Black and white – Hopefully Creative

The Misfit

Who is that lurking in the back?

For the last couple of months, I’ve had a zip lock pouch in my bag that held everything I needed to make ‘The Misfit’. A cross stitch pattern kit from Heritage Crafts. I ended up stitching a polar bear hiding in a bunch of penguins. The kit has eight colours of floss, but by occasionally using two different colours in the same stitch they manage to achieve ten different colour combinations. You start with all the cross stitches and then you define the animals by adding the back stitch.

Embroidery of penguins and a polar bear without backstitch

Cross stitched penguins and one polar bear

After I finished all the cross stitches, you could sort of see the critters starting to appear, but by gradually adding the back stitch you can really see them come alive. I didn’t finish this in a few sittings, this thing went all over the country with me since October. It’s small and flat enough to bring anywhere and easy enough to pick back up at any time. I finally finished it on December 20th and have now framed it and it’s hanging on my wall with some of my other cross stitch projects.

Aurea & Center Street

Self striping zebra yarn boleros, no raccoons in sight.

My first shipment of wholesale yarn included a kilo of Superwash Zebra DK, a 100% merino wool that has black and white yarn. I was massively interested in seeing how that would knit up, so I started a project in June 2022. I cast on the bolero Aurea by Berroco Design Team and planned to incorporate the eyelet details of the Center Street by CJOriginals on the back. When I look back on the project and what the Aurea pattern says, I did not follow the instructions. I didn’t make separate pieces for the back and fronts and instead knit those all in one piece. Once the main body was done, I put it in a corner and only looked at it again in May 2023.

At that time, I decided to start knitting the arms. Again not wanting to deal with seaming, I tried to do top down set-in sleeves. I’m fairly certain that I didn’t make the sleeve cap large enough, so that’s something to keep in mind for next time. But the sleeves are there and that’s all that really counts. I then started on the neck edge, which was frogged a few times before I was happy with it. It needed a lot more stitches than I initially thought.

I do really like this yarn, it’s so soft and the way it stripes is really interesting. I do find it funny that there is less of a raccoon arm effect, where the stripes on the arms are much wider than those on the body. I guess the knitting in the round of the sleeve and the much longer knitting back and forth in the body almost cancel each other out. I haven’t yet entirely figured out how to wear it, because it does gape a little. I think I’m going to find some sort of pin to keep the fronts together and see how I like it then. For now, I’m happy with it because it is cute and warm.

Baby Zebra Hat

Little Zebra hat for a little baby

To add to the little Giraffe gift, I wanted to make an animal themed hat. It needed to be a safari animal and my Ravelry searches unearthed a zebra version. Baby Zebra by Marji LaFreniere, a cute little hat in black and white with a mane down the back. I didn’t want to make it too complicated so I knit the body of the hat on the knitting machine. Since the yarn was very thick, I cast on my 74 stitches (72 + 2 for seaming down the back) by putting 2 needles in work and skipping the next one. Once I reached the length, I pulled the knitting off the machine and onto 4 mm needles.

Since a hat needs to be smaller on top, I did the decreases by hand. Once it was done, I sewed the back seam, leaving space for the tufts of the mane. I made the ears mostly according to the pattern (either the maker can’t count or I can’t because the row numbers didn’t match up) and attached those to the hat. I then cut lengths of yarn and knotted those in the seam of the back for the mane.

I have No Idea whether or not this hat is actually baby sized. I’m notoriously bad at this, generally making baby hats sized for like 1 to 2 year old kiddos. We’ll see on which end of the spectrum this one ends up. The bottom of the hat rolls a bit, but I think it still like it. You can also still see the skipped needles in the body of the hat, it almost looks like ribbing. However, I still think this thing is stinking cute!

Plaid Pants

Some nice, warm, plaid pants.

As a follow up to the previous post about the cape cover, these are the pants worn for graduation in January. I’d been leafing through pattern magazines and found a pants style I really liked in Burda Style 12/2022 model 1. It’s a wide legged pant with a diagonal overlap waistband. The legs have vertical pressed creases. I chose to do a Burda Style pant because it seems like those crotches work much better for me than Simplicity or Knipmode crotches.

As I was using a nice thick black and white plaid fabric for the pants, getting it cut out involved some real head scratching. I wanted to make sure that the plaid lines matched along the side seams and inseam, but also pockets and closure flaps. Since the bit of fabric that I had wasn’t overly large, I ended up cutting on the cross grain. The pattern didn’t come with back pockets, but I substituted some in anyway. Once I had all the pieces cut, I set to sewing. This went fairly smoothly until the instructions for the closure flap. I still don’t know what they actually wanted me to do, but I’ve done something and it closes, so I’m calling it good. It also doesn’t entirely match plaid there, but I’ve done a good enough job so I don’t think it’s super noticeable.

The front pockets are pretty regular. I followed all the normal steps and made sure to match my plaid there for maximum style points. For the back pockets, I followed a tutorial by Sewing Divas for non-sagging pockets. This involves making an extra fold in the side of the pocket closest to the wearer. So far, it seems to work. There are single welt pockets, and they are going over a dart. This means that you’ll see some slight discrepancy in the width of the plaid above and below the welt. This was unavoidable and I tried my best. I still think they came out pretty well.

All the insides are finished with the serger, so no fraying expected. The pockets are nice and deep. The fabric is lovely and soft. The plaid matches where I want it and overall I’m very happy with these pants. Did I figure out after the fact that they look quite similar to my other black/white plaid pants? Yes, I did. Do I care? Also not. They did require a bit of alteration after I’d worn it to graduation because I’d hemmed it a little short. That’s been fixed now, so they go out and about with me quite regularly.

Plaid Pants Again

When you make pants and then wait weeks to actually complete them.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine celebrated her birthday in Rotterdam. Rotterdam has a large market on Saturday which also has a few fabric stalls, so I convinced another friend to come with me to the market to look at some fabrics. I fell in love with a sneaky sweatpants fabric with a black, white and grey plaid on it. The fabric feels very similar to the striped one I used for these pants, so it had to come home with me.

Determined not to let the fabric languish in the hoard for too long, I set out to make my new pants pretty swiftly. Since the plaid is unbalanced, it would never be possible to make symmetrical pants, but I did decide to do my best to plaid match the horizontal where possible. I settled on a pattern that had arrived recently in the Simplicity Naaimode magazine (nr. 45), model 30 also known as Simplicity S8956, which was fairly wide legged, with a pleat and pockets in the front and a shaped waistband. All the pieces were cut out and sewn together. The only changes I made were to add an extra belt loop for my keys and to cuff them as they were seriously long.

So that meant that this thing was finished right? Nope, wrong. The front pockets that come with the pattern are really not very big, and while I was debating the entire time whether to add back pockets, I decided not to put them in at the time I worked on it. So when I’d finished the pants as per the project on the 27th of September, they then lay in my ‘to work on’ pile until last Sunday, waiting for back pockets. I chose to do single welt pockets for the first time and used a different kind of fabric for the pocket back to hopefully alleviate some of the denseness that welt pockets can create. I probably should have made them a little bit wider, but they did turn out well and function as pockets! Will even fit my phone, so job’s finally done.

Penguin!

A bite-size penguin has been added to the family.

As mentioned in Kevin the Owl, I’ve somehow amassed a decent stash of cuddly fabric that I need to sew up. So yesterday after work, I decided to take another stab at it. This would involve a really cute free penguin pattern from Sew Desu Ne/Cholyknight. It’s a penguin lying on its tummy with an adorable tail sticking up. He’s made of black, white and ochre cuddly fabric and some black and white felt.

Last night, I sewed on the eyes and prepared the face by adding the black forehead and sewing that down. Then this morning, the rest of him got sewn together in about 2 hours. I’m for sure not the fastest sewer, but it was a nice process nonetheless. Most of the pattern came together easily apart from adding the tummy. I think I stretched the fabric a little so I had to really manipulate it to fit and then I went back for a bit that was not very oval-shaped anymore. Still, he worked out wonderfully well.

He’s quite small, which is nice. The one thing I changed from the pattern is that I didn’t add pink blush ovals under his eyes. I don’t like pink and he’s cute enough as is. I’m not at all sure what I’ll do with him, but he’ll probably be hanging out in my house for the foreseeable future.

Sewing for Someone Else

Sometimes ones mistakes can be put to good use for someone else.

Somewhere in the midst of lockdown, I impulse purchased a few lengths of fabric from the internet. When they arrived, I found that one of them had quite a lot of pink in it. I’m not a pink person, I hate pink with a passion, so I wasn’t going to use much of that fabric for me. However, my mother is a colour person. Bright colours are definitely her preference, so I decided to suggest making her a thing from that fabric. She was a bit scared because choosing patterns is not something she does regularly.

When she dropped by at one point, we started looking through pattern magazines and settled on the pattern. We chose Pattern 14 from Simplicity Naaimode 31, also known as New Look 6298. Measured her and decided on the size. I sewed it up and brought it back to her and it was.. very large. Not very appealing although the fabric looked good on her. So off for a second try I went, unpicking the raglan sleeves and neckline and took it all in. Upon return it looked much better. We’ll see if she ever picks it to wear, but even if she doesn’t, I had fun making it.

Now on that first visit, I also showed her the trial version I made for the party pantsuit. It looked absolutely horrible on me, but it was made of a stretchy fabric. She found it quite nice and put it on. It looked a whole lot better on her. So we decided that I would finish it and put a band of ribbing in for a waistband. That way my trial version would actually end up being worn (potentially). It’s nice to see someone else enjoy your failures by getting use of them.

Delayed Party-Pantsuit

I was supposed to attend a celebration halfway through March and was planning an outfit for that event. Unfortunately, Covid put a stop to it all. I’d started my new pantsuit in time and had it mostly finished by March 9. Then waited too long to seam the legs in the week of the event (in hopes that it would still go through). However, it took me until last week to actually finish the thing with all bells and whistles. The bells and whistles being a detachable bow-belt thing.

Usually I find a fabric and then look for a pattern with it. In this case, I’d found the pattern and went on a hunt for fabric. In the end, I chose a black and white ‘waffly’-thin-scuba something. I don’t even know how to describe it, but it has stretch in it and the back looks odd. The pantsuit was made from the fabric with the larger scale pattern and the bow from the smaller scale pattern fabric.

Anyway, the plan was to make this pantsuit from Knipmode nr. 9 2019, pattern nr 8. I’d needed to first see if it would fit, so I mocked up a short version of the pants and the top. I had to take in the top and reduce the length in the shoulder straps. When I tried on the shorts, I looked like I was wearing a diaper. So I gave up and used my regular pants pattern.

Since I wasn’t sure if I would always want to walk around with a giant bow on my front, I decided to make the bow detachable. I couldn’t figure out how I actually wanted the bow, so I procrastinated for, well, two and a half months. In the end I made belt loops, and added buttons to the bow. There are tiny thread loops on the suit, at the pockets, centre front and top, to hook the buttons into. I haven’t tested it out for any length of time, so the plan is to do that at some point. Perhaps once I’ve finished a blouse to wear with it, since it is very low in the back. I do like the abstract print of it, so we’ll see how it wears.

Flower Power Pantsuit

This year, my preparation for Graduation was On Point. I went to the market one day in Spring and found the most wonderful black & white striped knit with a wealth of blue flowers on top and bottom and some sparse ones along the middle. I didn’t dare to buy it then, but at four o’clock the same day, I came back. Sadly, it wasn’t in the market truck anymore either, but I agreed to pick up a length the next week.

So after I’d gotten the fabric and washed it, I needed to make the pantsuit. I’d decided to use my normal pants pattern with the straight edges and the top from pattern 19-20 in Simplicity Naaimode 32, also known as Simplicity 8178. Then came the difficulty of placement. I’d decided that I did not want to have half flowers along the crotch seam, for obvious reasons. So I sat on the floor for quite a long time to figure out how to get everything out of a short length of fabric. At the end, I think it worked out well.

So, I sewed the thing together forever ago (April apparently). Then about a month before the actual event, got down to hemming the legs. There’s a small snap at the crossover point at the bust. That’s the only real closure. It’s got giant pockets, made out of a black stretch mesh stuff. The pockets do show the things that I stuff in there, but I’m ok with that.

For now, I’ll just continue to keep wearing it and feeling awesome with it!

Plaid Jumpsuit

So, in preparation for the Plaid Jacket, I browsed the internet to try and figure out if the sleeves came in full length in the pattern (they did not). During the search, I stumbled on this page from YoSaMi and I fell head over heels. Specifically with the tartan jumpsuit that she made from the top of the dress of Simplicity 1325 and the pants that come with the original pattern. Now, I did not have the pants pattern, but I did have the pattern for the dress. For the pants I used the pieces of the Swordfish Pants that were elongated to waist height.

The fabric was some plaid stuff with silver threads. The pattern was nicely small scale which meant matching it was not too difficult. I lined it with some white stuff with small flower things. This was probably not the best choice as it does show in some areas. However, I really like the way it turned out. I started with sewing the pants, including pockets but ignored the darts in the back as those needed to line up with the top. After sewing the top and attaching them together most of the way, I sewed in the darts in the back of the pants and added the zipper. As an afterthought, I added the loops to the back pockets and buttons to match the pull I attached to the zipper to get it off easier.

I wore it yesterday to a birthday and I really like it. I feel it is actually quite flattering (don’t tell me if it isn’t) and it’s quite comfortable. The only issue is that I’m still trying to figure out how to wear it. Decisions on what shirt to wear underneath and stuff like that. However, I don’t think that will stop me from choosing it as I really like it. We’ll see how it holds up to a full day of going to the toilet and getting it on and off in confined spaces…

Tag: Black and white