slouchy hat

One of the purposes of fall is to wear hats. Soft, warm, textured hats that makes your cheeks feel even rosier. And if you make the hat yourself, and the yarn is lovely and delicate, and the color is perfect, and the leafy lace pattern is the most enjoyable pattern you’ve knit in a long time, well – that’s a fall hat.

The yarn came from a sweater I took apart last winter. It really was a thin yarn, so I ended up knitting with it double, so the hat wouldn’t end up too thin or fall apart if you looked at it the wrong way. The lace pattern is from last winters Vogue knitting magazine, originally on a cardigan.

To use the pattern on the hat, I first figured out about how many stitches I needed for the circumference of the hat (I think about 150 – found out by trial and error, knitting the ribbing). Then, knowing how many stitches the repeat of the lace pattern was (10 stitches), I got 15 repeats of the pattern, and exactly 150 stitches. I might have increased or decreased after the ribbing was done – I don’t remember. But! It’s not hard to apply repeat patterns from other types of garments to a hat. The best thing is that the yarn-weight doesn’t matter; you’ve already figured out how many stitches you need to get the right size hat, and so the number of repeats will just be what it is. Decreasing towards the crown was the hardest part – especially with a lace pattern to consider. I made it all up as I went, but it was the only time I wished I had instructions to refer to.

Not quite fall yet in this picture – I finished it during the summer, before sending it off to Berlin.

Knitting this, it was lovely to feel something else than stockinette under my fingers, just yummy textured softness. There is more left of this yarn, so don’t be surprised to see something similar to the hat in the future! This particular one is already at its new home in Berlin, where fall has begun, and the hat is in use. Just like it was meant to.

http://indigorchid.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/yarnfest/

vintage sewing stuff

A friend brought me a birthday gift the other day – wrapped in old pattern tissue paper, and it was a good indication of what was all inside! She had recently been to a yard sale, and bought all sorts of sewing stuff that had belonged to an old woman. Looking through it, I felt like I was given fragmented glimpses of the life of an Illinois seamstress.

This box originally held almonds. From the First National Bank of Chicago. And it was a birthday gift. And now it has an assortment of really big buttons, zippers that look like they’ve come out of garments, and thread and pins in a little chinaman-pincushion-box.

And the patterns of course… The look like they span at least three decades – and look at the envelopes on the top! Mail-order sewing patterns, with lovely fonts and stamps and 2 cents mailing cost. I am enamoured with the shirt-dress in the top picture – it even has a nurse uniform style! The only difference I can tell (from the tiny illustration) between that and the red dress seems to be that the cuffs are turned up, but how adorable! The black, double-breasted, 60s style coat in the second picture has also caught my eye. The pattern in the back though, with the green border on the side, promises that it’s a “quicky”, so maybe I’ll start with that one, haha! And finally, some 70s patterns, with a very maritime color-scheme. I wonder if that was planned or not!

meeting fall in mustard-colored shorts

I love fall. And I love mustard (in color; not so much in condiment).  I’ve posted before on my love of different colors, and I guess a mustard post is overdue now. When it swept into my color-favorites a couple of years ago, I had no idea it would stick around for this long. In fact, it’s becoming somewhat of a staple. I’ve never been terribly comfortable in yellows before, but this muted and richer, more subtle version is just right. I think that is a trend in all my colors: while my yellow-green and turquoise still surround me, they have become more toned down, especially the turquoise that tends to go more towards sea-foam and teals.

So, shorts! They have taken an embarrassingly long time to finish. I bought the fabric as a remnant piece a couple of summers ago, at Z Fabrics in Portland, Maine (oh, such a lovely little store, with beautiful, handpicked and quality things in stock. This was where I first saw oliver + s sewing patterns. They are beyond adorable.)

The pattern is, let’s say, loosely based on Ruby from Burdastyle. I’ve omitted the loose belt, the back pocket, and the cuffs from the original pattern. I also shortened the length, both at the waist and the hem. Those are all personal preferences and fit-alterations, so the shorts still pretty much looks like the original design.

The fabric is the softest corduroy in the loveliest shade of mustard yellow. I used this article a lot as a reference while sewing with this fabric, especially making sure I cut the pieces out correctly. Corduroy has nap that goes in one direction, so it looks different depending on if the nap is going up or down. When it goes down, it’s a little shinier, going up, the fabric looks darker. Therefore, it’s really important to cut out all the pieces in just one direction – unless, of course, that’s an effect you’re going for!

I love the little welt-pocket in the front – it was my first one!

I made the buttonholes at my school, where there is a dedicated button-hole-machine. It’s pretty nifty and automatic, so after the first button-hole is made, it will automatically make the rest the same exact size! They certainly did turn out much better than I think I would have managed with my very manual Bernina.

As much as I like wearing shorts in cooler weather, I think this pair will get lots of wear. And with the grey days ahead, it’s nice to bring some cheeriness into them!

yarn stash

Hello my yarns. Just like with my fabric stash, I started over again with my collection of yarns when I moved to Chicago last year. This might actually be the largest my stash has been in a long long time, so I’m in decent shape! I love just looking at my skeins and balls and cakes. I recently got a ball winder, and I can’t believe how fun it is to play with, ending up with beautiful yarn cakes, with textures that reminds me of honeycomb.

I have plans for much of the yarn, so hopefully (ah, twofold… I won’t be able to just stare at the pretty yarns in skein-form anymore) the stash will shrink over the winter as I snuggle up with my knitting.

• The dusty grey-blue yarn to the left is 11 skeins of Sisu, waiting for me to knit it up into a cardigan, hopefully looking something like this.
• Chunky green yarn… will become a chunky scarf (possibly plural).
• The lovely lovely, and very very thin mustard yarn in the middle is already on its way to become a light, shawl-collared cardigan in my machine-knitting class. Can’t wait for it to be all done!
• The also very thin denim-colored yarn next to it is being used for a hat and a scarf in the same lace-pattern.
• Finally, the dark grey yarn to the right is what is left-over from the sweater I frogged, only to knit a new sweater out of it. A pair of socks are underway, as well as a scarf. The lovely thing with both of those projects is that I can keep going until I’m all out of yarn! I love projects like that.

woolies

I made some wooly things for Christmas last year, gifted to family-members. And then I forgot to take pictures of them. This summer I finally got around to snapping some pictures, and it was a little strange getting the wool stuff out during the lovely warm season. But now it’s starting to feel like the right the time to get into woollenness again, with the leaves changing and summer definitely being over.

I posted about spinning yarn back here, and this is the yarn that resulted. After having spun the white yarn (which has some color-variations due to using fleece from several different sources), I spun the dark brown yarn. It was bought pre-washed I believe, intended for felting, and that’s supposedly not a very good thing for spinning. I found the brown fleece surprisingly easy to work with though, and it ended up more even than the white, and also the the first, yarn I spun. (Which might be the biggest reason it’s slightly more wonky than my second try!)

I did also get around to using that dark brown wool the way it was intended. About the same time last summer, I decided that the boy and I should make felted slippers for the grandparents. I’ve felted several times before, quite a long time ago, but I convinced myself that 1. I remembered how to do it, and 2. It couldn’t really be that hard, could it?

It wasn’t terribly hard, no, but took quite a lot of effort and time before they were all done, not to mention guidance from my mom, who actually did know and remember how to do this.

We made patterns for the slippers out of linoleum, and then set up shop outside in the yard. Then followed several hours of folding sheets of carded wool around the linoleum shape, careful patting, lots and lots of warm, soapy water, and vigorous rubbing. It smelled really good though – the soap we used has the aroma of fresh pine needles! (I’m sure there are some fresh pine needles in the soap itself too.)

The slippers started out really big, and the more you rub, the more felted they become – which also means the wool gets denser and the whole project shrinks in size. As the slippers got more firm, we could bust out some old-style washing boards, and really get down to business!

To get the color on the outside of the slippers, we put down some lengths of yarn in a random pattern at the very beginning, before covering the linoleum with the brown fleece. Since the slippers get turned inside out about halfway through the process, it was really exciting to see how the design turned out! Wool can be a bit slippery against some floors, so to finish off the slippers, I cut out and hand-stitched on soles, made of sueded leather.