I’ve been back from Iceland for a few days, but the simple cold I had when leaving Reykjavik had its volume turned up to 11 thanks to air travel. I’m hacking away still but hey! I make sense now.

As you can well imagine, a knitter cannot visit Iceland without stopping by Istex and, luckily for us, Ragga wasted no time taking us there. I knew I wanted some unspun, if only because I had never worked with it before. Seeing garments made with two strands held together at the Alafoss store only reinforced my aim and I selected enough to knit Védís Jónsdóttir’s Ranga from the new book ‘Knitting with Icelandic Wool’.

Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Ranga’s sleeves are unshaped, and my arms are simply not long enough to allow me to get away with that. I also decided that I’d nip the body in slightly around the ribcage while I was at it. Oh, and yeah – I’d also be doing away with the zipper. But doing the pattern as written apart from that.

Except that after swatching, I found that the fabric I liked was at a different gauge than called for in the pattern. This was entirely my fault, by the way – the pattern called for Lett Lopi, not Plötulopi.

We were to be in and out of the bus for a few days, taking in sights and visiting yarn  and grocery stores (don’t laugh: the latter sell yarn). And we we’d be socializing amongst ourselves, so math was out for the time being. In order to move forward as simply as possible, I selected the size which would fit me best after accounting for the tension change and cast on… for the yoke!

Which worked really well. I had a provisional cast on to pick stitches up from for the body and sleeves, was able to try it on on the fly and there was no reverse engineering to be done. All I had to do was locate the number of stitches after the body and sleeves were brought together and go on from there. Danielle and Anne decided to give it a try as well – you can see some of Danielle’s progress here but she was much farther along when we said goodbye last week.