My favorite thing to do on Ravelry is to go through my friend’s activity feed and see what other knitters are up to.  I have friended many remarkable knitters there.  I like to follow their projects, both to get new ideas for myself and to see some beautiful knitting.  I also love to see the ways in which people style and wear their hand-knitted garments.  Last month, I saw this beautiful finished project from Ina (Ravelry link here), and thought to myself “Emma would like this.”

© inaholst – used with permission

I sent Emma a link and she sent back a one-word answer: “Amazing!”.  That was enough to put it on the Things-to-make-for-Emma list.  On her project page, Ina notes that the pattern – Thornhilds Snoning – and yarn are available in many shops in Denmark.  I looked it up and found that both pattern and yarn could be found at Sommerfuglen in Copenhagen (follow this link).  So, two weeks ago, I hobbled into the shop with my broken ankle, with this pullover in mind.  (Can you tell from this photo that I was not at my best?)

The sales person said to me “The pattern is only available in Danish” and Doug said “No problem!”  I was fairly loopy from the ankle at that point and just nodded.  When I got home, I realised that my Danish pattern reading skills are really not up to the challenge, so I wrote to Ina, who kindly volunteered to help.  I want to be able to learn to read a Danish pattern, so I suggested a round-about way to do it.  I translated the first page as well as I could, sent it to Ina, who checked it over, corrected mistakes, filled in the bits I couldn’t do, and gave some generally good advice.  My plan is to try again with the next page, hopefully doing better with each subsequent try.

The pullover is knitted with two strands of yarn held together: Isager Aran Tweed and Isager Silk Mohair.  I bought the Aran Tweed in the colour Green, and the Silk Mohair in shade 37, a very dark forest green.  Ina’s project, pictured above, is knit with the green tweed in combination with shade 56 of the mohair, which is a mossy green.  My combination results in a darker green than Ina’s; it turns out to be very hard to capture the colour correctly in a photo. This morning I cast on the sleeve, and here is a photo, which gives a pretty good approximation of the actual colour:

The combination of the mohair with the Aran tweed makes for an extremely luxurious fabric.  It feels fantastic and knits up quickly.  My thanks to Ina for her help and encouragement, not to mention the creative inspiration!

Ha ha – just noticed the mistake in the sleeve: I crossed the last cable too soon!  I’m so happy I stopped to take a photo instead of blindly knitting on.  This way I only have to rip two rows.  Note that this is clear evidence of my broken ankle; normally, I would have fixed this, taken another photo and only then posted it.  Instead, I’m going to go put my feet up.