Sunday, August 23, 2009

Shawl Finnished

There has been a bit of knitting lately. I found this lovely shawl pattern on Ulla, a Finnish on-line knitting magazine. Although the pattern is in Finnish, and although I know only a dozen or so words in Finnish, I was able to decipher the instructions by taking several steps.

1) I ran the pattern through the mostly unhelpful Google translator which provided insightful tips like these:

Watered scarf, squeeze it dry and pingota. Enter
huivin be pingotukessa until it is completely dry
.
Heads Telecommunication Finally the yarn ends.

2) I cross-checked the Finnish instructions and the translated ones with the Ulla site's Finnish/English knitting terms.

3) I luckily mentioned my effort to knitting savant Sue, who happened to be knitting a shawl that appeared to begin in the same manner
as this one. So I used her instructions to begin the project.

4) The lace portion is charted and most knitting charts depict the sam
e stitches in any language, so it wasn't all that difficult after all. Anyway, I'm pretty proud of my Lumi Shawl (Lumi means snow).

And, I know my Finnish grandfather (who taught me a few words in Suomi) would be proud too.
So, here it is . . . knitted in a Elsabeth Lavold yarn "silky wool," whose obtuse name cleverly disguises the fact that it is a silk and wool blend.
There has been other knitting too--CHRISTMAS KNITTING!!!! or maybe birthday knittting, I haven't decided which. You see, there are two lovely nieces who live in the fantasy world of Laura Engels Wilder and for whom I made prairie dresses last year. Certainly they need shawls to go with those dresses, and so as of this morning I am one shawl to the good in filling that need.



This shawl is made of a 6/2/3 weight pima cotton weaving yarn. It is wonderfully drapey and I think just perfect for the intended purpose. One similar (or identical, I haven't decided--but do not want to start a fight) shawl to go along with the decision whether they will be September birthday gifts or Christmas gifts.

5 comments:

Marianne said...

Both shawls are beautiful, I'm going to have to check out the Ulla e-zine!

Anonymous said...

Laura INGALLS Wilder.....they will be thrilled regardless....

love,

you know who

ann I am said...

OopS or is it opps?? I NEVER get the spelling right.

Pinneguri said...

Don't you just loooooove those Google translations?! I have had some of the same experiences, esp on Finnish ... it's a hard language, we'll have to excuse Google for not having learned it too well ;D
Love your shawl, and thanks for your notes on it in English.

Elsa said...

the green shawl is a beauty! would love to have the pattern! the other shawl is beautiful as well ... thanks so much for sharing!

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