Florence's Knitting Podcast; Lots of light blue knitwear!

Hi there, it's Florence here and I'm back again with another episode of my knitting video podcast. I wanted to make this episode a long time ago. I went on a trip to Bulgaria and then when I got back I got really sick and I've been sick for weeks and I think my voice has just about returned to normal to the point where I can film a video. Try and like fix this cardigan a bit so it at least looks good for the video about cardigans. This is going to be a typical episode of my knitting video podcast the structure will be as usual I'll show the main pieces that I've finished since the last episode I'll show everything that I have in progress that I've been putting a significant amount of my time into since I filmed last time and then at the end I will show any yarn that I picked up there's a lot this time um because I went to Unravel Festival oh my goodness this was a long time ago so I haven't made an episode in a very long time I went to Unravel Festival in sort of early mid-September. I think this one's called Unravel Autumn and it's not the main Unravel Festival but yes it's a yarn festival where you can go and look at and buy yarn from a lot of smaller businesses and I did buy quite a bit. Anyway before I start I will mention what I'm wearing as usual. This is the Dagmar jacket I think. It's a petite knit pattern. I really like this one. I've worn it a lot. The yarn I used is Helholt Triple which I think is exactly the yarn that is suggested in the pattern. It's quite hard to buy in the UK. I bought it in Helsinki when I was there a couple of years ago and something that I will say is that this yarn has worn incredibly well. This jumper has basically no pilling on it and it kind of looks quite new I would say even though I've worn this so much. Last winter I wore it a lot and so far this autumn it's been my go-to cardigan. So yes I actually love this yarn and if you do have the chance to pick it up if you are based in a country where it is widely available or if you're British, if you travel to a country where it's easy to find, I do recommend it. It's not a good one for fitting a whole sweater quantity into your carry-on suitcase though, that was a challenge. And I'm not going to talk much more about this because I've definitely spoken about this cardigan in previous episodes and I have really exciting finished objects that I want to share. I have this amazing stack of baby blue here. There are two finished objects here. I'm really excited about both of them. I guess I'll go in with this sort of less seasonally appropriate one first. This was the summer top that I knitted this year. I did finish it a little while ago so it did get somewhere before it got too cold to wear a top like this. But yes this is the I think it's called the Isabel top by the Knit Pearl Girl. This is what it looks like. Hopefully you can see. And the back looks like this. I was very concerned about the sizing on this one. I think I've made the second size. This pattern has so many sizes. The sizes are described with letters and I think they go all the way from like A to O or something. There are loads. And I mentioned before that something I think is very cool about this pattern is that there are separate charts for groups of sizes. So for the bigger sizes the arrangement of the lace and stuff is a bit different to make sure that it sort of fills up the fabric in a way that looks really appealing, rather than having the same size lace panel on the bigger sizes as the smaller ones and then having a lot of empty space. The result is a pattern that's terrifyingly long. It's a very very long pattern but you shouldn't be too intimidated because most of that is charts and most of the charts are pretty similar. You don't really need to reference them too much, it's kind of showing like how to do the lace motif for this part and how to do the lace motif for this part and for this part and actually they're all kind of the same chart and once you've figured out how the lace pattern works which is very easy it's a short repeat and easy to memorize you don't really have to reference the charts again. So this top comes in two different versions. It comes as a classic camisole that's closed at the front and then it comes in this open front version which is the one that I've done and the pattern includes instructions both for adding little i-cord ties and also for adding these buttons. these aren't real buttons there's no button band or anything on this there are no button holes but what I've done which is also what the knit pearl girl did in the sample that I really liked and I was referencing when I made this I basically just stitched the front two panels together at regular intervals and I've stitched a pearl um on top of where I've set them together in each place these pearls are a bit bigger than the ones that the knit pearl girl used I think I just went for a slightly bigger size although I did order them from the same Etsy store she linked the Etsy store she used in the pattern which is nice. And yeah like I feel like with this kind of closure I mean obviously it's not really a closure because you can't open it again um but I feel like it's quite risky because I want it to sort of pull open a bit between the buttons because I like the keyhole look you get where the two sides pull apart and then close again at each pearl button but I don't want there to be too much pulling um for it to look bad or to show too much skin. I'm wearing this just with a regular bra underneath something that's similar in color to my skin but I don't want it to be super visible and this actually worked out perfectly it looked so tiny when I was knitting it but actually this looks great it doesn't pull too much um yeah I'm really really happy with the fit I didn't make a lot of modifications um but basically when I was deciding to make this top I was looking at all of the projects on Ravelry and I saw that a lot of them are very sort of A-line in shape. I mean even the Knit Purl Girl's own sample it really seems to flare out a bit towards the bottom or maybe I guess it's straight ish but kind of gives the illusion of flaring out more as your body gets smaller in the waist area and so I wanted to add waist decreases to this. The other thing I did to try and avoid the A-line shape was I decided to use a wool yarn. I'll talk more about the yarn later but this is done in 100% merino instead of the silk that the pattern suggested. The wool will have more memory and I think will have less tendency to stretch out like flare out and stretch out around the waist so I'm happy I made that choice. Anyway I decided to add in waist decreases. I will try to show them to you. So this is the side panel where the decreases are. If you can't see much yeah I can't really see them either. I think the stitch pattern that's used on these side panels is very good for hiding decreases. I believe I did one decrease every eight rows and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Now the slight complication with making a modification like this does affect other parts of the top as well. It meant that this bottom hem was a lot shorter. This top doesn't finish exactly at my natural waist, it is a bit longer and so my body is getting bigger again approaching the hips and I didn't increase again to add more room so I have quite a few fewer stitches along the bottom than you should have for the second size and I'm also just kind of built pear-shaped. I wear the second size to fit my upper body but I'm a heavier, I'm not a particularly small person and so that bottom hem needed to be a lot stretchier than the pattern called for. The pattern suggests an I-cord bind-off, which I will say looks great, and the pattern has a lot of really cool little tips in it for how to make the I-cord travel smoothly around the corners of the top, which I really wish I had the chance to use, but unfortunately, I just had to use the stretchiest bind-off that I have in my selection of go-to bind-offs, which is the surprisingly stretchy bind-off. It's the one where you kind of do a regular bind-off where you sort of knit two stitches, and then you pass the second stitch over the first and off the needle, and then knit another stitch, and pass the stitch over and off the needle and so on that sort of first bind off that you learn when you're learning to knit but on top of that you do an extra yarn over between each stitch and you put the stitch and the yarn over over and off the needle each time probably doesn't make that much sense from my description but based on that description if you find a YouTube tutorial you should be able to figure out if it's the one I'm talking about I did that bind off instead which I don't know it tends to look a little bit messy I don't think it looks terrible but it's definitely much less pretty than it would be if I had done the I-cord bind off especially with the nice corner details. I had to do the same bind off around the neck it actually took me three attempts to get the neck bind off to work because at first I was optimistically doing the I-cord bind off everywhere apart from the bottom edge and then I realised I could not get my head through the head hole. I knew I wanted a button right at the top so even though it was open front I did need to be able to get my head through the top opening with it closed at the top of the neck and so then I did the surprisingly stretchy bind off but I only did a yarn over every other stitch that I bound off if that makes any sense and then that still wasn't stretchy enough and so I did it again with a full surprisingly stretchy bind off which I think looks the worst but is the stretchiest and that was fine and then for the armholes and also for the front um left and right they're not button bands you know what I mean the left and right front edges I did again that surprisingly stretchy bind off where I'm yarning over, yarning over? Yarn overing? Every other stitch. I guess what I'm trying to say is if the finished edges don't look so clean on this top, that's not the Knit Purl Gal's fault. The pattern has a lot of really nice clear instructions for making clean finished edges. I just had to do something a bit different to get this fit to work. I think it was worth the trouble though and I love it. The yarn I used for this is the Knitting for Olive Merino, just the regular old knitting for of Olive Merino. The color is ice blue. I love this color. I think it suits me. I think it's very wearable. You can probably tell that I like it based on the next garment that I'm just about to talk about. So yeah this is the Isabel top by the Knit Purl Gal. It was my summer top for this summer and I am super happy with it. I think it's so beautiful. Okay let me try and figure this out and do up the top button. So this cardigan was a piece that I knitted freehand so there isn't a pattern out there for this although I'm considering writing one up. I think I might cast another one of these on because I actually really like this and I would like a cream one and maybe I'll write up a pattern as I go with that one. So this is just a baby blue cabled cardigan. Kind of a big thing to hold up but hopefully you can see it okay. And the fun thing about this is that it's quite asymmetric so the cable pattern is very different on the left and right and if I flip it around to show the back. It's got the same kind of thing going on, very asymmetric cable pattern and the sleeves are also different. So this one has like the big diamonds on and then this sleeve has the squiggly cables. I free-handed this, I've been talking about making a cardigan like this with asymmetric cables for a really long time and yeah it just took me a long time to get around to it because I had to sit down and do a lot of charting to plan out what I wanted to do in advance it's not a project that I could just jump into without thinking about how these cables would work with the increases to shape the back or how these cables would fit around the neck opening as well and so all of this stuff had to be thought through and planned and yeah this summer I finally got around to it this has been a slower project I've been stopping it to work on other things but I finally put the time in to finish it recently and I'm really glad that I did what do I want to say about this? I guess just to talk about the construction a little bit it's a very simple drop shoulder cardigan. I shape the back panel with increases to give the shoulders a little bit of a slant but from there it's all very straight down so I knit the back panel from the shoulders down to under the arms. I pick up for the left and right front and I knit those down to under the arms and I join everything into one big flat piece and knit the rest of the body and then for the sleeves I didn't even do any short rows or anything because it's so oversized I don't think I really need to just a straight sleeve works fine the fit of this I'm mostly quite happy with I think it has an okay amount of ease I find with cabled jumpers they always seem to fit with less ease than I'm expecting because they're basically ribbed all over right like these cables are kind of just fancy ribbing and so they always want to like cinch in a little bit like ribbed garments want to. But I think it's oversized enough, I think it looks nice. I would say also that the sleeves are maybe a touch too wide and when I make a second one I might make the sleeves a little bit narrower. They're quite big as is but I don't even mind that, it's a very comfy garment and I'm quite happy with it. The yarn that I used for this is surprisingly not from Knitting for Olive so these are actually two completely different colours. Well I mean they're very similar but they are different colours from different brands. This is an Impigant from Sandnes Garn, which is just a 100% Norwegian wool yarn. The colour, I'm just gonna say a number, 5811 maybe it's called. The correct colour number and name will be in the description, so you can check there if you're interested in any of the yarn or patterns or whatever that I've talked about in this video. It's a beautiful colour, I had to buy more to finish this. I don't know if I have lost a bunch of the original sweater quantity that I bought or if I just massively underestimated how much yarn I would need I haven't weighed this to see how much I actually used yet and that does mean somewhere this probably has different dye lots touching but I don't know I don't think you can see it and I also don't really care my knitwear is handmade and it's allowed to look handmade and I think it looks pretty even if it's not completely perfect I also want to show the buttons because I think they're really cute they're maybe a tiny bit too small but I did make the buttonholes on this a little bit too small I did yarn over buttonholes which are maybe not quite appropriate for a cardigan like this especially because I was doing the button band on three millimeter needles so a yarn over really isn't giving very much buttonhole and so these buttons barely fit through. I never wear my cardigans unbuttoned anyway so I might just sew bigger buttons on like stitch them through the fabric so that they don't need to ever be unbuttoned but anyway these buttons are really cute and they're from Eliza's Buttons. Eliza's Buttons makes these ceramic buttons and I think she's based in Oxford so these buttons are available both in the Woolhound which is the yarn shop in the Oxford Covered Market and also in the Oxford Yarn Store which is a bit of a walk north. The buttons on this Dagmar cardigan are also from Eliza's Buttons. I think they're so cute and they come in so many different styles. Every time I go into one of these yarn shops I grab any that look tempting, and so I have a little bit of a horde of these buttons waiting for cardigans to put them onto. I don't have them to hand, so I can't show you, but recently I got a set that's very plain, except all of the buttons are different colours, like really muted, warm pastel colours, and I think if I make this cardigan in white, that's what I will put on it, because I think a white cabled cardigan with these differently coloured, muted pastel buttons, it would look so good. Yeah, I'm not sure what else to say about this. I'm sure you'll see this cardigan again, and I'm sure I'll be wearing it in videos, and I do plan on making another, so I guess I'll talk more about it then, and about the adjustments I make to get it perfect. But overall, it's just a piece that I'm really glad is finished, and I've been wearing a bunch recently. Okay, so the next piece is a very nearly finished object, and it kind of would be a finished object, except I've deliberately kept it unfinished to show in this video. So I mentioned in the last episode that I had bought some yarn to work on a test knit a pair of socks. This is a pattern called the All Eyes on You sock I think. Yeah, this is the All Eyes on You sock by Penny and Stitch. Miyu from Penny and Stitch asked me to test knit this and I agreed to. She's always really friendly and I chat to her from time to time and I was happy to test knit this sock. I figured it was something I'd probably wear quite a lot. This sock pattern comes with two different sets of charts in it for two different designs. So this is I don't remember if it's option A or option B but this is the fancier one which has more of these eyelet cables on it and then there's another one which is more of an everyday version although I do think these are still very wearable for everyday which has fewer of these eyelet cables and then it also has an optional ruffle on the top and this picot edge the reason I said this is unfinished is actually because I don't think I like the ruffle I think I'm going to take it off um it's not really a problem with the pattern I think that the mohair that I used for this um I used the Izzy Silk mohair in the color E0 I'm not sure this is much cooler of a cream color than the sock which is more yellow and I think that the color of the ruffle makes the sock look more yellow than it is and I don't really love that and also I think the socks look great already um and they're already fancy because they have this picot edge and so I don't really feel too sad to be missing out on the ruffle. So I think I'm going to take the ruffle off this one and not bother putting it on this one but I wanted to keep the ruffle on until I film this video so I could show you also what the ruffle finish looks like. I don't know what to say about this it's a fairly typical sock pattern or at least it's the kind of sock pattern that I would like to use. It has a lot of the techniques that I frequently reach for when I'm knitting a sock even without a pattern so it's cuffed down which is my favorite it has a slip stitch heel flap yeah it's just a basic really nice sock something I will say about this pattern is that surprisingly it needs a lot of stitches so this sort of eyelet cable pattern it means that you have some rounds where you have fewer stitches on the needle and so usually I would knit a sock with 64 stitches in a round. I actually did this one in size with 72 stitches so way more than I would usually do. I don't think these picot edges have as much elasticity as a rib cuff would. I don't think they grip your leg as well and I also think they kind of look bad on the finished sock when they flare out a lot which they often want to do because again they don't cinch in as much as rib and this sock is basically ribbed anyway right. So what I did was I knitted the cuff with 64 stitches and then I did the rest of the sock with the 72 stitches. This isn't in the pattern and it's definitely not because I started off with 64 stitches and then found the sock was a bit small and didn't want to rip back the picot edge and do it again. Happy accident though, right? Because I think the smaller stitch count on the picot edge actually works out kind of well. The yarn that I used for this is, oh I don't remember what it's called, it's from World of Wool. World of Wool just have a sock yarn, I think, and it's that one. Ah, it's called Wanderer, and it's made of British wool and recycled nylon, which is cool. It is superwash, it has 350 metres per 100 grams, and it comes in a whole bunch of colours, but it should be fairly obvious which this is because it's the white cream one. But perhaps because it used more stitches than I would typically knit a sock with. I found this pattern was very yarn hungry. I actually used up almost the entire ball of wool knitting these socks so I had one 100 gram ball which normally I can knit a pair of socks with with quite a lot left over. I had a very small amount left over I'd say maybe 10 meters or something. I pretty much used it all up and these socks are not super long so maybe that's something to keep in mind if you're typically someone who can get say a pair of socks out of a 50 gram ball of sock yarn which I am not because my feet are too large for that but uh yeah I'd say this is a pretty yarn hungry pattern I'll link the pattern in the description if you're interested I just think these are really cute and I will wear them a bunch I think they'd be really nice with Mary Jane shoes or loafers or something like that in the winter shoes that show off the fancy pattern a little bit would it be a Florence's knitting podcast episode if I didn't have a mitten I have a mitten. I actually don't remember where I was up to with my mittens in the last episode um I think maybe I just cast on the second sample for my ceramic mittens but I won't talk about those this episode. If you are curious about the ceramic mittens they're currently being test knitted and I think the pattern will come out in roughly one month. These are also being test knitted. I only have one and it's for a specific reason. So I've had a few requests recently to make a tutorial video for colorwork mittens and I thought that was a really nice idea and something I like to do and so this winter I'm hoping to do a tutorial for making colourwork mittens for beginners and this is the mitten that I'm going to be showing in the tutorial. The reason why I only have one is because the second one I'm going to knit on camera for the tutorial. I am going to make a second pair before then but I wanted to save the other one from this pair for the video because I think these colours, the white and blue and red, will show up really clearly in the video whereas the other pair I'm going to do in like a navy blue with pink and green and the navy blue is very dark and I think will make things a little bit difficult to follow on camera. So yes we have a floral pattern on the back of the hand, corrugated rib for the cuff and then just this really fine, I don't know what you call this, like one by one color work pattern on the inside of the hand and a floral thumb. I think these are just really cute like I actually think these are some of the nicest mittens I own and I really really like them and I think that I will wear this pair a lot once they're done and yes they're currently being test knitted. I plan for this pattern to be for a DK weight mitten. I think DK weight is a nice compromise I think for first-time colorwork knitters or first-time mitten knitters perhaps fingering weight might be a little bit too much of a commitment and be a little bit intimidating and anything thicker than DK I don't know then it's really chunky and I find it hard to fit a good design into the limited number of stitches that we have available but I think DK is a nice compromise. With that said this is not knitted in DK weight. I mentioned before I have enormous hands this is always my struggle when I'm mitten knitting especially when I'm making patterns because a lot of the time my patterns are one size which I don't know it does feel kind of bad that I'm releasing one size mitten patterns that I don't really fit. I kind of expect that people can use their judgment and gauge to adjust the size a little bit but maybe I should be more thorough in how that's covered within the pattern anyway um an example of that sort of thing this is knitted in Atlas from Sandnes Garn it's a newer Sandnes Garn yarn I think it's wool and something else oh I have a ball here I want to say lamb's wool it is 70% lamb's wool 30% merino okay I'm glad I checked because I was very wrong on that this is the pink that I want to use for the flowers on my second sample. But yeah it's definitely more of a worsted weight, a little bit thicker, so I used the same needle size but I'm just using a slightly thicker yarn to make sure that the mitten comes out a bit larger and yeah this is kind of a perfect fit for me actually. So I think you'll be seeing these mittens again soon, probably another sample in an upcoming podcast episode and then eventually also a full video tutorial. I'm going to start working on the tutorial after the test knit is done so any feedback from the test knit can go back into the pattern before I film the tutorial and so I haven't got started on that yet but it's something that I will be doing fairly soon I hope. Here is just another quick close-up without my hand and sleeve making it harder to see what's going on. I have two more work in progress pieces that I didn't have in the previous episode. Those of you who watch knitting podcasts ever which I assume is basically all of you will know exactly what this is. This is a petite knit Sophie, well, it will be a Sophie hood, although I haven't got to the hood part yet. So you might remember last winter I made a petite knit Sophie hood in a really pale teal green colour. It was so cute, I planned on wearing it a lot, and then I knitted some mittens to match, which were dark brown and sort of pale minty eggshell blue green. And then when I was away in Poland over New Year in Wrocław I stood up on a bus with the mittens on my lap, dropped the mittens on the floor of the bus and got off the bus without noticing. And despite waiting for the same bus to come back and getting on and having a look and also spending a lot of time searching the lost property page and contacting the bus company, the mittens were never found. And so I was left with a hood which doesn't really match any of my mittens apart from the pair that I'd lost. So this here I'm making it again in a colour that I think will go much better with all of my mittens. This is a white colour, it's actually a little bit of a greyish white or at least a very cool white so it's basically more like the frill of these socks than the body of the socks. And for this I didn't buy yarn so I'm using yarn annoyingly that I had in the stash for other projects and I don't know, It's frustrating, isn't it? I will have to buy more of these to then be able to do the other projects, but I think that's okay. I don't think dialogue will matter so much. So this is the yarn that I originally wanted to use. This is from Gabo Wool. I guess I should flag this as sponsored because they sent me one ball of this yarn for free, and then I bought all the rest with my own money, non-discounted, as soon as they started shipping to the UK. This is their Cashmerini. It's a cashmere and merino blend and it is stunning, it's so soft. I was kind of curious about how it would wear and so I really wanted to knit it up on its own, also because it's much softer than this mohair I'm holding it with. Unfortunately I really wanted to get the right kind of gauge for the Sophie hood and it's been long enough since I last knitted one last winter that I couldn't really remember how it was constructed and so it would have been kind of annoying to read through the pattern and plan out how to adjust it to match a different gauge. So I'm just holding it with mohair and I'll make something else with this cashmere, cashmerini I think it's called, cashmerino, cashmerini, to try it out on its own. To give it the best chance though of being very soft and not completely ruin it, I am using the softest mohair that I know, which is this Isia silk mohair. This is the one that I use to do the cuff of those socks and I actually bought it to hold with another yarn which I might show later in this episode. Actually I don't have it to hand so maybe I'll show it next episode but yeah these two are a fairly good color match um I am really really happy with how this is turning out one of the reasons I like the Sophie scarf or Sophie hood so much I've actually never made a full size Sophie shawl the big one um but I really like for big scarves the triangular shape it uses a lot less yarn and it's so much faster to knit than knitting a rectangular scarf because it gets so skinny like these long parts use a lot less wool and way fewer stitches. And so I really do recommend triangle scarves especially for beginners. If you really are dead set on doing a scarf for your first ever knitting project make it a pointy one. I've just worked on this at maybe two of the knit nights I've gone to so far and I have this much so it's working out really quickly. It is on five millimeter needles which also is very fast. I don't know how much else I want to say about this. I'm sure we all have seen this kind of pattern before. This is very much a piece that I'm knitting because I want the final product not because I'm particularly excited about actually knitting it. It is so soft it's going to be such a treat to wear. And I have one more work in progress and this is really big. So the ceramic mitten pattern that I'm working on is in collaboration with the Yarn Archive which is a yarn store based in the UK. So I've been chatting a bunch with Cindy from the Yarn Archive to plan this test knit and we also met up in Oxford and went and visited the yarn stores here and it was really nice and we were chatting a lot about nice patterns that we'd found and we ended up deciding to do a sort of small knit along where I'm knitting the same jumper and that's what this is so I know this kind of looks like the Dala ski sweaters that I've knitted in the past this pattern is actually not from Dala this is a drops pattern I've never knitted a drops pattern before um they don't come highly recommended they're all free and on the drops website so I can't complain that I'm not getting what I pay for because it is free anyway um I played around a bit with the chart I am following the pattern fairly closely in terms of how the charts are arranged I've just changed the colors and fixed things that I think were not intentional about it whereas Cindy is doing this jumper a little bit differently having this main chart twice at the top and then again at the bottom of the body and skipping this bottom chart that I have. So I have cast on, this is bottom up, I'm basically just knitting a big tube and then I will steek it to add the armholes and also the collar and so I just cast on here, I've done half twisted rib, this chart here some amount of stockinette which I hope is the right amount, it's very hard to tell and now I've started on this main chart. The yarn that I'm using for this is Pigment from Sandnes Garn. I'm actually so frustrated I really wanted to knit this in um undyed wool so I wanted to try and find some DK weight undyed sheep wool yarn that comes in different colors ranging from a very dark color to a very light color and I found some I think it's from World of Wool which is the same brand that made that sock yarn but on the website it was kind of hard to judge how all of these browns compared to each other to pick out five that had similar tone but different lightnesses if that makes any sense. And so I ended up just using Pigment which I think is what Cindy is also using and I do think it looks really great but literally about a week after I bought this yarn my local yarn shop or the Woolhound in the covered market started stocking the exact yarn that I've been looking at from World of Wool and now I can go and look at it on the shelf and see all the colors and I'm really sad that I didn't wait I didn't know it was coming and ended up buying this instead just because it's fun to try out different yarn. But yeah, I mean, this is the second jumper with Pigment in this video. I am a big fan of this yarn. I have jumpers that I've worn tens or hundreds of times made from this yarn, and I know it holds up, it looks good, and I find it pretty comfortable. All of the colours I used will be in the description. I don't think it's super interesting to list them all here. They're all brown. There are five of them, ranging from this pale creamy colour to the darkest one is quite close to black. I think they're mostly the PetiteKnit Pigment collaboration colours. And I picked for this lightest colour because I knew there was going to be a big plain stockinette section in the middle without any texture or pattern. I picked one which is tweed so it has various shades of brown flecked into it which I think helps tie in the stockinette section with the chart at the bottom and at the top. So yeah, this is the project that that I'm knitting in front of TV in the evening sometimes. I'm making slow progress on it. But yeah, it's been moving faster than I expected it to move, to be honest. I only have a little bit left until the body is done, and then I will move on to the sleeves. I will make a video probably showing how I steek and assemble these jumpers, because I kind of have my own way that I like to do it. And yeah, maybe that will give a little bit more context as to why I knit them the way that I do, which is a little bit non-standard. I think I didn't mention, the pattern is called Northern Dream. Everything will be linked in the description and this one is free. So if you're interested, you can take a look. Okay, so those are all the work in progress pieces that I'm going to talk about this episode. I'll move on to show some of the yarn that I've bought recently. I don't think this is even all of it. Basically I bought a bunch at Unravel and I'm going to go through it. Maybe first of all, I have this. This isn't from Unravel and add, this was sent to me by Gabo Wool. As I've mentioned, Garbo Wool is, I think, a Polish yarn brand. I was sent some of their yarn, just sort of one or two balls of each colour, from a variety of the yarn that they thought that I'd enjoy, a few months ago. And I liked it so much that I ended up ordering a massive box myself with my own money once they started shipping to the UK. This is the newest issue of their magazine, and so they contacted me and asked if I would like the newest issue of their magazine and I said yes and this is what I got. I do think it's super cool I guess I don't know if this is just something they added because they were sending it to me but it did come with this swatch card where they have swatches of all of the yarn that's used in all of the patterns in this magazine which I am really excited about. It's one of those magazines where it has all of the written patterns in the back and then it has lots of really beautiful photography in the front it has maybe I'll just show a couple of things I think are cool for you poncho enjoyers there's this sort of poncho looking jumper which is pretty cute I do like the poncho I just feel like it's so everywhere right now that I feel like maybe it won't age that well I'm not sure this I really love and honestly might make it's a little cropped vest with contrast details and this one is knitted in I think the yarn is called Creper wool yeah and this is the yarn that I said was very very similar to Pigment so that would be a little slipover that you could totally knit with Pigment as well although the Garbo wool is really beautiful and very affordable I think those are my favorites from this and yeah now moving on to the yarn that I bought at Unravel Festival. This first one I know doesn't look very me in colour. I think I'm going to try and knit some socks for my mum for Christmas with this. She wanted socks that were fun colours and I find it very hard to find self-striping hand-dyed yarn, so not variegated but where you knit it up and it actually makes individual coloured stripes. That's what this is, it's from Madrigal Yarn. The colour is called Adam and it also comes with a contrast for the toes and heels which is something else that my mom mentioned that she would like on a pair of socks that I gift for Christmas and it's nice because they come together this teal perfectly matches the teal in the self-striping as well. I am a little scared of knitting this because I actually haven't used a self-striping yarn before and I think it will matter more what my gauge is like. Luckily when I bought this the seller, the dyer I guess, also gave me a free pattern to use with it so I think I'm going to try to follow that it might have had a short row heel which again like I'm not the biggest fan of but I guess for a self-striping yarn like this you kind of have to use so that all of the rounds end up being the same length because otherwise I just grab a sock to show when you're doing this part uh the gusset part of the sock these rounds are much longer than these rounds and so the stripes will end up looking very different so yeah I guess I will have to do a short row heel for this one. I think it'll be fun to knit up and I do enjoy the opportunity to use colours that I wouldn't otherwise use but which are fun to look at when I'm knitting gifts for other people who have more adventurous tasting colour than me. The second thing I bought was this. This is from Fiber Workshop. I love Fiber Workshop's yarn. it's all Norfolk horn yarn and it's all dyed with plants so I got this is the four ply weight I just got one 50 gram hank I'm hoping this is enough we will see and this is undyed and then I got this set of minis this is the spring set they had a set for each season and these are each 10 grams I think I'm planning on making some floral mittens with these so I'll be using this cream as the base and then all of these colours for rows of flowers and I think I was pretty much planning on using this pattern but it will obviously be a defining gauge so I'll be able to fit more flowers on and I'm going to alternate between rows of pink and blue flowers with these two greens for the stems on the two rows and then this yellow for the centres. These are dyed with madder, weld and indigo. If you remember my I think it's called forget me not sweater which is a jumper pattern that I published a couple of years ago. That is also knitted with yarn from Fiber Workshop, plant dyed Norfolk Horn wool and yeah I bought that at the East Anglian Yarn Festival I think a while ago and I loved it and I'm so happy to have some more to play with. I bought this yarn, this is a Latvian yarn, I don't remember what it's called, it has a very specific name. I bought it from a stall called 80 skeins which sells a bunch of this Latvian wool a lot of it was single ply and sort of variegated in color but this is much thicker it's sold by weight so I just grabbed a few of these hanks and then weighed them and I was charged based on that I have a whole bunch of this color which I don't know I look at it closely and it has a lot of really beautiful blues and greens it's almost slightly mild it looks so pretty but then I do realize that when I knit this up it's going to be like a dull green that looks kind of grayish and not that inspiring unless you're looking very closely and so I went back and I grabbed these as well um I just have one of each this is a really dark blue I know it looks kind of black and this is a white it is a very yellow white um like compared to some of these other white yarns I have this one is definitely more of a yellow cream so it's probably not something I would use on its own but I think these three together could knit up to some really beautiful color work and so I think I'm going to try and design like a chunky color work design to use these colors. And then the last thing I bought was this. I have I think six of these which is probably enough for a jumper. I think they're 175 meters each so just over a thousand meters in total I guess. This yarn, I don't know, it was almost closing time and I saw it in the bargain bin and I looked at the label and it just says Long 100% Long and I was like what's a Long actually all of these are labels differently it's very bargain bin you know this one says that it's Shetland BFL and alpaca but I'm almost certain it's also Long because these are pretty much identical this one says tofu 100% Long which I think is correctly labeled so I think it's Long wool and the colorway is called tofu and the woman at the stall did show me what a Long is it's a very cute sheep you can look it up um but I just love the color of this it's a really grayish not too yellow cream it's pretty soft um this is Aran weight and I'm just super excited to knit something with it it's such a wearable color I've realized that as much as I do enjoy these baby blues and things the pieces that I reach for the most in my wardrobe are the ones which are a cream or almost grayish cream color just like this and so I know that this will knit up into something that I really love it's still more yellow cream than that Sophie hood I'm knitting um but yeah it's definitely pretty cool for a undyed sheep wool yarn is that everything that I wanted to talk about this video I bought some yarn in Bulgaria but I think I'll hold off for the next video with that one because it's packed away and I really don't want to dig it out right now and I think this video has been more than long enough. I have a lot of editing to do, but yeah. Thank you very much for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video, and I will be back again soon, hopefully, if I don't get super sick again with another one. Goodbye!