In June of 1991 I traveled to Finland, near Joensuu. My then-partner and I had rented a cottage from friends of his family and spent two weeks on a lake, remote from everything else, with a small sauna on the property and a boat to take out onto the lake. I was studying for my final exams at the university, which at this stage meant that I had a number of novels to read that I would be examined on. For several days I sat out on the lake in the boat reading Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘Shirley’. I loved the Finnish landscape, the little lake, we had good weather.
On one of the days we went to visit the friends we had rented from, and I remember that the mother of the family talked to us about the historical fact of divided people. It was only one and a half years after the Wall had come down, less than a full year since German reunification, and the topic was very much present those days. She mentioned that Karelia, the region they were living in, was still divided, because part of it is part of Russia. I had no significant knowledge of Finnish history then, apart from the fact that there had been a Russian-Finnish War, and had never thought much about the effects that had on people living there. But we got talking, she had seen me knitting something, she talked about Karelian knitting patterns, and I ended up copying a pattern she claimed was ‘typically Karelian’.
On our trip home, when we had a couple of hours to spare, I insisted we go and try to buy some ‘real Finnish yarn’ so I could knit a Karelian sweater. (I assume my then-partner must have thought me a bit out of my mind, but he obliged.) And I did knit that sweater. Which I still have. It hasn’t been worn a whole lot because the yarn turned out to be more itchy than I had realized, and even recent bathing in lanolin hasn’t helped with that a lot. It is a sweater to be worn over a not-too-thin turtleneck, otherwise you’ll be unhappy.
But it fits well. And when I look at it now, I am still pretty pleased with the result. All I had was the hand-drawn repeat of the Karelian pattern. No further instructions, but then that is how I always knit or why I have severe problems when trying to follow a knitting pattern that tells me to cast on 32 stitches and knit 20 rows instead of giving me centimeters for a specific size. I swatch, I measure the body or arm length, I calculate (one of the most useful things I learned in Math – Pythagoras’ Rule of Three!), and then I start knitting. But I never learned how to do a proper design. So I suppose if I had been more educated about these things I might have given some thought to whether the repeats matched nicely on the sides of the raglan lines in the upper part.
It didn’t occur to me then. And I don’t mind. And I am not sure I would be willing to do the maths to avoid that 'problem' if I were to start another sweater with a colourwork pattern without instructions these days.
All I want to do is to get it a bit softer, if possible.
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