No, it really isn't the yarn fumes.

You sometimes hear knitters say 'The yarn fumes went to my head'. It's a stupid sentence designed to explain or excuse the fact that they have yet again bought more yarn that they don't need but was just too appealing for them to resist. It's often heard in the aftermath of yarn shows. It's not true, it's just one of those daft knitter sayings like 'Sock yarn doesn't count towards stash' and 'Blankets don't count as works in progress'. Well,  yes it does and yes they do, and it would be a lot better for us all if we were honest, stopped making stupid excuses and said 'I am a weak willed person and I couldn't say no to buying this yarn, or casting on this blanket even though I already have a gazillion skeins of hand dyed sock yarn in my cupboards and have already cast on seven ever so slightly different blankets that I don't have time to finish.' When it comes to  knitters, 'ooh look, a shiny thing' might be the motto for many.

I note this is not all knitters. Some knitters buy wool for a project, they cast it on, they finish it, and they then buy wool for the next ting that they want to knit having thought long and deeply about what that might be and researched appropriate patterns before coming to a logical and well thought out decision. I envy and admire  those knitters. I aspire to be one of them. Not made it quite yet though. 

I have never actually used the yarn fume excuse, and I don't think I've ever said that blankets don't count as works in progress either, but I have ben guilty of uttering the sock yarn doesn't count lie, although I haven't for quite  a long time. Like I say I have aspirations towards being a more honest and more organised knitter. 

With this all in mind I had absolutely no intention of buying any wool in Finland. I may have looked to see if there were any yarn shops in Savonlinna before we went but there weren't, which was fine by me and I wasn't going to go looking. In a way then, it's a pity  that the wonderful design shop /tourist trap we sought out looking for a present for a friend's baby had a whole section at the back dedicated to wool. 

Now here's the thing. A long time ago, in the days before I checked my tension I made a sweater for the OH in North Ronaldsay wool. It had a lot of textured stitches on it, it was gansey inspired and he chose the pattern and he chose the wool and I made it and then he couldn't really wear it much because it was far too big, Since those days I have learned how important it is to check tension if you want jumpers to fit and so nowadays I do. And he's been making noises for a while about me perhaps reknitting the sweater and I said I would but not in North Ronaldsay yarn because I find it itchy to knit with, let alone wear, and the colours are not very enticing and it isn't cheap. So it struck me that when we saw this wool in the shop in Savonlinna and he went into raptures over some of the colours that perhaps this would be my opportunity to buy some wool to reknit his jumper. I did lots of calculations  on bits of paper the first evening we had been in the shop and went back the next day armed with details of how much I would need. 

And that was when I hit a problem because North Ronaldsay yarn is aran weight and aran weight  appears to be something that Finish knitters know not of. But the OH was looking at the wool like a lost puppy and saying what a shame it was that the beautiful sweater kits were so very expensive ( spoiler - I didn't buy an expensive sweater kit) and these colours were all gorgeous and somehow I found myself saying 'well if you don't have the wool for my pattern, have you got a pattern for your wool'. And of course they had loads, and of course the OH fell in love with one, and we picked colours and bought the wool and he was all excited about getting home and having me cast on, and in all the excitement neither of us thought until we'd got the stuff back to the hotel about what language the pattern would be in, because if it wasn't the yarn fumes that turned us daft, we had fallen victim to that awful anglo-centric way of looking at the world that annoys me so much in other people who expect everythign to be in English, and of course it turned out that the pattern was in Finnish. 

Well of course it was. It was a pattern being sold in  a Finnish wool shop designed with a particular brand of Finnish wool in mind, and what other language was it going to be in for goodness sake? Photographic proof. 

 In the circs. it's unfortunate that Finnish is one of the northern languages that I don't have even a smattering of, it being so difficult to learn and all. However help was at hand in the shape of a multi-lingual glossary of knitting terms on the Drops yarn website, which includes Finnish (hooray!). It wasn't all that easy, even with that and decades of knitting experience but I manged to translate the instructions to a certain point. At which I swapped the translating for casting on. 

This is a photo of what we hope the sweater will turn out like

and this is my progress so far. 

Amazingly it looks quite good.And still a fair bit of soothing forest green round and round to do before I need to start trying to work out what comes next.