FO: Buchanan Tee

I finished a fantastic little summery top a couple weeks ago.

It's the Buchanan sweater from Kate Davie's wonderful little book appropriately titled "Yokes".   The last sweater I made of hers was the whimsical Owls pullover.  Sadly, I left it in storage and I want it back (along with that denim pencil skirt, ugh, sometimes I just miss my stuff).

There are several winners in the Yokes book.  Loads of simple, creative designs that would be flattering to most- there is quite a bit of waist shaping worked into these patterns, which, hello, I can't do without.

This was designed with a heavier wool in mind- a mohair blend!- but I couldn't do a short-sleeved top in wool.  In my mind, it called for cotton, specifically some of my jealously hoarded long-discontinued Rowan Calmer.  It behaves like wool but it's nice and light weight, making it perfect for summery little tops that you dream of wearing.  Lately, I've been in a "suns out, why am I freezing?" sort of place so it hasn't gotten any real use yet.  I can't wait.  Tomorrow is a warmer day according to the Met office.

I loved the colorwork on the Yoke of this.  It's much bolder and graphic than traditional fair-isle yokes.

All-round, a winner.

Quilt

Well now.  I made a patchy-work quilt!  It's not a traditional one, with fantastically precise geometry, but kind of a wildly modern one of mismatched and layered patches.  Gee's Bend is not where I live, obviously. 

In the process, I've learned quite a lot.   

Firstly, I love fabric.  I love pattern.  I love color.  Really, I do!  No matter that I strive to have 100% black and monochrome wardrobe.  What is available to you now at any well-stocked fabric store is amazing, and these designers always release collections that work so eccentrically well together.  This was a collection of fat quarters I had picked up here and there for the past year, almost always heavily discounted as last year's pattern collection.  Liberty, Westminster Fabrics, Rowan, Amy Butler.  I went for blues-greens-yellows in various electric shades and amassed enough to start thinking about a project that would take up more fabric than a tote bag.  Originally, I had no real desire to quilt, as it seemed like a process that would be taking me down quite the rabbit hole.  Whatever, I did it anyway.  It's not like I'm going to be sitting by the fire and hand-stitching this.

The original pile of scraps

I chose a pattern for the quilt top in Amy Butler's In Stitches book and roughly followed it.  She called for bigger chunks of fabric; I pieced together fat quarter pieces until I got the patch dimensions right, sometimes sewing together several lengths of scraps to get where I needed to.

Stitched-together quilt top

I don't have a long-arm sewing machine, so I figured a full-sized quilt top would be easiest to deal with since feeding the entire quilt through the tiny gap allowance on my Singer was anxiety-inducing.

Rather weirdly, in the Amy Butler pattern, she has you sew the quilt top pieces onto muslin backing.   From everything else I read about quilts, I found nothing about doing that technique, and I just sewed the quilt top together.  That ended up being the easiest step.

Once I had that done, I found 4.5 meters of fantastically contrasting fabric for the backing- a geometric print in similar blue-greens from Westminster called "Summer Tweed", and some lightweight cotton-poly blend quilt batting.  Or wadding, as they call it in the UK.  

So the basic quilting 101 theory is this (in case you are a complete amateur like me):  you need to make a sandwich with the backing, the batting and the quilt top.  You pin it all together (or you can sew about a thousand tailor's tacks to hold it together).  Preferably with safety pins if you choose to pin.  I did not.  Feeding a quilt with a hundred pins holding it together through the machine led to blood.  It was mine.  I pricked my hands constantly before I wised up to why the instructions specified safety pins at this point.    

et voila!  a finished quilt

 With your layers sandwiched together, you sew around all your patches.  Once it's secured, you can figure out your quilting lines- the decorative stitching on top that will secure the batting in place so you don't end up with it bunched up in every corner, and to add interest to the quilt top.

This was the hardest part for me.    There was much rolling and turning and pushing and pulling to get all the quilt lines down.  I tried to start in the centre and work my way out, and just did alternating sections of vertical and horizontal stripes either 1" or 2" apart.  This step took days, and a few days more of the quilt being in time-out as I learned to walk away.

My biggest problem was the thread.  I chose, after much deliberation, a light weight cream thread in 100% poly.  At first, I thought an acid lime green would be just wonderful, but after realizing my quilting lines might be quite imperfect, I decided to go with the subtle.

However.

I had so many problems with this thread and tension.  It was maddening.  Next time, I'll choose a thicker thread.  Almost every time I stopped the machine, or even paused, the thread would manage to wind around the bottom bobbin and I'd have to stop, clip the threads, untangle and re-thread every single time.  It just wasn't right.  I also ended up ripping back quite a lot once it was done to fix spots where the tension was wonky enough to make it look sloppy.

The other thing I really struggled with was the bias tape.  I hate picky-picky work like that (I normally just go out and BUY the stuff, pre-folded), but I used the leftover meterage from the quilt back to tie the edges together with homemade bias tape.  It went...a bit sloppy.  I had to go around the entire quilt a second time as the front and back of the tape ended up not always keenly matching up.

So yes, this did cause me a bit of pain and suffering.  No, it's not quite big enough to cover a queen-sized bed, and it won't be winning any prizes at the county fair, unless the county population is exactly 1.  But look- it's all my favorite scraps of fabric, all haphazardly stitched together in a nice summer-weight blanket.  It's functional, I swear it!  I don't know if I'm jumping on the quilting bandwagon any time soon, but it was a really nice way to teach myself and understand the technique, and a good excuse to start hoarding more fabric scraps.

I love it despite its imperfections.

A Quilt Named Patchy

An impending disaster?

Perhaps.

I have a nasty fat quarter habit.  Any time I see a bright and lovely bit of luxe cotton fabric packaged neatly with other bits of coordinating fabric, it comes home with me.  While I usually have enough for small projects- bags and throw pillow covers- I decided to go whole-hog and make a quilt.

I haven't quilted before, but I think I understand the theory.  Or, perhaps, ignorance is bliss.

I found some Rowan and Amy Butler fabric on sale recently and pounced on the bin. I had a rough idea of a pattern and decided to go with blues and greens- vibrant and lovely- and matched it with some other scraps from Kensington and Liberty that I've been saving up from various projects and clearance sales.  I had decided that I didn't want anything too matchy-matchy or geometric.  This thing would be all over the place (the better to hide mistakes!).

A couple of books and youtube videos later and I had cut the pieces and laid it out-  I found a pattern from Amy Butler's book "In Stitches" that I followed roughly for the quilt top.  I had to patch together some scraps to make all the pieces fit, as this pattern called for bigger chunks of fabric and I had mostly fat quarters to work with.  Hopefully this will be my summer blanket, as I don't have one and last summer I just used the duvet cover sans duvet as a blanket.  How uncivilized!

Most people who quilt seriously seem to have a "quilt wall"- a tacky bit of fabric on the wall where they can arrange their pieces, stand back and admire it and arrange the squares as needed.  I slummed it and used the bed.

Everything is pieced together, and I've pinned some more scraps on top as overlays.  I've ordered some cotton wadding and found a big 4.5 meter piece of contrasting fabric (on sale!) for the quilt back and edging.  Once I get the wadding, the whole thing will be sandwiched together and quilted on my standard Singer.  Somehow, I'll make this work even though I don't have a special "long arm" machine that would allow more fabric to be rolled up and fed through the machine.

This is TBC....it might be the lumpiest and most unsightly quilt ever, but I won't know until I give it a try.   The suspense is killing me.  

FO: Athena Sweater

A quick summer pullover.  Completely nonsensical and unseasonable.  Yup.  That's what I think I'll knit.

I needed a quick break from my current projects, this yarn was annoying me with all the space it was taking up in my stash bin, and a week later I had a very 80's beachy pullover.

 I kind of felt for a beach day, so I created a beach cover-up.  Too bad I twirled around once and had ENOUGH ALREADY of being out in the cold with this on.  Not that it was a terribly cold day, but just not t-shirt weather.  

I don't think it's the most flattering thing I've ever knit, and due to its construction, it's kind of hard to alter.  You knit it from sleeve to sleeve, with the ribbing added later.  So- no waist shaping, no option to shorten of lengthen.  As it is, I made the smallest size the pattern offered up, and it is quite big.  I mean, it's supposed to have some ease, but batwings are in, right?  RIGHT?

 Ultimately, I think it will pair with a bathing suit and a sarong quite nicely, and naturally, some sort of perfectly icy spiked drink in a red cup.

 Also, I'll be perfectly tan, but not unhealthily so.

Wishful thinking, this is.  But alas!  The end of February is in sight.

The pattern is Athena from the Rowan All Seasons Chunky collection.  It used 6 skeins of the aforementioned All Seasons Chunky in the color Dune- it's a weird, highly twisted ropy cotton that makes for instant gratification and nearly impossible seems.

The Butcher of Sheepy things

Like I said in a previous post, I somewhat lost my knitting mojo after then holidays.  Once I got all the gifties sent out to the four corners of the globe, I sat down and looked around and just couldn't find the inspiration to do diddly.

I dislike unfinished projects in general, which is why I was disgusted with myself for having a hat brim sitting on the shelf for more than a month.

A long stretch of simple knitting in the round was abandoned in favor of just not wanting to deal with it for 14 inches.  

I did chip away at a crochet blanket for a while:

The Babette, the best way I could think of to use up all the scraps of sock yarn that I've accumulated the past few years.  A memory of socks and shawls and sweaters, slowly being pieced together in a colorful spread of clown barf.  However...I now need to create more scraps as I'm running out of yarn for it.  

Part of this big stall was the fault of this jumper:

An incredibly warm men's Icelandic lopi sweater called Riddari, knit in the natural colors of sheep of the Birtish Isles: Black Wesh, moorit Shetland, white BFL, and steel gray Suffolk.  It was lovely to knit- the wool was rustic and had a lovely sheepy smell, and it was comforting and joyful to make.

Once I was done and blocked, I decided I didn't want it to be a pullover- a zipper install to let it be worn open would be a good idea since it was extraordinarily warm. So I crocheted steeks, slicked it from nave to throat, and basted in a lovely vintage brass zipper.

Hours later, I was in a mass of ripped seems and bits of thread.

No matter how carefully I install a zipper, no matter how many tutorials I read and follow step-by step, I can not get the stupid giant bulge out.

 Really?

I'm at a loss as to what to do- after picking it out and re-sewing it, trying to keep the fabric loose and the tension even, the bulges would not go away.

Should I try again, send it off to a pro to pic, or try to sew it back up and call it a pullover?

FO: Dia

Some days, I'm just too impulsive for my own good.  

A trip to browse the haberdashery department at the local John Lewis led me to see a beautifully knitted sample of this:

Oh! Oh! Oh!  What a lovely pullover!  Never mind that I dislike working with linen and cotton (although wool would have done quite nicely) and I didn't bother giving the pattern a read-through to figure out just what doing color work would involve.  Sign me up!  Oh, and the Creative Linen yarn is on 60% off?  I always wanted a boxy summery sweater!  I'm be lounging around in my harem pants in my riad in no time.

Off to the races I was.  I knocked out the sleeves first and soon realized that the flawed logic of this design.  The Creative Linen was terribly splitty, meaning it was painfully slow to do lace work without it looking sloppy as ice cream on a hot tin roof.  

Once the sleeves were done, I started the body.  Like all Rowan patterns, it is written to be knitted flat, but I merrily joined it together in the round until the arm pits, where I switched to the color work.  

Have you ever tried to do colorwork that wasn't in the round?  I hadn't before this.  

It was terrible.  In fact, I had to walk away for a few months.  

I picked it back up again, only to give up again.  Another couple months passed.

Finally, I made a deal with myself.  Two rows a day.  I have to complete two rows a day on this.  I didn't even know if it would fit, never mind look good, but I kept up my personal bargain, and in a few weeks I was sewing in the ends.  

Ta dah!

I am so sick of looking at this thing, but here it is.  I don't have it styled at all here, but it is in my "not bad at all" category.  It's boxy, yes....even though I did three repeats of the lace to lengthen the torso a bit and there's not waist shaping at all.  I'm not really good in boxy things- it makes me look too stout and barrely and I just don't need that.  Halfway through I decided this would be gifted, so it doesn't have to look good on me anyway, ha!

This thing was a BEAST to knit.  I would not recommend it.  The way Rowan patterns are written are not for the faint of heart, either.  Although I did see someone leave the sleeves out and turn this into a vest, which looked just fine.  I think that any time you do any sort of color work, it should be knitted in the round, even if this means steeking (slicing the sweater carefully to make holes for the sleeves).

 I'm glad it is over with- I was getting so very sick of seeing this day in and day out, just taunting me.  I've learned my lesson- stay out of John Lewis.  I practically sabred a bottle of Champagne to celebrate.

Happy that it turned out okay- about halfway through I was overcome with despair that it just wasn't going to hang together right once it was sewn up.  Relief: it looks just fine.

However, I am so very sick of it that I no longer want it.  There's nothing wrong with it, but I feel as though someone else can lounge around their riad in harem pants more effectively than I could.

The deets: After my gauge being a little lose, I decided to knit the smallest size as written.  I used 5 skeins of Creative Linen in ocher and just 1 of salmon pink.  The pattern is Dia from Rowan 55.

FO: Plethora of Hats

A cold chill has swept the land.  After a bit of petered-out hurricane Gonzalo blew through England, it went from balmy and windy, to rainy and windy, to cold and windy in a 24 hour period.   Sweater weather!  Cuddly hats and snugly scarfs and indulging in all sorts of edibles that you've been turning your nose up all summer.  Sweet potatoes and soups and sweet potato soup, squash and crispy sweet apples and I've not turned down any offers of hot chocolate.

I've been plugging away on hats.  It's become a bit of a joke in my knit circle: another week, another hat.  And it's true, I've been knocking out about one a week.  These aren't difficult patterns, and most of them are worsted-weight, so it only takes me a few hours a piece.  

As always, fantastic gifts.  All of these are being flung to the four corners of the earth.

First up: 

The Botanic Hat, a clever little Stephen West Beanie.  It's completely reversible, and looks remarkably different when you give it a flip.

See?  The best thing about this is that when I finished, I weighed the leftover skeins and realized I had enough for a mirror-image:

The pair of hats used exactly two skeins of Rowan Lima, an alpaca yarn that makes me rethink alpaca yarn.  It's velevety.  Instead of being twisted into plies, it is chained, so it makes for less drapey structure-less fabric as it seems to behave much more like wool.  It's not bad at all..

Another creating- the Windsor Hat.  It's a free pattern on the Rowan site and I loved how feminine and girly it was (and I'm not a girly girl by any means).  The pattern was a huge pain in the ass though- it was written Rowan-style to be knitted flat, which is as complicated as you could possibly get.  Still- it is slouchy and warm and after a glance at the pattern, I was able to improvise and knit it in the round, and all was right in the world once again.

The yarn was an odd skein of Creative Worsted, a wool/mohair blend, and the pink was leftovers of Swans Island worsted Merino from my Wayfarer scarf.  

This bad boy is going to a friend of mine who just moved from a balmy climate to a cold one:

It's the Greenery hat.  I made an extra-thick brim so it can be worn as a big slouch or doubled over the ears (which hides the cabling a bit, eh?).  The yarn?  Ah, the yarn.  A few skeins of wool yarn I picked up at Monoprix in Paris out of pure curiosity.  While I miss Monoprix badly (like Target in the US, they had great chic clothes) this yarn was not the best.  It was really dense- this hat is heavy!- and had a weird acrylic-like squeak even though it was pure wool.  It's not terribly scratchy though, and I think it will keep a head very warm.

Finally:

I used all the scraps that haunt the flat from the ghosts of hats past and made a Kex hat, another  reversible beanie from Stephen West.  I've been making a ton of his patterns lately...I just find they are brilliantly unisex and uniquely constructed.  

I have some more projects to flaunt, but some are gifts and need to be gifted first, but I'm enjoying this sudden drop of temperature to inspire me to cover everyone I know in wool.  

FO: Some catchup in the waning afternoon light

Hello again!   Here I am, I'm back in London.  I have a lot to talk about, and sometimes I have a hard time organizing my thoughts, so forgive me if I'm all over the place in the coming weeks.  Life has not been boring, and I foresee it not being dullsvile any time soon.

So, I made a bunch of stuff.  I thought I should post about it, if only to make me feel better about sending them into the ether.

First up was a crazy impulse knit.  I saw a sample knitted up at John Lewis, saw the yarn deeply discounted in a bin next to the sample, and a few days later I had created this:

It's called the Rhea top, and it's too big!  Yargh.  Bulky yarn (Rowan All Seasons Chunky, a cotton/poly blend) and an open-work pattern meant it was really hard to get gauge and guess how much ease I needed.  In the end, it was way too much.  I'm going to frog this back and re-knit it in a smaller size on smaller needles because I think that this could very easily become an oft-worn summer favorite if it fits right.  It's kind of 80's in the styling, and the cable drop stitches and texture, and I just want to wear this while walking the boardwalk.  I will try again.  

See that?  That's the Scottish Highlands right there, and we made it out the other side alive.  Also, a Windschief hat.

Stephen West makes such great unfussy patterns.  He's been my go-to for hat patterns lately- I tend to make a stockpile of them with no one particularly in mind, and then give them lavishly once the right people appear.  This one is a simple slip-stitch pattern that gracefully arcs around a series of decreases and pared increases, giving it an interesting asymmetrical swirl.

I used a skein of Madeline Tosh dk in "Granite".  It's luxuriously soft merino, and although Tosh is known for doing bright, beautiful colors better than anyone, I loved the tones in the greys on this.  It's superwash, so it's been a good hiking hat, with no fading or color bleeding after multiple washes.  


I spent the summer plugging away on this:

It's the Lace Saddle Tee, heavily modified.  The original pattern just had lace on the sleeves, but I went whole-hog and echoed the lace pattern up the side seams.

I love the way it looks, but again: it's too big!  It fits kind of weird- the front looks okay, but there is all this extra fabric in the back.  I really don't even know how to correct that in the knitting process.  It fits my hips and waist just fine, and I did have some shaping thrown in, but somehow I created too much fabric in the back.

I'm still wearing it though.  I used some very precious Rowan Calmer- a cotton/poly blend that behaves more like wool than unyielding cotton, and this continues to be my favorite non-wool yarn to work with.  The sunshiny lemony yellow makes me happy.

This was also my first attempt at saddle shoulders, which were fun to make but hard to explain.  It took a few tries to get it right, but I like the way they fit.

Finally, this.  I made Groot.

I'm not a fan of the huge amount of comic-book movies that come out every summer.  I didn't grow up on comics.  I spent the first half of the "Avengers" movie not knowing that Bruce Banner was the Hulk, and was probably the only one surprised when Bruce got angry and made the transformation.  Pop culture princess I am not.  

However, I did get dragged into Guardians of the Galaxy this summer, and despite being very confused about back story and bad guys, it was a fun show.  There was a tree named Groot who ended up being the hero of the day, and he dances to the Jackson 5 (as we all should), and when I saw someone had written a pattern to make your very own Groot, I nerded out and got to work.  Finally, a use for that super scratchy yarn from Greenland that I bought in Copenhagen that no one would ever be able to touch without cringing and possibly crying from the pain of it all.  He worked up quite fast, and I had to buy safety eyes and pipe cleaners, and then re purposed a pot  from Ikea that had some rosemary in it that didn't quite make it through multiple periods of neglect.  I had opened up a throw pillow and used some of the stuffing in that instead of buying a bag of polyfill, and then sewed the pillow back up and no one is the wiser that it's missing a bit of umph.  Finally, when it came time to plant him, his giant head flopped over drunkenly.  So I went into the kitchen and got a metal BBQ skewer, put the knob end well down into the gravel, and then heartlessly impaled my creation.  He now stands quite upright.  That smile is fixed.  He's dying on the inside.

Want to make one?  You should, because I'm not going to make another one even though I've gotten dozens of "I want one!" requests.  It's easy; I barely know how to crochet and it only took a few hours.  Here's the instructions on Twinkle Chan's blog.

I've made a few more things, but haven't photographed them yet.  Soon.  I think.

But, cheers to all that.  I find that I miss sitting down to write, and I'm working on getting some post about our hikes and travels up soon enough.  After a cold and dreary August, September was fantastic weather and I took advantage fully.

Regent Street

It's really hard to be on a yarn-diet right now.  I keep reminding myself how much I hate working with non-wool yarns; the summery cottons and linens and bamboo blends that make up lighter-weight garments.  Still, sometimes I fail.  

Like when you walk into Liberty and see a sale table.  There was fabric there too!  I might have shattered some eardrums with the squeal I let out.

People here seem to shop professionally.  I was talking to someone in the office last week who started listing all the shops she had been in that weekend (almost everyone has a bit of a sale to make room for the fall lines right now) and she listed all the things she had picked up "for a steal".  It was mind-blowing, especially when you realize how very little closet space there is in this town.    

Outside on Regent Street, where they shut down the street to traffic during summertime Sundays, there was a bus cavalcade, with all the different types of buses that London has used in chronological order.  There is a special kind of person who is just fascinated by this.  It was mostly children.     

Speaking of which, I loved how ghostly and other-worldy this little girl looked while peering out of a vintage bus.

And finally, the first (or last) bus was a horse-drawn one.

Afterwards, a walk though Covent Garden and along the river, with a mission to get to the other side.  

To the Globe Theater!  The replica of the original Shakespeare theater, firmly planted near where the original footprint is, with open air, thatched roof, narrow uncomfortable benches, and authentic performances and costuming.  

The standing-room seats have the best view and are cheap, but, ya know.  STANDING.  For three hours.

They burn incense before the show for added authenticity.  Back in the day, showers were hard to come by.  Overall, it was a very good show- we saw Anthony and Cleopatra, and the acting was fantastic.  The only gripe is sometimes the voices were drown out by a low-flying airplane.  I guess it would be too much to ask to get the flight paths changed for the sake of art.

Then, off to Bloomsbury. There was a weird rainy sculpture outside of one of the "key parks" there.  I quite liked it.

And then on to the British Museum.  I love this place.  It has no airflow though, and I find myself getting sleepy and cranky and uncomfortable in the crowds pretty much right away.  I love the museums here as they are free, and that really makes me feel like I don't have to cram everything in and get your money's worth.

Oh, and a rare badass sighting in the wild: