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Viking-Inspired Knits from Elsebeth Lavold

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viking knitting books

Heidi is the winner.

This week’s giveaway is two amazing pattern books from Elsebeth Lavold, both having to do with Viking-inspired knitting patterns.

Lavold spent years researching Viking knots and other ornamentation and translating those designs to knitting, the result of which became her book Viking Patterns for Knitting. It includes 60 charts for patterns inspired by Viking motifs, and shows the item that inspired the design, which is really cool.

There are also 14 full projects in the book (you can see them on Ravelry) including sweaters, coats and accessories for the body and the home.

Viking Knits and Ancient Ornaments is a continuation of that book, produced more than a decade later and incorporating more design charts and another couple dozen garment and accessory patterns.

I’ve read online that it’s helpful to have the first book to work out the techniques used in the second, and it’s clear that neither of these books are for beginners, or those without a great level of comfort with cables and traveling stitches.

That’s why I’m giving away the books together. The first is paperback and the second hardcover, so because of the weight they need to go to someone in the United States (sorry, international knitters, you know I love you!).

If you’d like a chance to win these books, leave a comment on this post before the end of the day Sunday, August 27. Just for fun, because it’s eclipse day and this is a USA-only giveaway, I’d love to know what you are doing/did for the eclipse. Did you travel to see it or was it visible where you live? As I write this it hasn’t happened where I live yet. We’re supposed to have 91 percent coverage, and I’ll probably slip outside during it but also watch videos of the totality with my daughter when she gets home from school.

Thanks for visiting, commenting and sharing, and good luck!

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Comments

  1. Watched it at work, using a pinhole device improvised from shipping boxes, a presentation easel, and other bits. The whole company called a break for the 15 min before and after the height of the partial here in Massachusetts, and we all behaved like very curious kids at a Science Museum. Love working in a nerdy start-up!

  2. Love the patterns in these books. Just getting back into it after years of alzheimers caregiving.

  3. I work in a call center and therefore did not get to go outside to see the eclipse, but wanted very badly to see it. I will have to settle for internet or TV news to watch it. We were supposed to have 90% coverage here in Oklahoma. I traveled to Iceland last year and am very interested in the Viking culture and would love these books. Thanks for the chance at a giveaway.

  4. Loads of us met in a downtown park. Rather festive environment. Had glasses from library this time, but can remember making some with my Dad for an eclipse when I was a kid.

  5. I am a knitter-for many years now- great books! Since I had no glasses and saw the last eclipse, I sat on my porch and watched the darkness come and go! My son sent me some fab pics he took-amazing stuff! Thank you, Susan

  8. Here in SF we had a lot of cloud cover, which worked in the favor of those without glasses. We still didn’t look right at the sun, but aimed our cameras at the reflection in the nearly black uv windows on some of the bigger buildings. Not great for taking pictures tho.

  11. I was working and so busy i did not get time to go outside for the eclipse 🙁 viewed on social media though – nice pictures

  12. I didn’t go outside, just watched from a window inside and saw lots of photos on Facebook later.

  13. We had a nasty storm at the same time the eclipse would have been visible to us, so….I stayed inside and knitted! I always get excited about new books, better than Christmas!

  14. We had 100% coverage here, so we all sat in our lawn chairs in the driveway and watched through eclipse glasses. Very quiet with no bird or chipmunks calls, it got kind of cold out, and it looked like one of those night filters that film makers use! Really a fun experience!

    Also fun would be working all those knots and twists in the two books — thanks so much for the nice giveaway. 🙂

  15. I stayed home and watched it through glasses and on TV. We had 90% coverage, but heavy cloud cover. I lived it through my daughter who traveled to Southern Illinois to see the totality. It sounded amazing!

  16. I live in the path of totality in Corvallis Oregon. The media was predicting grid-locked traffic (which largely didn’t materialize), so I watched the eclipse from the comfort of my front yard. We had ideal conditions with perfectly clear skies. It was really cool watching the moon slowly eat the sun, then seeing the bright circle around the dark moon, and even a few stars.

  17. Wow! Can this week get any better? Two exciting happenings – the eclipse and your giveaway. I am always so inspired by Elsebeth Lavold! She is my most favorite designer and I love the way she so aesthetically puts together her books. Inspiration on so many levels. As for the eclipse, I was working and went outside during the peak to take a peek. Even where I was the partial darkness was an amazing experience and can only imagine what it was like experiencing the total eclipse of the sun.

  18. Hubbo & I both had glasses and popped outaide to watch. We had about 85% totality. My drove to Oregon and my daughter is in Kentucky… they both had the full experience.
    BTW, I’m intrigued by these books.

  19. I went to visit my cousin in Maryland and we watched the eclipse on the beach. We had fun. I love Elsebeth Lavold!

  20. We had about 75% coverage in North Texas, so I watched the eclipse on TV. I did go outside at the peak of the eclipse here. I failed to get the proper eye wear in time, so I took pics of the crescent-shaped sun spots coming through the tree leaves. We do get to experience a full eclipse in 2024, and I will be fully prepared!

    The books look fascinating.

  21. Thanks for the giveaway. We were planning to view an 87% eclipse here in South Dakota, but it was a cloudy, rainy day. We watched the eclipse on the NASA broadcast.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]