Bohus

This weekend, I had the luxury of attending a class on the history of Bohus Stickning with Susanna Hansson. If you ever have a chance to take a class with Susanna, take it! She was a fantastic teacher and has a wealth of knowledge to share. Plus, having the time with other knitters is also a treat.

Bohus (pronounce "boo-hoos") is a stranding technique which also involves texturing by adding purl stitches to the right side of the work. Unlike Fair Isle, which has a two colors per row rule, Bohus can have multiple colors being used on one row. At the most, I knitted with three colors and found myself preforming knitting acrobatics as I tried to hold all three colors in my hand at once. It was quite a sight.

Bohus patterns were primarily designed for sweaters, but for the sake of the class, we made little wristlets. We received little kits for the class containing tiny yarns. I knitted my wristlets on US Size 0 at a gauge of roughly 9 stitches to the inch. These stitches are teeny tiny, but the overall effect is amazing! To show what a difference the stitche size makes, Susanna passed around two samples hat, one matching the traditional gauage for Bohus sweaters and knitted with fingering weight yarn, and one knitted with Shetland/aran weight yarn. The hats were both the same pattern, but almost looked like two different pieces. The color was the prominent feature of the traditional hat, while it was more of a secondary player in the aran weight hat.

At the end of the class, Susanna asked if we would all line up our wristlets so we could we could see the differences between each one. Seeing all the beautiful partially finished wristlets in one place was amazing. Equally amazing was seeing all the balls of yarn attached to the wristlets. Everyone was able to retrieve her wristlet from the pile without tangling a ball!

After the class, I rushed home and found some time later in the evening to finish one of the two wristlets.

Although I did have a ton of time to knit, we also had a very fun family game night. Little Clover recieved a Clue Mysteries game which contains over 40 kid friendly mysteries (meaning, no one dies and all the "crimes" have an accidental undertone). To help set the mood, we donned fake mustaches. Even Italian put on a fake mustache over his real goatee. (That picture was very very blurry. I think the two mustaches confused my camera and prevented it from focusing.) Italian did successfully capture a shot of Detective Little Clover in mid thought.

Oh, we also managed to watch the first (American) football game of the season.
Go Colts!