iceland

knitting with Ragga Eiriksdottir by jen geigley

This past weekend, I took a wonderful knitting class with Icelandic knitting designer Ragga Eiriksdottir. (You may know her as RaggaKnits.) We learned how to make upside-down Icelandic patterned yoke sweaters. Super neat, right? The Des Moines Knitting Guild hosted a weekend of classes with Ragga before she heads up to Minneapolis to do more teaching gigs with the talented and awesome Stephen West. Here are some of my pics from the workshop.

If you can't tell, we all had a bit of fun. Ragga brought piles of sweaters to share with us, some from her family's collection and some that were from the 50s-60s (worn while salmon fishing) that still looked amazing. She told lots of stories and shared so many bits and pieces of her knitting expertise with us. We knitted tiny upside-down Icelandic Lopi sweaters using Icelandic Lopi wool yarn and learned a German twisted cast-on. So of course I'm feeling all kinds of inspired to go forth and knit a my own pile of patterned yoke sweaters. Right now.