seamless hybrid

Ever since seeing Jared’s Seamless Hybrid sweater over at brooklyntweed, I knew I had to make one myself. Luckily, the boy was on board, and so it started.

The pattern for this sweater is Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Seamless Hybrid, in “Knitting without tears”. Zimmerman is impressive enough as a knitter and patternmaker, but her books are also a really enjoyable read – being informative and funny, like she is having a conversation with a friend. The book is filled with no-nonsense and common-sense tips, like “your hobby should be enjoyable. If it isn’t, find a new one”, and “if how you prefer to do things seems to work better than what the pattern tells you, do it your way”. I like those kinds of messages!

This sweater started it’s life as another sweater. Back here I was taking it apart, and it looked like this:

… and this is how much yarn the sweater yielded. I guess it doesn’t look like all that much, but it’s since become a sweater, a pair of man-sized socks, a yard worth of scarf in progress, and seven balls of varying sizes left. The original sweater was from Eddie Bauer, in a cotton/wool blend.

The pattern, like Mr. Brooklyntweed noted, is more of a recipe or guide than anything. It pretty much tells you to figure out the gauge for the yarn and needles you want to use (say 5 stitches/inch), decide how big or wide you want the body of the sweater (say 32 inches), and calculate how many stitches you need to cast on (5 x 32  = 160 stitches). The sleeves are a certain percentage of the amount of body stitches, and you just knit these three tubes until they reach the armpit, then join them together. The yoke is certainly the hardest part, and like many knitters have noted, the instructions are a little vague here. I found Jared’s post very helpful, not only for his description of knitting the yoke, but also with the nice close-ups of his sweater.

The sleeves and body are joined together into one big tube at the armpit, and some stitches are left alone at the very underarm. I used bright orange yarn to hold the stitches while I was knitting the rest of the sweater. The boy requested that I sewed up the underarm stitches with the orange yarn – he liked the idea of a semi-hidden, unexpected flash of orange under the arm!

I thought the pattern was very easy to work with. I actually like the way it’s set up, so I can use any yarn and any sized needles to make the sweater. Often times I want to knit things without having the exact materials that the pattern calls for, and I end up changing and making up a lot of things, and I’m sure with a less successful end result. Also, being a lot of stockinette knitting in the round, it’s a pretty quick knit as far as sweaters go.

The finished sweater was a tad tighter than I had planned, but for a first attempt at an actual garment (as opposed to mittens and socks and such), I am very very pleased. Plus, I see this as the test-round of many sweaters to come!

illustrating

Studying fashion design is certainly not all designing. In fact, it goes more like this: part designing, part patternmaking, part sewing, and part communicating your designs and ideas. And with communicating comes drawing.

In my fashion illustration class, we worked a lot on drawing “the fashion figure”. The fashion figure is at least a nine-head figure, and is often supposed to convey more of a mood about the clothes, rather than construction-related details. That’s what the flat sketches are for. Throughout the course, I found myself drawn to “messier” styles of illustrations – blocks of colors that didn’t stay inside the lines, visible pencilmarks from the initial sketching, with a few quick, assertive lines. Like the marks of someone who knows what they are doing (which might not be quite where I’m at, but I do like the style!).

Make it big. Click.

I guess it doesn’t come as a terrible surprise that I actually like doing flat sketches. Flats are often made as a supplement to fashion illustrations, and are intended to show construction aspects of the garments, such as topstitching, binding, seamlines, buttons, vents, and all the details the patternmakers and seamstresses would need to know to put the garment together. Something about the clear, crisp lines, the symmetry, and the detailed technical-ness of flat sketches appeals to me. Though, not if they have to be done in a hurry. These are best done slowly, with a fine-tipped pen, in good lighting, with your nose close to the paper!

This is from a recent design project, involving a deconstructed men’s suit, and using that as a starting point for coming up with designs. I really enjoyed this project, ending up with lots of little ladies with heavy bangs. The bangs are becoming a bit of a signature, so I’m sure they will show up here again!

machine knitting

For the first part of the semester this fall, I took a machine knitting workshop at my school. It was a lot of fun! I decided quite early that I wanted to make a cardigan (I love cardigans!), and I had this mustard-colored yarn at the ready, after frogging a sweater earlier in the summer.

I’ve used a knitting machine earlier, but it was a long time ago, and the most complicated thing we did was to change colors to make stripes. During this workshop however, we learned about shaping the knitted pieces to make garments, graft the pieces together, and decorative touches such as cables, holes, and running stitches.

The majority of the cardigan grafted together, and back on the knitting machine to add a band in the front.

The knitting machines look a little bit like a keyboard, except that they have a bunch of little crochet-looking hooks in place of keys, and a handle (kind of visible on the left side of the knitting hanging down) that you slide back and forth over the bed, as it’s called, and that action is what creates the rows of stitches; the actual knitting. The yarn is fed through a series of wires that looks like a fishing pole, but that is what controls the tension.

We made our garments by knitting each piece by itself, and then joining them together – much like in sewing. The other option is to just knit a length of fabric, and cut out your pieces from that, similar to buying yards of jersey, or other knitted fabrics. To make the pattern, we draped fabric on dress-forms and marked the shape we wanted. Then, using the gauge we’d figured out by knitting little test-swatches, we did a lot of mathematical calculations, measuring our draped fabric pattern-pieces, and multiplying those measurements with the number of stitches per inch in our swatch. The measurements were thus our guidelines for when to increase, when to decrease, and when to stop knitting altogether.

The decorative effects and shaping of the pieces is made through changing the position of the stitches on the needles. It’s a little hard to see on the picture above, but those little tabs that are sticking up not quite consistently are part of the needles, or hooks.

The shaping of the pieces was done at the edges of the knitted piece. To increase stitches, you move the stitch on the edge over one needle, so there is a vacant needle between the knitted piece and the edge-stitch. The purl-bump of the edge-stitch is moved to the vacant needle, and when you knit the next row by gliding the handle over the needles, they all get knitted and you’ve added a stitch. To decrease, the edge-stitch is just moved inwards one, so there is two stitches on one needle. It’s not terribly hard, but very exciting to see your knitted piece change shape, and even more exciting when those shaped pieces are put together and turn into a shaped garment!

From yarn…

… to cardigan.

It’s been so much fun to turn a bunch of yarn into a garment that I can wear! I’m sure I’ll be back at the knitting machine to take advantage of the speediness, but it does have a downside: it’s not very portable.  Hand-knitting will never be abandoned; you just can’t beat curling up on the couch with a cup of tea and some lovely handiwork.

patterning sneak-peek

I’ve entered into those crazy last weeks of the semester, where lots of projects needs to become signed, sealed and delivered (and graded of course). Here is a little sneak peek of the last of my patternmaking projects this semester:

Make sure to click to see the larger versions – there’s a lot of details!

There are a lot of exciting and fun projects to be completed, and I look forward to showing it all! In fact, there might be a bit of a school-project “series” coming up, since I still have several things from last semester to show as well!

tailored jacket: finished

My tailored jacket is done! Actually, it’s been done for a little while now; the weather was just way too warm over the summer to think about, or model, a tailored wool jacket. This is where I left off, with the shell of the jacket sewn, and all the horsehair canvas sewn in to the front, lapels pad-stitched, and edges reinforced with twill-tape. Sadly, there are no fun pictures this time of the inside of the jacket, since it’s all safely hidden inside the lining.

The next step after the shell was sewn, was to attach the facing pieces to the front edges of the jacket. Making a tailored garment means doing a lot of little steps to ensure the best possible fit. One of those steps was to make the facing just a little too long, and make sure the excess ends up right where the collar turns (right over the buttons). We did the same with the twill-tape, and it leaves just a little extra room for the collar to turn nicely, without pulling tight. It’s a small and subtle thing, but the small and subtle things really add up in the end. I plan to use this trick on future jackets – whenever I can remember it, that is!

Non-functioning vent, bound buttonholes, and gorgeous, engraved coconut-buttons.

The vent on the sleeves aren’t actually functioning vents, as they are just sewn shut on the inside. They do have an awfully nice mitered corner on the inside, so if you catch a glimpse of the diagonal seam from the corner, it looks quite professional! The sleeve is a two-piece sleeve, which honestly isn’t any more difficult to sew than a one-piece sleeve. I think it can make certain styles of jackets look more tailored – in fact, I’m working on another jacket with two-piece sleeves right now.

After stitching the shoulder seams together, we pad-stitched the under-collar in pretty much the same way the lapel was pad-stitched. The difference was that we stitched the horsehair to black wool felt, which essentially is the under-collar for this jacket. The top collar was then sewn to the jacket, and secured to the under-collar using a blanket-stitch. There was a lot of hand-sewing at this point!

Getting the lining in the jacket was less difficult than I thought it would be. The pattern is more or less the same than for the outside, with some modifications. The lining in jackets and coats are traditionally slightly larger than the jacket itself, so that it can move around without pulling on the outside fabric. While we machine-sewed the lining together, and to the facing, most of attaching the lining to the jacket was done by hand; the hem and the neck-edge, and also, closing up the lining at one of the arm-holes. I used a wonderful, slightly heavier, slightly textured, cream-colored silk, and it behaved quite nicely while sewing.

The last day of class was spent finishing the jacket, starting with sewing on the buttons. Getting the lining in place made a big difference – all of a sudden the jacket was practically done! We also finished the bound buttonhole, which involved cutting an x-shaped slit through the facing, right behind the buttonholes on the front. It was a little unnerving to cut into a jacket that was as good as finished, but when the little flaps were folded under and hand-stitched down, the jacket was truly all done.

What’cha looking at? My well-fitting jacket perchance?

A couple more pictures here.