Knitting weekend

This past weekend I went to an island called Grötö and Stickfest i Väst (Knitting party in the West). I’ve tried to write about it but it’s hard to do it short enough to fit in a blog post so I’ll try to summarize:

Yarn (obviously)! In the welcome basket, yarn lottery, competition prizes and on the market square

Heaven's hand by Hamilton Yarns

Bart & Francis yarns

Awesome people! Lots of them, I think more than 70 persons (mostly women though to be honest)

Knowledge! So many people that know so much and willingly share it with each other

Maria is teaching twined knitting

Food! There was breakfast, lunch and dinner served, which meant I didn’t have to plan or prepare any food for a whole weekend! And coffee and tea whenever you wanted.

Cottages! We slept in cottages, I shared one with two of my friends.

Our cottage

I won lots of prizes; my favorites are the Malabrigo Lace that I won in the yarn lottery and a knitting bag made by Stickfrossa that I won in the competition The Fastest Knitter in the West.

Malabrigo Lace Paris Night

My knitting bag from Stickfrossa

The Fastest Knitter in the West-competition was really something else. Almost everybody participated and got prizes too! With 8 mm wooden needles and wool yarn that obviously was made for smaller needles. Ten people at the time knitted as much as they could for five minutes while the others were cheering like crazy around them and challenging them to do stuff like standing up, changing places, drink some wine and drop a needle. The winner was crazy fast! Her needles were blurry while she knitted. If she hadn’t hold on tightly to her needles it would have gone away like an arrow and somebody might have gotten badly hurt!

For a while now I’ve wished to learn how to do needle binding. I was talking to Ingrid Brundin and just happened to mention that and she immediately said she could teach me the first steps! She taught me one way to start and three different stitches so now I guess I’m hooked to this new technique too! One cannot have too many projects right? So now I’m needle binding my first pair of mittens, just by improvising.

Now that’s all I will write for now. Hope to post here more often but I can’t promise!

The candy I brought home

Teaser

This weekend I and my friend Lisa went to Örebro to visit a yarn exhibition. The reason for this is that I've decided to start a company on my own. I’m going to sell yarn here in Sweden and I’m trying to find nice yarn that is either ecological or fair trade. I will probably write more about this later.

Here are some pictures from the exhibition.


Swedish wool, Ullcentrum


Recykled PET bottles, Marks & Kattens


Wilfert's


Manos Silk Blend

Knitting event at Grötö

Yesterday I and my friend Lisa (who also is the one that brought me into the world of Yarn a couple of years ago) went to visit a knitting event at an island called Grötö outside the coast of Gothenburg. This event was a smaller version of SiV which is arranged every year in March at Grötö.

Lisa was supposed to pick me up around two but about 15 minutes before that she called and told me that her car had broken down! You have to go by ferry to the island and the ferry only leaves every second hour. She lives further away from where we were going than I do but we decided that I should pick her up instead and we hoped to make it in time for the ferry we were planning to go with anyway. Luckily we made it just in time and arrived at the event around three.


Lisa at the event

It was a lot of people there already and I believe most of them were staying the night. Me and Lisa had to go back home in the evening though. I sat down next to Sandy and on my other side there was a nice man with the same name as my son, Wilhelm. He taught me how to crochet a net and another way of making Tunisian stitches than those I already knew. That’s one of the greatest things of meeting with fellow yarn lovers, you can learn from each other.


Wilhelm with his crochet net

I also met Slavi from Denmark who sells yarn on the internet. He had brought some yarn for sale with him to Grötö. I bought a couple of lovely skeins of Colinette JitterBug, the colorway Forest!We had a great afternoon and evening with people I had never met before, much laughter and inspiration for many new projects.


The lovely JitterBug I bought

I got home about half past eleven and was really tired then. I really hope that I will make it to the real SiV in March!


Me with hook and yarn crocheting a small bag

I brought my camera but had forgotten to put in the memory card so the photos of me and Wilhelm were taken with my iPhone.