Gifting for your future self

Happy Valentine's Day!

 

Recently I was looking through old knitting gear bags for a tape measure and found this adorable collection I must have assembled for a little trip I don't even remember now. And I thought, how sweet of past me to have put this together for future me!

The tape measure was curled up neatly inside a pill container, and a second pill container was loaded up with colourful stitch markers. 

A plain square tin had plain stitch markers. I wonder what project I was working on? A lace shawl? Been a while since I've done that, but I know this isn't the only time I've included a small Swiss Army knife for its all-important scissors. 

I drift in and out of an obsession with setting up the most compact tool set possible, but here I was clearly looking to maintain the usefulness of older items (the first few inches of the tape measure's markings are worn with use) or prolong the usefulness of discardable ones (the tiny tin which once contained mints.)

This was a fun find! 

Now to pay it forward by making sure that present me gives future me a totally organized yarn and tool stash, so I can be orderly and serene when colour matching a sweater that needed invisible mending, with yarn across three different storage areas. Unlike last night, ahem. 

Too ambitious? I think so too.

Hope you have a lovely weekend lined up, and thank you for spending this little bit of it with me!

 

In love with Tana Lawn

Recently I treated myself to a little parcel of Tana Lawn cotton from Liberty of London...

I didn't shop at the linked site but rather from Studio 39 Fabrics here in Canada, which stocks a swoony variety of Tana Lawn patterns (spoiler: one of these four is not Tana Lawn, just a print I absolutely loved for my evil scheme, detailed below.)

And can we also take a moment to admire the bonus gift of a bit of Tana Lawn Betsy tied into the parcel?

 

If you don't know this fabric, it's cotton in an incredibly thin and soft weave, patterned with the most colourful designs. I first stumbled across it at a jumble sale during the year I lived in England, where I picked up a skirt in what I now know is the Thorpe Hill pattern. It had to have dated back to the seventies, in an unflattering below-the-knee length which I shortened a few inches and wore long past the lining getting holes and into the fabric itself getting a bit weak. I mean, for such a fine textile, it is hard wearing!

But because it's so thin, it's also cool to wear even at high temperatures. At another jumble sale a while later I found a bright pink floral blouse in it and omigosh. So soft and comfortable no matter how hot the day.

I thought of this fabric during one of the cold snaps last month, when I started to dread the prospect of very hot weather when, rather than putting on another sweater, I will be stuck back in a rotation of cheap T shirts, sometimes two or three a day if I get out for a few walks. Le Sigh. Clothes are so much more interesting when you can layer them and combine fabrics, right? But in high summer, the only way to survive is in loose-fitting breatheable bag.

Evil Scheme Reveal: scarves made from Tana Lawn to tuck into my roster of cotton V neck Ts. Not hot, but outfit-making, and sun-protecting.

Ready for runway time?

Meet Joanna Louise...

And here is Wiltshire...   

Plus the piece of resistance, a reunion with Thorpe Hill!!! 

I was so excited to see this fabric and recognize my beloved skirt (which was a brown colourway, but no matter.) Of course I had to have it.

Bear in mind, most of these prints are available in a range of colourways, just like our beloved winter woolly yarns. 

B L I S S  

Before I finished my shopping I had also fallen hard for this Moonflower print designed by Kimberley Kight. (seriously, you should click on the link and then click on her name for the rest of the collection because it is a FEAST.)

How cute will this be on a not so desperately hot day with creamy linen floaty pants and a black linen top? Or the reverse. I have a lot of cream or black linen, it turns out. 

Plus you know that pink selvedge is going straight onto some other project as a showpiece. It's too awesome to be wasted inside a seam, don't you think? 

The Moonflower fabric is very affordable but the Tana Lawn... not so much. I could only spring for half a meter of each of that, which should be enough for an infinity scarf I can throw on and walk out with. Or a bandana plus maybe a little knit accessory pouch? This is tomorrow's problem. For now, let's just luxuriate in a couple more pretty fabric pix:

Today of course is VERY cold and tomorrow will be more so, which means I will not be sporting any of the cute outfits I am now excited to wear in July. Instead I am hunkered down inside to work on my current writing project, enjoying the sun pouring in through the windows, and grateful I finally finished fixing my super warm semi-felted sweater.

Really hope you have a lovely couple of days lined up, or at least some lovely moments to get you through if not. Thanks again for dropping by and I'll see you next Saturday!

 

 

 

Nips and tucks and snowy snowy days

I am so sorry to see January closing out again as it's my favourite month. A friend asked me why and I realized my full answer boiled down to: I have an excuse to stay inside! In fact, at the moment one of our doors is frozen shut with heavy drifts beyond it, which is why there are no snow angels in this pic.

So pretty out there though... anyway, with snow comes cold, so some of my inside time this week was spent fussing over my newly felted sweater, which still fit like an off the shoulder gown. Time for neckline pintucks!

Thankfully I did still have leftover yarn for the purpose. 

There was no way to draw this in without the alteration showing, but I thought if I just added tiny pleats at the very top of the neck and had them face out, it wouldn't disturb the yoke pattern too much.

The extra texture is kinda cute, don't you think? Along with the uneven spacing, which I've decided is more organic than amateurish, ahem.

I figure I pulled in the neck between two and four inches with this hack. 

It's still not quite enough to make this sweater perfect, and I'm considering an extra tuck or two, maybe in the back where they won't show as much? 

But the sweater stays up above my shoulders now, which makes it wearable, which is in turn very timely. Now to make some felted wool pants to match!

(ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I kid. The crochet blanket is now telling me it will require the rest of my lifetime to finish, so there can be no other projects ever.)

Hope you have some good things coming up in your weekend! and thanks for making me a part of it. See you next Saturday... with blanket progress? who knows. Only eight stripes to go, and then it's border time! I plan to keep warm under it while I'm working on that part, while I admire the snow from inside... February being my second favourite month, for all the same reasons as January.

 

 

Duck Sweater Repair

So, there's this sweater I knit back in the 90s even though I had no clue how to do intarsia...

... which has been resurrected of late and worn so often that one of the baby ducks got a stain on his face and I had to renew my attention to it (you're seeing it clean, post-washing and blocking). The baby ducks, by the way, go all the way around the waist for reasons that made sense to me at the time. 

In fact, here it is in all its wrinkled glory: 

Once I had it clean and was looking more closely at it, I saw THIS

There's a hole in the sleeve!!!!!!!!

It's still small. The wool around it was holding and not giving up more stitches. But I can guarantee you I no longer have any scraps left from the yarn I used to make this thing. I spent about an hour on Monday pulling out all the scraps I do have and discovered that this particular shade of green is not one I've favoured since. Eventually though, I found some wool/mohair boot sock yarn with an almost correct shade of green between the blues and the acid greens. WHEW.

So that left me with the problem of how to mend the hole so it wouldn't show. 

Which is also something I have limited skills for. I did have some resources for research and testing, but when it came to the point I ignored them, convinced I could go it alone. Obviously that didn't go well. But after three or four tries I thought, in the spirit of this sweater, maybe I should just do my best with the skills I have today and make that endeavour part of the Duck Sweater's history? 

I did my best, and got this:

It's not perfect. But it's also in an armpit. And now the sweater can get out there again into the cold snap we're having.

That's what I learned this week. Sometimes something is better than nothing, and also, never toss your yarn scraps! Because you never know, amiright?

Hope you have some small win this weekend in the absence of any huge ones, though of course I wish those for you as well. I'm content with this one, personally, and will gratefully top that up with a cup of tea. Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you next Saturday!

 

 

What took me so long

Let's talk felting today! Specifically, on-purpose felting the sweater I made last winter, which came out huge and floppy and pilled a lot. Here she is when I first finished her:

Pretty colours, right? I love this combo and I love that I was able to find 100% wool yarn to put them together. Only the wool was so underspun it pilled like crazy, and the sweater was so oversized it just sagged on me. As you may recall if you were around this time last year, I even had to turn up about two inches on the hem or it woulda been a minidress.

In the fall I remembered that felting is a thing, and might just be the *very* thing I was looking for. And over the holiday I remembered that I would rather wear this sweater than let it hog a lot of shelf space in my closet. But before I could felt, I had to take out that hem...

 

... which was a very big job. And in unpicking all the ends I used to do it, I accidentally unpicked two ends that were really just a join between one ball of yarn and another. Oops!
 

It left quite a hole, but with effort I was able to remember how to restitch through the exposed loops, and the result was more than satisfactory. 

And then I had to run in the ends again.

What a mess inside, huh? Or, as a Canadian, I might say, eh?

Sorry about the colour change in these photos. The sweater really is that lovely rich green, but the light today is so uneven... truly grey and wintery. We've had snow!

Hence my desire for a functional sweater. Okay, moving along... 

I couldn't risk this baby on the washing machine, so I decided to felt by hand in a big bowl in the sink. I put in hot water and some Soak Wash (the better to avoid having to rinse out a lot of soap later) and started kneading my sweater like it was bread dough. When the stitches started to look a little blurred, I stopped, figuring I could felt more later. Then I set it out to dry. 

That was yesterday, so it's still a little damp. But check this out! 

The stitches no longer have big airy gaps in between. And the heft I wanted in the fabric is there - just a little heaviness, still with some floop. Plus: SO SOFT. I honestly don't think I'll see much pilling with the new finish.

Here's a closeup of the before and after, again with iffy lighting quality and poor placement planning:

 

The size shift, by contrast to my photography, is near perfect! The chest went from 46 inches down to 43, still huge but workable; the swing hem from 54 inches to 52; the overall length from 29 inches to 28. My ideal length is 27, but even that one inch reduction makes such a difference to how this thing hangs. 

Weirdly, the sleeve length got worse. It was 27 inches, and now it's 29, covering my hand to the knuckles. However, since the dream was always wear this sweater with loads of layers underneath to sub in for a winter coat on less than freezing days, the extra hand coverage is not unwelcome. The rest of the time, I can just roll up the sleeves, amiright?

I was also pleased to see the inside looking super neat and tidy after a bath:

So I'm asking myself, what took me so long? Felting the sweater took less than an hour. Unpicking the hem and repairing the hole? Maybe ninety minutes. I'm not sure I'd ever make an oversized sweater on purpose again, and I might felt this one a second time in the future if I find I need it to be smaller still, but right now I'm just so pleased. Not least because I just bought a cute pair of walking shoes that match it perfectly, ahem.

(If the link is no longer active when you're reading this, the shoes are Birkenstock Londons, in suede, in the colour Thyme. This is my third pair of this design as I absolutely love them! All the perks of Birks with the added security of a totally closed shoe. Obviously I will not be wearing these in the snowy conditions we currently have going on, but once the roads are clear in spring, and the weather is still chilly enough for this sweater, this outfit is happening!)

I hope your weekend is lovely and hopefully a bit escapist, as we all need that break, don't we? Thanks for spending this time with me, and I'll see you next Saturday. Probably still not with a finished crochet blanket though, sigh.

 

 

Bits and pieces

Stick with me for a knit storage innovation! But first: I was thinking I might do a New Year's list of things I hope to get to this year, like a To Be Read book pile but for knitting, and called To Be Finished. These little mitts missing only their thumbs and run-in ends would be tippy top of the list:

Only I did a thing like that last year, where I committed to finishing a project every month and only made it through about four months before the wheels came off.

Since then I had been under the impression I had run out of projects to wrap up. Ha! 

Over the Christmas break I did a big cleanup and found so. many. more. Most of which are socks I knit and just didn't run in the ends on (big category one), even though my sock drawer has tumbleweeds blowing through it owing to all the socks that need mending before I can wear them again (big category two.)

Ready for the innovation?

What I also found in that cleanup was heaps of Ziploc bags filled with yarn I kind of forgot I had, because Ziplocs are ugly and my main yarn storage cabinet was already full, so they were jammed into a bigger bag and stashed under a table in the basement. 

While in the meantime, in another room, a large shelf was was clogged up with empty Mason jars I hadn't needed after buying a case in each of two sizes to use for baking mixes.

(this might be another innovation: when you're measuring out the dry ingredients for a go-to recipe, bring out a series of Mason jars and measure out several more batches into them. When you seal the lid the expiry date stays the same as your least fresh ingredient, which is probably months away, and you only have to wash the measuring gear once!)

So I got to thinking... aren't Mason jars just another form of moth-proof storage for wool? And couldn't I give myself storage space in one area by removing the jars to go on display somewhere else?

Answer: YES. 

 

I was so excited to choose the yarns to put in each one, and arrange their beautiful tags so they'd show. I didn't even listen when Pete said they looked like lab specimen jars with pickled invertebrates inside. (To be fair, there's a basket with six more jars in it that really do look like that, which is why I have not enclosed a picture of same.)

Did you do any big cleanups over the break, I wonder? Or draw up a dream list of something you'd like to do this year?

Either way - thanks for stopping by, and I'll see you next Saturday!

 

 

 

Blanket progress report

It didn't feel like I got much quality time with my stripey crocheted blanket the last few weeks, but somehow she's outgrown her cute project bag and is now living in a pillowcase.

How does that even happen?

I'm so grateful I figured this pillowcase out because the whole thing was getting pretty ungainly. As it is now, I can just turn the pillowcase to work from one folded section to another while I crochet or run in ends. 

 

Last time I had enough progress to show off, I photographed it on our dining table, which is the same width this was going to be. But since then I recalibrated and decided to make the stripes symmetrical from a central point (specifically, a claret stripe flanked by denim blue stripes.) You can see it in the pic above, a little to the left of centre frame.

Here's the first half, from the central point (left) to the start (right):

As the wonkiness of the stripes suggest, I'm new to this and winged the colour shifts as well as the rest. I'm really noticing a light patch to right of centre with a run of green/yellow/off-white/pink, but I think when it's reversed the colours should look fairly balanced, don't you?

At any rate, now that the table isn't the measuring tool, here's how far I still have to go: 

From navy blue through to claret, basically, which is about twenty stripes. 

Three stripes take me an hour to do, and running in the ends on those stripes takes another ninety minutes or so. I guess that means I only have another eighteen hours tops with my bestie before it's time to box her in with the aforementioned border. 

I'd say the end is definitely in sight! Though where those eighteen hours are going to come from is definitely a question. I so wish I had paid attention to the pattern instructions and done two stripes in each colour... so much less yarn wasted, and so much less time on running in ends.

Still, I'm really glad I decided to make a blanket, and I'm still enjoying every minute I work on it. Even the ends-running-in part is becoming meditative and pleasant. Who knew?

Good thing I bought yarn to do it all over again, but the right size this time, for the sofa, amiright?

Happy New Year and I do hope you've had an enjoyable winter break. Thanks for making me part of it and I'll see you next week with... who knows what! Except it probably won't be a finished blanket.

Probably.