Estonian lace shawl

Not very long ago, I attended the Stitches West fiber-art show in San Carlos.  Besides coveting just about everything and subsequently spending way too much money on beautiful but random yarn I haven't even thought of projects for, I was lucky to finally pick up something I'd wanted for a while.  One of my lovely acquaintances, Tina of Freia Fibers, handpaints her own yarn in striking and unusual color combinations.  I got a couple of different balls in lace weight, wanting to turn it into some pretty lace.

Freia Fibers: Flux lace in the color Tapestry

I then scoured Ravelry for a suitable pattern and found this free one for a shawl by Mia Rinde called Fylleryd.  In my hands, it turned into something like this:

The resulting rainbow shawl!

Estonian lace is characterized by the presence of "nupps," or little balls in the knitting created by wrapping your yarn around the needle.  They look gorgeous, but they are full of treachery!  Let me tell you:  if you ever try this technique, please for the love of all that is holy, look up how to do nupps on YouToob first.  It will save you literally days worth of frustration and feelings of inadequacy from trying to figure it out on your own.

The beautiful, but unholy nupps.

The good news is, once you have the technique down, they're actually not that bad.  Pleasant, even.  Knitting the shawl did take a while, because of how many times I had to rip and redo the first few rows containing nupps, and also because I only had fragmented time to fit knitting in.  I also had to fidget with the pattern because I didn't have enough yardage to make the full shawl, but I wanted to maximize the pretty edge.  I did some quick calculations of how to fit it all in, but in the end I was just a little short.  That brown color you see around the short edges is actually from a different-palette ball, because I had run out of yarn a few rows before finishing.

With knitting in general, and lace specifically, it is usually "blocked," or soaked and stretched to final dimensions.  It comes off the needles a little scrunched up and needs to be cajoled into unfurling in all its glory.

Fylleryd before and after stretching

However, I'd never blocked lace weight yarn before!  And since it was a small shawl, I wanted to stretch it as much as possible, so that it could be as large of a garment as possible for all the time I spent on it.  So, I applied all of my canvas-stretching skills to pinning it as tight as I could to the mat.  Turns out lace yarn isn't as strong as canvas, and somewhere in the middle of my creation, the yarn broke and made a hole.  Luckily, I noticed it in time to carefully mend it before it started a run.

Before and after mending.  Not perfect, but no one will ever know.

I learned a couple of things from this project.  It being my very first triangle shawl, I learned how to do the fiddly provisional cast-on used for such things (ask me if you want me to show you!).  Also, as I already said, I vow to always look up complicated stitches before trying them, even if the written description doesn't sound that difficult.  The cast-off stitch I did was inferior, and the edge rolls in a little as a result.  I got lazy and instead of following the pattern directions, did a simple cast-off, which didn't turn out to be stretchy enough for the edge.  If I have time and feel perfectionist, I will redo the cast-off and re-block the shawl.  That way, I can get the pretty drippy edge you can see in the original pattern.  And, finally, I learned that color-changing yarn is beautiful, and so is complicated lace.  However, when you put the two together, you can sometimes lose the pattern of the stitches when the colors don't line up favorably, and when using pre-dyed yarn, it's a game of chance.  In the future, I think I'll stick to knitting lace from solid or semi-solid colors, and keep the pretty color-changing yarn for simpler stitches, so that the colors can be shown off to the best advantage.

For all that, though, it came out great!  The colors are so versatile, I can match it with almost anything in my wardrobe, while also adding a splash of color.

Unapologetic photoshopping!

The resurrection - Paris Promenade dress

It sure has been a while.  Two years, just about.  But recently, I've been inspired to start sharing my craftiness with the world again.  And to make my return, I've chosen something I had a lot of fun making and that came out pretty damn snazzy, if I say so myself.

The dress!  A floor-length, Parisian 1930's inspired gown.

Back in February, some dear people I know had a marvelous wedding, for which I made a dress.  I wanted something vaguely 1920-30 (it would fit the theme), with that sort of bohemian art deco feel, and for some reason, I really wanted a dress that was emerald green.  So, it took some searching for the right pattern, and the right fabrics, but I was able to find just the shade of emerald green dupioni silk I wanted, and a nice burnout velvet to accompany it.  Sadly, the pictures don't quite capture how brilliant green this silk is, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  The burnout velvet is pretty see-through, which I think is at least in the spirit of the period, when women started getting rid of a lot of their restrictive undergarments and started flaunting their natural shapes under flowing oriental-inspired dresses.

The back has a real cute bow with tassels.

 The pattern was Fokwear's Paris Promenade Dress.  The pattern itself was pretty simple - a wide shape with an over-piece, identical in front and back, that sashes in with a belt - but I made some modifications.  In particular, the hem was super super long, and I was supposed to turn it up and stitch it to the lining of the green bib.  Screw that - way too much work and potential for disaster.  So I just cut the hem to the floor and finished it.

The back with the bow and the handmade beaded tassels.

The green overdress was trimmed in a beaded border that I managed to snag for pretty cheap.  I stitched the whole thing on by hand, since the beads wouldn't go under my machine foot.  As you would expect, I was literally one inch short to finish the whole border - but I cheated by slipping in a bit of jacquard ribbon, and you really can't tell unless you know it's there.  There are also beaded tassels on the sleeve seams and the ends of the sash.  I couldn't find readymade tassels of the right color, so I made some from embroidery floss.

Handmade beaded tassels!

 Now for the challenges.  Besides the inch gap in my beaded trim that's being masked by jacquard ribbon, I started off by making a mistake in the neck opening, which was a real bitch to fix.  Not to mention the velvet itself a very difficult fabric to work with - it was constantly slip-and-sliding under the foot of my machine, so by the end of a seam, the edges would be wildly off.  Luckily, it didn't matter too much, plus I have some awesome friends who suggested that I use a piece of tissue paper between the layers, and rip it out later, which helped a lot.  The green overdress has a few lines cut on the bias at the botttom, and I didn't think to stay-stitch  them right away (that instruction was missing from the pattern and I forgot to use my own brain).  This resulted in some stretching, but luckily that was barely noticeable.  And, I was sewing pretty much until the bitter end.  The trim is only basted on in some places (though, since you can't tell, I wondered why I bothered being neat on the rest of it), and I'm very grateful to my mother, who took over hand-hemming the bottom so that I would have time to actually shower before rushing off to the wedding.  I made it!

The surreptitious jacquard ribbon

Day-after-wedding brunch at Chez Simone in Oakland.

Autobot logo chart

A little chart I made to facilitate the making of the Epic Scarf for Erik.

Click to view full-size, then right-click to download

Skirts!

I have not been lazy.  In fact, I have been very busy, so a few posts are overdue.

Over winter break, it was nice to have the time to work on a few ruffled skirts.  Ruffled skirts are dead easy, but tend to require some time.  The first one I finished was a 10-yard skirt for bellydancing; the other was a skirt I started ages and ages ago for the PEERS Jane Austen Picnic Dance, finished all but the waistband, and then for some reason abandoned.  Probably lack of time or motivation.  I am instead planning to use it for the Valentine's Victorian ice skating gathering, along with a salvaged petticoat.

Tucked up all nifty-like

10-Yard Skirt
One of the more convenient paradoxes of the 10-yard skirt is that you only need about 4 yards of fabric for it (for my height and willingness to do some piecing), or just a little more if you're taller and less concerned with using as little fabric as possible.  I made mine with four tiers, where the top was twice as long as the others, but you can also do it with all tiers being equal length.  Another really convenient thing is that 8 widths of 45" wide fabric make up the 10 yards of the bottom tier, so you don't have to do a lot of tiresome measuring.

The new thing I tried with this skirt was twin needle gathering, because I thought it would make my life oodles easier.  In reality, it made my life sort of in-between for single-thread and double-thread gathering.  For one, it only required me to stitch once along the top of the ruffles for gathering them, and made the bobbin thread zig-zag really easy to pull out.  On the other hand, it's about as stable as single-thread gathering, so a little more patience was required to make the gathers stay even and line up nicely with the edge of the higher tier before you stitch them down.  All things considered, not bad.  Still, however, I am now utterly convinced that I need a gathering foot.

Skating Skirt
This is another very ruffly skirt, and in principle even easier than the 10-yard, although more time-consuming.
It's very likely not period Victorian, I haven't bothered to check, but there will be no period police where I'm going.  It's meant to have a bit of a petticoat worn with it, which in my case comes salvaged from a relatively ugly 80's prom/bridesmaid dress I once bought for $15, wore a few times, and then ripped for parts.

This one consists of a skirt made with 2 widths of broadcloth and gathered onto a waistband, with 4 layers of ruffles made of 4 widths each, gathered onto the skirt at regular intervals.  Simple enough.

Current projects

• Hats!  I'm knitting about a million of them.  A post to come when I have enough to show off.
• Epic scarf commissioned by a friend.
• Baby clothes for the plethora of office babies being born in the next few months.

Hot Bottoms

Yes, I actually own these shoes.  My mother
bought them for herself, and somehow I ended
up being the proud owner.  She also lamented
the fact that they're not appropriate footwear
for work in America.  Yes, I'm going to pipet in
club heels... 

Every time I want to wear a skirt in the winter, the biggest problem is worrying that I will freeze my butt off.  Literally.  Admittedly, living in San Francisco isn't as cold as some places, but it gets pretty damn cold.  So I've wanted to make a pair of knitted shorts for a while, to wear under skirts in cold weather, and a couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to doing that.
There aren't a lot of patterns out there for knitted shorts.  The one I liked best was this pattern to base mine on.  But, seeing that I had a completely different yarn weight, and wanted to have a slightly different shape, I actually ended up modifying it quite a bit.

How to make some of your very own? Well...

You'll need

• 200 grams of yarn, with a gauge of ~34 sts to 10 cm; I used Cascade Yarns Venezia - it's 70% Merino and 30% silk; 'nuff said.
• size 7 circular needles
• various bits of waste yarn for stitch holding
• ribbon and beads for waistband
• fine weight yarn for ruffles (optional)

I used my mom's interchangeable circular needle kit, which worked out really well when I needed to switch between knitting waist and legs.

These were made for about 74 cm waist and 97 cm hips

BODY
Cast on 210 sts and knit in 1x1 rib for 11 cm (~26 rounds)
After this start expanding to 226 sts: add 4 sts evenly every 4 rounds, by knitting 2 through 1; make sure to follow the pattern of the rib to make it blend in
I knitted the body for a total length of 20 cm, and the shorts sit somewhere in the vicinity of my upper hips.  If you want them to sit higher (such as on your waist), knit an extra 4-5 cm.
Split the stitches on yarn holders as follows:  leg (45 sts), crotch (21 sts), other leg (45 sts); put the back (115 sts) on straight needles.
Continue the rib stitch back and forth over the back as follows:

• knit a full row; when you turn over, knit the first 7 stitches and put them onto the leg stitch holder (you will not touch these again for now), 
• then continue the row; when you get to the end, turn over, knit the first 7 stitches, and put them on the other holder, then finish the row (minus those first 7 stitches, of course).  Each row should be 7 stitches shorter than the previous.  
• Do this 8 times (59 sts left); 
• the next two rows, take away 8 sts each; 
• the two following rows, take away 11 sts.  You should be left with 21 sts. (If not, fidget with your numbers to make it so)

Bind off these 21 sts.  Do not bother with the Kitchener st as described in the original pattern.  It comes out hideous in rib knit (or at least the way I did it...)

CROTCH
Put the 21 crotch sts from the holder onto the needles and rib back and forth until you have ~11 cm.  I actually added 1 st on each edge (=23), so I could do neat edging,* then right before I finished, I knitted 2 together on each edge to take them away again. (*By that I mean, take off the first st and purl the last st of every row).
Bind off these 21 sts and sew together with the leftover 21 sts from back.

LEGS
Put the sts from one leg holder onto a short circular needle, and pick up 30 sts along crotch edge for a total of 122 beautiful leg sts.  Knit in the round in rib until the leg is as long as you want it (or as long as you still have yarn).
To finish, you can bind off loosely in rib.  Or, you can add glorious ruffles, like mine:
Knit all sts of the last row (no more rib!).  Switch to a fine weight yarn, but keep the same gauge needles.  Mine is a mystery yarn that came from a sweater.
{Knit one round; Next round: knit 1, yarn over - all around}x3
This will exponentially increase your sts from 122 to 488.  I hope you have patience.
Knit one last row, then bind off.

Add a longish ribbon around the waist (just pull it in and out in between stitches at regular intervals).

Ta-da!

My first commission!

I finished my first Etsy commission today!  It's a pair of really cute Lock&Key wristwarmers, in mossy green with gold ribbon.  My customer has been really great about feedback on what she wanted, and we finally have the end result - "Judy's Secret"

Here's an abbreviated pattern for those of you who'd like to make their own:

You'll need worsted wt yarn, size 7 DPNs, and a stitch holder or piece of waste yarn.

1.  Cast-on 32 sts

2.  Knit in 1x1 rib for 17-20 rounds (or whatever length you want from the wrist up)

3.  Thumb gusset:  at the beginning of the round, add 1 st by knitting 2 through 1, every other round for 16 rounds; that'll give you 8 thumb sts.  The way I did mine was to always branch the added stitch off the original "column" that started the additions (refer figure on the bottom of the post).  That way it looks nice and neat.  Always add new stitches to the right of this column for one wristwarmer, and to the left for the other.  Knit another 4 rounds for a total of 20 thumb gusset rounds.

4.  Take off thumb sts on a holder; rejoin the round for the hand and knit another 7-10 rounds in 1x1 rib.  Bind off the top in rib.

5.  Put the 8 thumb sts back on three DPN's and pick up 2 sts where the thumb joins the hand (total 10 thumb sts).  Knit for 4 rounds and bind off in rib.

6.  Add whatever ribbons and charms you like, et voila!

Etsy

Hello everyone, and welcome to my first crafty blog post.  I've decided to do this mainly for two reasons:  one, that I've been making a few more things lately, and wanted to share the process, the results, and maybe some tips with you; and two, that I've reopened my Etsy, and wanted to have a record of the sorts of things I am capable of doing for everyone's perusal.

To celebrate both the opening of Etsy and my new blog, you can use the code "cheers" to get a 10% discount on your purchases from my shop!  Neat, huh?

I'm pretty busy with Dickens Fair lately, but I'll try to make some new posts in the next few days.