Finnish eye-candy
I was browsing around internet-land and came upon Ulla, a Finnish online knitting magazine.
The sweater on the cover is breath-taking, in my opinion. Wow. Everything I could hope for; fitted in the right places, loose in the right places, mostly simple (if you like knitting an awful lot of seed stitch) with very nice finishing details, like incorporating short rows and cables into the collar. Very clever design. Now the cables come straight out of Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Patterns for Knitting (except for the short-row corner of the collar), and I'm curious about the copyright issues of re-charting someone else's cable panels straight out of the book, but using a different notation. The full pattern can be viewed here. Either way I love it, but sadly I don't read a word of Finnish, and web translators do a horrible job on Finnish. But still, it's nice eye candy. And you can probably figure out the charts pretty easily if you're familiar with cable charts in general.
And if that one isin't enough to whet the appetite of a cable lover like myself, there's another gorgeous one in the same issue which can be found here. The cables are also straight out of Lavold's book. My issues with this piece are twofold; knitting it would take me 10 years. It goes to the ankle! Whoever designed it must be incredibly fast or incredibly patient (or both). Second, long sweaters make my butt look a mile wide. Look at the model! The second button (near her waistline) is bulging, and the butt-level button is left conveniently undone. Why are ultra-long sweaters not designed to incorporate the fact that most women have butts? This drives me nuts! Maybe someone should do something about this... or maybe I should design the perfect won't-make-my-butt-look-big long sweater. If only I had more time....
Still, the sweater is very pretty, and maybe a clever knitter could do some waist-shaping or something.
My parting thought: why do a majority of this magazine's models look so unimpressed, or even downright p*ssed off?
5 comments:
Wow, that sweater is fantastic ... and if that cable is picked up I might have found my cable ... hmmmmmm.
By the way, I have a theory that the resting Finnish face looks pissed off. Take me for example ... I'm a quarter Finn and my mom is half (of course) and I know from watching my mom she often looks mad, and ... hey, you know me! I look mad a lot too. :)
Can you read Finnish? I hear that the designer (who can be found on Ravelry) may do a translation... but hold on for a bit cause I have a nearly complete top secret sweater design that would like to have other sizes tested... but it will take a while to do the numbers.
Now if only that sweater (from Ulla) could make its' wearer look like Isabella Rosselini like the pissed off model!
Nuuu ... I can't read Finnish. I've always thought it's weird that no Finnish traditions or language got passed down esp since around here you never actually hear English spoken on the street but I think that back in the day you acclimated to the new country as fast as possible. My grandmother probably understood Finnish but couldn't read it, and it died out there.
If you get too busy to do the numbers on your top secret design, send it along anyway. I'm gonna guess I've done a little more upsizing than you might have had to. Course, you'll know where it all needs to be done and I'm lazy.
I checked her page on Ravelry the other day and she now has an english translation for both patterns.
Post a Comment