry – it's hard to pick a favorite but I might have to make myself a Tarradale at some point. The response to Milarrochy Heids has been phenomenal, and team KDD have unexpectedly already sold out of hard copies of the book in the pre-order period. More copies are on the way, but in the meantime, many local yarn stores will be receiving copies from the first print run, so if you didn't pre-order but you'd like a copy before Christmas, I'd suggest checking with local stores, or those that ship orders! I should also mention that the KDD shop has put together yarn kits for every pattern in the book – you can find the yarn kit for Caithness here, and the others are all listed in the yarn section of Kate's shop. Note that the yarn kits are the yarn only – you still need the book (or e-book) for the patterns.  I've been wearing my Caithness all autumn long and while Milarrochy Tweed is a relatively fine yarn, it's a surprisingly warm hat, probably in part thanks to the mohair in it. It's been such a joy to finally share it with you all. The other exciting bit of information is that I was featured as a guest on the Knitters of the World segment of the Fruity Knitting video podcast in their most recent episode (66: Uradale Yarns & Taatit Rugs). If you're not familiar with Fruity Knitting, it's an incredibly well-produced video podcast on You , featuring heaps of fascinating interviews and information. Andrea and Andrew are wonderful hosts and I always learn something watching their show. Being a guest on this segment means I got to talk about a few of my favorite pieces I've knit, and in my case, it's a mix of my own designs (like my Ebba, which I'm holding up in the screenshot above) as well as things I've knit from other people's patterns. It was a treat to be included! You can check out the show notes for the episode here to get a sense of everything this episode included, and you can watch the full episode here (my segment starts around the 41:00 mark, but I do encourage you to watch the whole thing!). I hope you're all doing well as we move into the busy tail end of the year. Remember to breathe ly, and to take a moment for yourself now and then. 

Paper Tiger

I don't think I wrote about Lyngen on the blog earlier this year. This is a pullover I designed for issue 5 of Making magazine (the COLOR issue), which came out this past spring. Making is a beautiful print publication and I was very happy to be included in such a bright and inspiring issue (I highly encourage you to head over to Ravelry to check out the other patterns in the issue). You can still get the pattern for Lyngen in that issue, but I've also just published it as an individual pattern on Ravelry, and it felt like a good time to share a little bit about it with you all. This was one of those designs that took a really long, meandering path to the final result. When Carrie first reached out about designing a pattern for this issue, I came up with two main colorwork sweater ideas, both of which were round yokes. One idea was inspired by the super colorful Hungarian embroidery from Kalocsa – the idea featured bands of motifs in different bright colors on a white background, and I think we were initially going to go with that idea. But then Birkin came out, and I emailed Carrie with a photo and said, Is this too similar? (Side note: this probably happens more often than most knitters realize, especially with regard to yoke designs. I've gotten two emails myself from other designer pals along similar lines after releasing some of my other yokes. Great minds, etc.) Even though we though it wasn't too similar, Carrie ended up deciding that my other idea would be a better fit for the issue. That idea featured a very similar chart to the one that ended up on the yoke of Lyngen, though I made some changes once we finalized the color palette. My proposal was a very me sort of palette – greys, with minty shades of turquoise and teal. Predictable. Carrie already had a project for the issue lined up in similar colors, though, so she proposed an alternate colorway, in four shades of Quince & Co. Finch: Maple, Petal, Clay, and Malbec. We continued waffling about color placement until finally deciding that Maple should be the main color of the body. Once we got there, I tweaked the yoke chart a little bit and decided to add small bands of colorwork to the bottom of the body and sleeves of the sweater as well. After all was said and done, I realized two things: firstly, that I loved this sweater. Secondly, the motifs made up of lots of single stitches in this particular color combination brought to mind the flowering heather I'd come to ociate with early autumn in northern Norway. This gave the sweater its name; lyng is the Norwegian word for heather, and the mountains to the east of Tromsø are known as the Lyngen Alps. I've written before about how working with third parties such as magazines often means getting out of my color comfort zone and using colors or color combinations I wouldn't normally have chosen for myself, and that often leads to designs that are really satisfying and refreshing for me. I had no idea I would fall in love with Quince's Maple colorway in particular. I had no idea that I would fall in love with this sweater.  I got my sample back from the magazine in April, around the time the issue was released. But I didn't have a ton of time to wear it before Montreal was getting too warm for knitwear. So when we headed to Norway for a week or two in September, I brought it along, knowing it would get some wear. It was the only sweater I brought and I lived in it. And then we came home and I have just continued living in it. (If you've seen my latest You video on colorwork books you may have noticed I'm wearing it there too.) A weight yoke is such a perfect everyday kind of sweater – it's easy to wear indoors without overheating, but it layers up very well for going out in colder weather. One of the things I love about knitting is that there are always ways for knitting to surprise me. It's such a joy to fall in love with a piece that you didn't expect to. I'm considering knitting up a second version of this sweater for myself, perhaps in Rauma Finull this time – but for now, I will continue to wear this one to death. Have you ever had a knitting project surprise you that way?

Paper Tiger

Norway's been on my mind lately and I realized I have a whole heap of photos I never got around to sharing from the Norwegian Knitting Industry Museum (aka the Norsk Trikotasjemuseum) that I took when I had the chance to visit the museum with my friend Jena nearly two years ago (!). The museum is located just outside of Bergen and I shared it on my list of places to visit in my Bergen piece for Mason Dixon Knitting, so I thought some of you might enjoy seeing it in a little bit more detail. Before it was a museum, the Salhus Tricotasjefabrikk was a textile mill and factory – one that not only spun wool into yarn, but also created machine-knit fabrics in house and turned those into ready-to-wear pieces like sweaters, activewear, and  . It's a rare factory where all three of those processes would take place under the same roof, but I think it makes the museum especially interesting to visit. It was active from 1859 to 1989, and later on became a museum.   It's located in Salhus, about 15 km north of Bergen on the Salhus Fjord. It's tucked right into the bottom of a hill at the water's edge, on a creek that flows down to the fjord (and which was the original power source for the museum, as for most old mills and factories in Norway). The houses peppering the steep hillside and the small marina outside make it a particularly picturesque location. The entrance to the museum leads you into the large cafe space with a wall of windows facing the fjord. This is where visitors can sit down with a cup of coffee or juice and some baked treats or sandwiches, but it's also where many of the museum's regular knitting events are held (such as knit cafes or author's talks). It's a welcoming space and the view of the water is beautiful.  Guided tours of the factory are given in Norwegian and English and visitors are shown a short film before the tour begins. You're taken through each section of the factory, so you get to see where each stage of the process from wool to garment took place: carding, spinning, winding, knitting, and sewing. Today, the machinery is used to knit scarves, socks, and sweaters that can be purchased in the gift shop. When it comes to the sweaters that the museum produced, Salhus specialized in a type of garment known as an islender. This means Icelander in Norwegian, and Annemor Sundbø refers to them as Iceland sweaters in her book Everyday Knitting. She erts that despite the name, this type of sweater may have originated in the Faroe Islands: In 1798, Jørgen Landt described Faroese sweaters with small figures, fine well made sweaters for the local inhabitants, and coarser garments for sale and export. Toward the end of the 1880's, Faroese export of knitwear increased, and these garments were often made of imported Icelandic wool, which the Faroese bartered for other commodities. This may be the explanation for the term 'Iceland sweaters', but then again similar sweaters were also produced in Jutland in Denmark and Halland in Sweden . . . There were several small patterns which were widely used in Faroese knitting. – from Everyday Knitting by Annemor Sundbø (2001) Sundbø goes on to discuss machine-knitted islender, which were very popular work clothes. She mentions Devold, one of the producers of what may be the prototypical Norwegian islender, with its small repetitive motifs in black on natural white: Devold still produces this style of islender today. While I think this is what most people picture when they hear the term, some people use it more broadly to refer to similar sweaters which use different motifs, but to the a similar effect (other people might categorize these sweaters as sponsetrøyer instead, but to go down that road is to get into the nitty-gritty details of Norwegian knitwear nomenclature, so I'll leave it there). Many of the Salhus fabrics were variations on the typical islender, such as the examples below: (Images via Museumssenteret i Hordaland, ed from digitaltmuseum.no) Both of the above examples come from Salhus Trikotasjefabrikk – the top example is a swatch for the fabric and collar of a more cl ic black and white islender, though the motifs are slightly different than the version produced by Devold. The one on the bottom is a different pattern and also makes use of different colors, but it's still very typical of the sweaters that Salhus produced. The museum maintains an archive of different patterned fabrics, with some of the patterns perhaps never actually being put into production (but more on that at a later date!). I found the whole guided tour really interesting – our tour guide was incredibly knowledgeable and engaging, and it was fun to see such a wide variety of textile-specific machinery being demonstrated. I think I was also a little surprised at how light and bright so much of the factory felt, but of course when it was first built, the workers would have had to rely on natural light and the many windows (and even skylights!) allowed for that. (Bonus: for those of you who can understand Norwegian, you should check out the podcast episode that Kristin and Ingvild of Strikketerapi filmed in the museum with an audience at last year's Bergen Strikkefestival - it's quite cool to see them in that setting!) The museum shop sells a variety of interesting stuff, including ready-to-wear knitted garments and accessories, as I mentioned previously. My own souvenir, though, was some of the museum's yarn, Museumstvinn. While they no longer do full-scale yarn production, the museum does have a selection of yarns that are plied on their machinery (the individual plies are spun up the road at Hillesvåg before they're sent down to Salhus). I was particularly drawn to the interesting marled yarns spun from plies of slightly different shades, like the blue one above.  There's a large open space used for rotating exhibitions (and it was the location of the marketplace at last year's Bergen Strikkefestival, which the museum hosts and which I hope to attend someday). It's beautifully bright and airy, and when I visited in 2016 they had an embroidery exhibit going on. I have such a soft spot for so much of the Norwegian embroidery – I've held myself back from collecting old cross-stitched cushions (like the ones below) and decorative klokkestreng wall hangings, but it feels like it's only a matter of time before a few find their way into my home. In case it isn't obvious, if you find yourself in Bergen I definitely think the Norwegian Knitting Industry Museum is worth a visit! Jena and I drove to the museum, but it's possible to get to the museum using the public transit as well (see the bus instructions on the museum's page here). It takes about 1.5-2 hours to tour the museum, but be sure to build in some extra time not only for getting to and from the museum, but also for browsing the shop and hanging out in the cafe (with a bit of knitting, of course). The guided tours happen at scheduled times, so you should check the schedule before you plan your trip to make sure you won't miss the last tour of the day.  -- P.S.: A small postscript about the name, because those of you with knowledge of French probably picked up on the loanword in the factory's original name: Salhus Trikotasjefabrikk. The 'sj' combination forms sound we spell with 'sh' in English, so this is the modern Norwegianized version of French tricotage (it was actually spelled the French way at the time of the factory's founding). Norwegian uses the Scandinavian word for hand knitting: 'to knit' is å strikke and 'knitted garments' are strikkede plagg. So why the French loanword here? In my experience, I've seen trikotasje  ociated with knitting on an industrial scale (i.e. commercial machine knitting), while strikk is ociated with knitting by hand. Since the Salhus factory created machine knit fabrics, we see that reflected in the name.