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!

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.

green dress (aka going-to-a-wedding dress)

I started this dress a long while back – over a year ago, I believe. It’s been through several transformations in that time! It started when I went fabric-shopping with a friend in the spring last year, and bought some yards of this smooth cotton-blend in a lovely dirtied green, but with no plans for it. A couple of days later, I saw a dress in a magazine, and decided to copy it. The dress in the magazine was made out of an entirely different type of fabric, and I had no patterns even remotely similar that I could use as a starting point. I set to it regardless, with a great amount of enthusiasm… for about three days. With nothing even close to a finished dress, and a lot of frustration over my malfunctioning self-drafted pattern, I put it away for almost a year.

It did turn out to be a dress in the end, and I’m quite pleased with it. This is it’s 4th incarnation.

When I was invited to the wedding of a dear friend and her girlfriend, I immediately thought of my unfinished green dress, and made up my mind to finish it and wear it to the wedding. Because of the sub-par pattern I had made for the bodice, it ended up too wide, and since I had already cut into the fabric (of which there was nothing left by the time all the pieces were cut out – the skirt was two rectangles with the width and length completely determined by what was left when all else had been accounted for), I had to find a way to alter the bodice to fit. I ended up with adding a box-pleat centered on the back piece, and a couple of pleats at the shoulder seam on the front.

At this point I had already sewn in the sleeves, and should only have to add the skirt and be done. Unfortunately, basting the pleated skirt on, the dress was looking pretty frumpy and unflattering, with way too much volume in too many places. I credit the success (or completion – actually, I will credit them both) to my dear boy, who pointed out that a more defined waist would balance out all the volume going on. Going through my stash, I found a leafy-floral print in a lighter green that matched my dress perfectly, and whipped up a fitted, shaped waistband, gathering excess fabric from the front torso under the bust. It was an instant huge improvement, and I even like the poufiness that occurred in the back from the too-long torso. From the side, it reminds me of certain 40’s silhouettes I’ve seen in illustrations and on vintage sewing patterns:

I snuck off for a couple of minutes during the day of festivities and took some snapshots of myself all dressed up.

Some frump remained, however, and after some tucking of the sleeves, hemming and hawing, and more advice from the boy, I took the seam-ripper to the sleeves, and got rid of them. Phew! I felt quite some relief at the decision to take them off, but even more when I saw that I liked the dress much better sleeveless. I added some finishing touches on the inside to cover up all raw edges (lots of handsewing), and it was all ready for the wedding ahead!

Hey boy? You make a really good partner in crime. This dress looks nice because of you.

baby-blanket

There is a baby on it’s way in the immediate family, and of course I needed to make that baby something. I’ve been collecting and holding on to random scraps of fabric lately, thinking that *someday*, surely I will be able to use it for some cool project – which turned out to be this one! (ok, here is a confession: It’s not lately that I’ve been holding on to scraps, it’s always. I’ve just started anew since moving to Chicago).

Re-purposing things gives me such a thrill, rivaled only by the glee of getting use out of every little piece of something, like scraps of fabric (or lengths of yarn, or every drop of shampoo, or leftover food. Yes, I am very thrifty. And it makes me very happy.) And for this baby-blanket I certainly got to do that!

Surprisingly few scraps were harmed used for this project.

I think perhaps this is the quilt where I got the idea of doing long strips of scraps for a blanket, and I am quite certain that a couple of her other quilts have been both a direct and an unconscious inspiration. I’m really drawn to this woman’s mix of traditional methods with a modern and graphic look. At any rate, I gathered all my fabric scraps first, picked out the ones I though went well together, and started cutting them into 3 inch wide strips, that I then cut to random lengths. I then sewed the pieces together in a fairly random order, until the strips were long enough. The teal-colored heavy jersey for the background was in an oddly shaped piece, but I managed to get six rectangles out of it – two for the shorter sides, and four to go next to the scrap-strips. Next came sewing all the strips and long rectangles of jersey together. In my enthusiasm for starting the blanket, I wasn’t terribly accurate in cutting the pieces of fabrics with straight lines and 90 degree angles. It would have been a little easier to sew it all together if everything matched up, but it worked out alright anyways.

After the top layer was all done, I added three layers of a rib jersey to make the blanket nice and soft. I decided to use that instead of the traditional quilt batting, since the loose batting might shift during machine washing, which I thought would be important for a baby blanket. (I’ve never used quilt batting, so I might be wrong about this one!) Also, I had lots of that jersey on hand, which meant I had everything I needed to make the blanket right away. To hold the layers together, the boy and I (he’s the co-designer of the blanket) settled on a sort of sun-burst looking pattern – something that would be linear, like the strips of scraps,  without being neither horizontal nor vertical. For the binding I ended up making bias tape out of a cotton I’d also used for some of the scraps. It’s nice when things actually match sometimes! The bias tape was surprisingly nice and easy to make, but wow – it took a really long time to hand-sew it on.

Sewing at sunset by a lake in northern Maine. It was lovely.

And finally, as a little finishing touch, I embroidered a little message on the back: