Hey, Ho, Spann den Wagen an

I met up with my friends G_____ and L___ from Germany in Los Angeles this past week after leaving Spring Training, and they brought me the greatest thing ever. I had planned to have some Wollmeise sent to them to carry to me, but the VAT savings pretty much equalled out the shipping cost so I just had it shipped to me. Instead, I requested Kinder Überraschung, and one volume of the Bavarian Twisted Stitch books that was available used on Amazon.de. I've been interested in these books for quite some time, I first heard about them after seeing Eunny Jang's Bayerische socks--I loved her swatches as much as the final sock pattern, and did a little googling about this knitting tradition. There wasn't much out there, but these books came up as a good (but elusive) source. Instead of just the single used volume I'd found, G_____ was able to track down the whole set, new:

I'm so excited about these! They are all auf Deutsch, of course, and my German isn't good enough to get much out of the text, but they basically are stitch dictionaries of Bavarian twisted stitch patterns. Since the patterns are charted and shown in good photos, there isn't all that much to figure out--the tricky part is just following which stitches are moving over or under others, and that's a challenge with any cables. Each book is about 70 pages long, with maybe 100 patterns each, as well as a couple of garment patterns per book. I'm looking forward to trying out a lot of these patterns, and maybe incorporating them into some socks or cuffs or something. They're a little labor intensive, though--I can't quite manage to cable without a needle on tiny cables, even though I've been using this technique exclusively on my Vickie Cardigan sleeve. Here's a swatch that I made this evening:

The pattern is called "Sechsfache Streifenkette", which means something like "six strips chain". It's Dale Baby Ull knit on size 0 needles. Or maybe they're size 1--I can't find my needle gauge! I know that I should include a penny or something for perspective, but the swatch is about 1.25 inches high and maybe 1.5 inches wide. I'm not sure whether these patterns can be knit back and forth--I just strung the yarn across the back for the swatch, since I'm only doing this to see how it looks rather than to calculate gauge. I'm looking forward to a lot of entertainment from these books!