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.