Meren Lahja - Gift of the Sea

My mother gave me a significant amount of cash for my 50th birthday “explicitly for yarn”. I was on a road trip on the Oregon coast, enjoying the greens of the pastureland dotted with sheep high above the wild Pacific when we came into the charming town of Cannon Beach where I found a lovely yarn store. I spent hours on the floor selecting the perfect colors of wool and wool blends by Mad River Wool Factory. As it turns out, those sheep I drove by are their flock! I chose some natural creams and browns of the fleece as well as gorgeous naturally dyed pink, purple and copper yarns, and a really unique yarn that “contains about 50% wool from 13 different breeds of sheep, contains about 30% superfine kid mohair dyed in 12 colors, plus 1 natural grey. The remaining 20% contains angora bunny, bombyx and tussah silks, cashmere, pygora, bison, alpaca and llama”. I used that skein for the final motif so its magic could shine against the natural light-colored yarn.

Mom loved everything I picked out. She even included a cool write-up about Mad River Wool Factory in her beautiful handmade birthday card I got when I got back from my trip. She was so excited to see what I would make from these truly special yarns. But sadly, this ended up being the last gift my mother gave me before cancer took her, and I had only made a few swatches out of it by that time. Naturally, this yarn became much more than just a gift for my 50th, and I ended up putting so much pressure on myself to make something spectacular that I became paralyzed with indecision. Almost three years later after a cross-country move and buying my first home, I was finally ready and inspired to make something worthy of this precious yarn. I knew I wanted an oversized yoke sweater with colorwork in Finnish motifs to honor my heritage on my mother’s side. I picked the motifs out of Alice Starmore's "Charts for Color Knitting" from the Finland pages by printing and cutting them out. I then spread them all out and picked the ones that felt most like waves, fences, cliffs, and foliage to me, or somehow spoke to me otherwise, and then let instinct take over arranging and omitting them until I was happy with the flow. Next I laid out all the yarn and took a photo, edited it to be black and white so I could more easily see the contrasts between the colors and started figuring out how the colors would interplay. Lastly I made a swatch to test a few colors and motifs, and of course to find my gauge.

Because I worked it top-down, I was able to try it on as I went. Which is a good thing, because there was a fair amount of frogging along the way. I initially had a higher almost mock-turtleneck neckband, and decided right away I didn't want that and changed it to a ribbed crew neck using the dusty pink before working the colorwork motifs, mixing up the colors to complement one another best.

This is another time I allowed my creative instincts to take over. I love playing with colors and seeing how they play with each other. It's so interesting to me how a color can change by the colors around it. In one of my favorite sections I used two low-contrast yarns - darker, lighter, darker - as the motif against the same background creating a gradient effect. I had a lot of fun playing with the color and motifs of the yoke. So much so that I got carried away by the rhythm of the colorwork and worked way too many increases and rounds before and after splitting for the arms. I also decided to remove a larger banded motif to make room for other motifs I was more fond of and that weren't made up of so many rounds. I wanted a big colorwork yoke, but I didn't want the colorwork to travel too far down the belly of the sweater, which I worked in the lightest color, and finished with some small zigzag motifs at the cuff and hem. Now it’s exactly how I wanted it to be, and I finished just before my 53rd birthday! This is probably my most prized and cherished knit to date.

This sweater may not be for everyone, but that’s kind of the point. It’s mine. Meren Lahja means gift of the sea in Finnish. A gift from my mom. Made by me. From the sheep on the Pacific Coast. In honor of my family and my home on the west coast. And it’s WARM and substantial! Like my mom’s hugs. Perfect for winters in my new home in New England. As Finns say, “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”