Finally

A picture of the Garnstudio jacket, which I love (although the angora sheds) and have to make an effort not to wear daily.


I was actually outside during daylight hours while my parents were here last week, and we took pictures.

I can't remember if I mentioned when I knit it (in about a week, because the gauge is so big, and the Schaefer Martha was so squishy that I couldn't help myself), but the directions for the sleeve cap shaping were a little wonky--either wrong or unclear, I'm not sure which. So in case you've found this post because you're about to knit the Garnstudio/Drops 103-1 Jacket, here's what I did instead:

At the length specified in pattern (between 34 and 49 cm, depending on size), I bound off 3 sts at the beginning of the next 2 rows, then 2 sts at the beginning of the next 2 rows (that part is in the pattern) Then I decreased 1 st at each end of every other right side row 6 times, then bound off 2 sts at the beginning of the next 2 sts, then bound off the remaining sts.

I was knitting the smallest size, and that made the sleeve cap tall enough that it fit the armhole.

And a semi-related story: my father went to a conference in Norway one summer while I was in college. My mother, one sister, and I went over afterwards to meet him. This was in the dark ages, pre-widespread internet, so I had no way to look up yarn stores before I went (technically, that's not true...a big enough library would have had phone books from major Norwegian cities). So I had to rely on my yarn radar (yarn-dar?), and one night on the way to dinner I spotted a yarn store. It was closed, but we came back the next day so I could poke around.

I stared at yarn and pattern books for as long as my family could stand, then bought 2 Drops books and several skeins of boucle yarn (also from Garnstudio, although evidently discontinued by now). The books were in Norwegian (as well as Finnish and Swedish), but I was certain I could figure them out based on 2 weeks of puzzling out Norwegian signs, plus my understanding of how patterns are written. I suspect the shop owner thought I was crazy--she told me specifically that the patterns weren't in English, in case I hadn't been able to tell. Having puzzled out patterns in various languages since then, I think that would have gone fine, although I never got around to it (and now the same patterns are online, for free, in English).

I hadn't been knitting long enough to estimate yardage requirements very well (and the whole meters to yards thing may have confused me as well), so it turned out when I got home that I only had enough yarn for a vest. I'd never seen the yarn in the US (remember: pre-internet!), so I made the vest, even though I didn't really wear vests at the time. After a couple of years of not wearing it, I gave it to charity.

And speaking of charity--I was going to post pictures of my charity hats and scrap yarn for Katy, but the pictures are apparently still in my camera, so that will have to wait.