Elsebeth Lavold

Indeholder "Forord", "Et projekt bliver til", "Mønsteranalyse", "Ring og kæde", " Hermod, sweater i gittermønster og løs hætte", " Siv, jumper med ribkanter og flettede borter", " Fjörgyn, stortrøje med hætte", "Vandrette borter", "Fletværk", " Hervor, sweater og hue", " Rafn, trøje med sjalskrave", " Ragna, sweater med slidser og hue", " Frode, sweater med Sankthanskors og flettede kanter", "Enkeltknuder", " Vebjörg, figurstrikket trøje", "S-krogen fra Ardre", " Harald, sweater med flettet bærestykke, hue, sokker og vanter", " Vigdis, vams med løs hætte", " Fjalar, sweater og hue", " Freja, jakke med bort fra Vendel", "Borten fra Lillbjärs", "Runeskrift", " Kysmik, barnesweater og herreslipover med runer", "Dyreornamentik", " Fafner, pude med dyremotiv og kant med rundede hjørner", " Strik rundede hjørner", "Hvordan læses diagrammerne", "Kryds", "Sådan gør man", " Udtagningerne", " Indtagningerne", "Råd og vink", " Størrelse, mål og materialer", " Strikkefasthed og pinde", " Kantmaske", " Opslagning", " Rib", " Indtagning", " Udtagning", " Markering", " Sæt masker på en tråd", " Aflukning", " Endehæftning", " Opspænding", " Sammenstrikning", " At samle masker op", " Sammensyning", " Knaphul", " At skifte garn", " For", "Forkortede pinde", "Størrelse og pasform", "Garn", "Vedligeholdelse", "Foto og Forlæg", "Forhandlerliste", "Mønsterfortegnelse", "Diagramsymboler".

Pæne mønstre og lidt forklaring på simple spørgsmål og teknikker.… (lisätietoja)

Big fan, have lots of her books that aren't listed on goodreads. This discusses her books generally.

As I took possession of Zarah http://www.ingenkonst.se/eyc8_e.htm today, I wondered yet again about my love affair with the Elsebeth Lavold, Sweden’s best kept secret as far as the knitting world is concerned. Most of my knitting friends don’t understand. A lot of her stuff is plain frumpy by our standards – by Swedish standards too? - that I don’t know. It even becomes comical:



Again, by our standards her cable work is wooden, set into boxy shapeless designs. Compare, in particular Debbie Bliss’s modern adaptations of cable themes. And yet.

At her best, she is so good. Look at the cover of Out of the Wood:




Or this:



And, of course, she insists on using real people as models and this has quite an impact on the look of her work.



It’s fascinating to compare the picture above with one of an overweight woman badly dressed:



Suddenly the very same pattern looks – well, would you knit it? And yet just before you turned to that page you’d thought how much you loved this. I must say, the two pictures have me confused. I want to look the girl ‘a’ not girl ‘b’ and I’m just not sure what would actually happen if I knitted this.


One of the things I like about her is her responsiveness to queries. I wanted to knit the cover design Mellow Yellow a few years ago, but the recommended colours were discontinued. When asked she came up with some nice alternatives. I bought the yarn, about a year later set about knitting this jacket, only to discover that a really careless mistake had been made in the pattern and I had only half as much of one of the two colours as I needed. Bugger. The thing that amazes me, though, is this is a world-class designer, it is the cover pattern of a book and yet evidently I was the first to try knitting this, well after the book appeared. Therefore I was the guineapig.

Look on Ravelry and none of her patterns are very popular. She is making a push in the US and she has a really nice line of yarns, so maybe this will change. She DOES deserve to be right up there so I hope she really does make it out of Sweden and into the world at large.

She has a comprehensive website, with her biography, all her books and pictures of most of her designs here: http://www.ingenkonst.se/.
… (lisätietoja)

I happened to receive an email today from Lavold which prompts this recollection. In the course of her lengthy communication she explains various truths about her business in order to counter the rumours that get going on the internet and before you know it are quoted as fact even on such a discriminating site as goodreads.


This is one of the observations she makes:

On a side note (and we need to repeat this), we do reply to every single email requesting support (well, in the past eight years two or three may have been left unanswered because of their utterly rude tone, but these are very rare exceptions). It may sometimes take a week, more if we’re traveling, but we always send replies.

In fact I had quite a discourse with Elsebeth on the matter of the cover design of this book. First I discovered that the colours used for the picture were discontinued. I wrote to ask for her suggestions on other combinations. She has her own yarn label I was going to be using, buying the yarn from Sweden without seeing it, so it would be impossible to figure suitable combinations in the blind. She wrote back with a lengthy discussion of the options. Gratefully appreciating this, I took one of her suggestions.

The story continues...Again, from her email of today:

A vital person in keeping the number of errors down is Carol Rhoades, our irreplaceable pattern translator and technical editor (for the benefit of our Swedish sample garment knitters, Elsebeth writes the original instructions in Swedish). Not only is her terrific work directly beneficial to the knitters, indirectly she reduces the time we have to spend publishing errata and answering support emails, thus freeing resources for creative work. Carol, thank you so much!

The yarn arrived and I put it away and came back to it ages later. After I knitted for a while, it became evident that there was a massive error in the quantities of one of the yarns. I wrote to Lavold and soon enough got back a reply that I was quite right. Damn. Since I'd purchase the yarn so long ago, I could neither return it or knit what I wanted with it. I unravelled what I'd done so far and eventually made something completely different and not nearly as nice with it.

Frankly, I think that as mistakes go, this one shouldn't have been allowed to slip by, especially on your feature pattern. Still, I can't complain about the impeccable follow up I got every step of the way. Lavold and her husband must work 24 hours a day.

You can see the whole book here:

http://www.ingenkonst.se/mtc1_e.htm

I'd say all in all, one of her best collections. I've only been mean about the stars because of my own tragic tale.

This I especially adore, but I can't help feeling it will be a disaster on tits. Note that it has been cunningly photographed on somebody who has absolutely not the merest skerrick of a breast:



One day...one day when I get over my last experience with this book, one day....
… (lisätietoja)