Tag: Blue-green

Narwhal!

So quick, so easy, so narwhal

Stash reduction is the name of game at the moment.

I’ve selected a good few toy patterns and am determined to make enough plushies to allow the pushy-fabric box to actually close again. Next up is a really tiny, really easy Narwhal!

  • Side
  • Head on
  • Side

Again, I used a free pattern by SewDesuNe/CholyKnight, appropriately called Narwhal Plush. He’s only got 4 pattern pieces and a total 8 pieces of plush fabric. So not very much of the stash was used, but at least some has a new shape now.

  • Top
  • Tummy

I like the way they had me made the tusk. It’s a small cone where you use small gathering stitches to give it that signature spiral look. Next up should be a Fennec Fox. I’ve got all the pieces cut, it just needs to be assembled.

Adventures in Dyeing

More adventures with different colours and natural materials.

Last June, I gifted my mother two ‘dye your own silk scarf’-kits. The plan was to get together some day and dye our scarves as a nice bonding moment (or something). Having brought to kits to my house in December, we didn’t get round to it, but last weekend we finally managed to get our dye on. The kit had a silk scarf, two packets of acid-dye (red/yellow or blue/yellow), latex gloves, a roasting bag, a tie and 0 instructions. Turned out in December that those kits were supposed to go with a webinar that I had completely missed. So in January I signed up for the new webinar, wrote down all the instructions and then we could get to work.

  • Red & Yellow
  • Blue & Yellow

We wet our scarves, folded them some way that would make the dye go approximately where we wanted it to go and then sprinkled on the powder. Some kneading, some more water, some hopeful guesses later and we put our tied off roasting bags in boiling water. Once they’d steamed for a while, we rinsed our projects and finally got to see our still wet scarves. I used red & yellow, and my mum had the yellow and blue. She wanted to have some green in it, but that didn’t really work out it seemed. Still it’s cool to see what folding and dye can create. I wanted mine to have the same colour at each end, while my mum wanted the one end to be blue and the other end to be yellow.

While waiting for the scarves to steam, I also decided to dye one of my skeins of yarn that I bought during the first haul. This time, I chose green, turquoise and blue dye. Just randomly sprinkled it on and I’d see what it turn out as. Compared to the thin silk scarves that were dry in less than 2 hours, this skein had to hang for like a day and a half before it was dry. It reminds me a lot of the sea and I really like it. It’ll probably be a scarf or hat of some sort in the distant future. I enjoyed it though, even the uncertainty of not knowing how it will turn out.

Warm Birdies

A while ago, I found a bit of fabric that was black and green with birds, reversed on both sides. The black side was somewhat more fluffy and felted, the green side looked more like threads. At some point, again, a while ago, I was cold and wanted to make something warm. This fabric seemed to fit the bill. I chose a pattern from Simplicity Naaimode 31 – patterns 1-4 (also known as New Look 6474). I chose the smallest size, shortened it by a lot to make sure it fit on my limited piece of fabric and started sewing.

Once the basic shape was finished, I put it on and it looked horrible on me. I can’t even describe my feelings about it. Still, I liked the fabric and wasn’t sure what to do at that point. Then I thought of something, perhaps it would fit my mother better. She’s also generally cold and likes colourful things. So wearing something green with birds on, shouldn’t be an issue.

I brought the thing to my parents and asked her if she liked it. She did, so I decided to finish the seams. All seams were folded inwards and sewn down, so it now looks quite nice on the inside. This means that it can be worn with the black side out.

The outside edge and sleeve edges have been finished with bias tape, this also looks neat on the side. I made a little loop at the outside neckline edge, so which ever way it is turned, it can still be put on a hanger. There are also pockets on the green side, which can be used when worn.

I hope she’ll get some joy out of it, and if not, someone else might. I’m just happy it did not end up in my corner of shame…

Arm Knitting

Since Tuesday, when the yarn was delivered, I’ve made a number of arm knit scarves. In almost all of them, I cast on 7 stitches provisionally, using an arm as crochet hook, and and arm as knitting needle. I would arm knit until I spotted a knot in the skein and finish knitting. I’d need about half a meter or more to kitchener stitch the stitches together.
This ended up resulting in a grey one and a yellow one that are slightly too long to single wrap and too short to double wrap.

For the double wrap blue-cream-green one, it’s a full skein and a little more of another skein. The remainder of that second skein was used for the doubled single-wrap version (right two pictures is the same thing). That was the only one that had 10 stitches cast on. These all did not take more than an hour or so each.

I’m finding that I quite enjoy arm knitting. It’s quick, easy, nice result and most of all, fun. I have another skein of grey and yellow and two of some blue/green/grey stuff that is less thick. So you might just see more giant knits.

Pentapus with Eigth Legs

Browsing Ravelry remains dangerous. I was looking for a pattern for a black sheep and found several but then I was blown over by a little pattern for a ‘pentapus‘ by Twice Sheared Sheep (hence why it showed up in my Sheep search). A pentapus is apparently an octopus with five arms. It was so cute that I had to start it right after finding it. It also helped that the instructions claimed that he could be finished in an hour (I’m apparently a slow knitter, because it took me a little longer..).

I did make some changes. The yarn was held double throughout. To create the eight legs, I did not increase to 25 but to 24 stitches, (k1,make bobble, k1) repeat 8 times and decreased from 24 to 20 stitches, in the respective rows. Otherwise I followed all the instructions.
The eyes are made by making a knot in some really thick yarn, then knotting it together in the octopus.

I think he’s really cute.

Hook Those Dragons Scarf

So after finishing the dragon shirt, I still had about 25 cm of dragons left over. I’d also been browsing Pinterest for the past few days for those super cool looking triangular scarves. There seem to be two camps: either the large triangle clipped by the corners, or a large rectangle clipped by its corners. In the end, I decided to go for the large rectangle with dragons and a slight nautical feel. All websites with instructions indicate that you need 1.5 meter wide fabric. I ended up having to cut of some bits for it to fit nicely so my scarf is only 1 meter long.

In the end I used:

  • about 30 x 100 cm of teal fleece (back)
  • two times 13 x 100 cm of dragon fabric
  • about 6 x 100 cm of other striped fabric
  • about 105 cm of dark blue nautical looking rope
  • about 80 cm of white with a black running stitch ribbon
  • a closure hook & loop – it’s not really a loop.

I did not want a full dragon scarf, since I’m technically supposed to be an adult (I think?). So I decided to cut the bit of dragon in half lengthwise and use the back of one of the pieces. I wanted an accent in the middle (and didn’t have enough dragon), so I found some striped stretch fabric (also used for shirts before) to put in the centre. I also wanted to emulate this so I cut 4 cm lengths of ribbon and attached those at 5 cm intervals to the dragon that would be backwards. I sewed it all together, adding stitching along the centre stripes and edges to help it keep its shape. Then I affixed the closure with the sewing machine and done!

I’ll test drive it in the next few days, I may melt since I think it could be extremely warm, but we’ll see!

Ear Flap Hat

So, what do you do when you agree to meet a friend for a crafty evening but have decided to stay in town to get your hair cut? You buy a ball of yarn and circular needles and take those along. I had wanted to make a hat with ear flaps for a while now, since it is getting colder on my bicycle and my current hat (with owls) doesn’t cover my ears. So I cast on 50 stitches provisionally (I thought I had cast on 55 for some reason – counting is hard) and started knitting. I had about half a hat finished at the end of the evening. The next day I found the tasseled earflap hat pattern on ravelry and wrote my limited notes here.

I recalculated their instructions based on my row gauge and at that point determined that I had failed knitting 55 stitched as I thought. According to my calculations I needed 52 stitches, so I increased a little at the bottom. Then I knit the flaps starting with 12 stitches and decreasing one on each side every knit row. I ended up with two stitches and added a third one in the middle to make the bind of smoother. There were at least three different bind off attempts but in the end the super stretchy bind of was used (where you do a yarn over after the previous stitch, knit the next stitch and slip both over the last knitted stitch). Then I returned to the top, removed my provisional cast on an continued knitting. I decreased five stitches every second row until there were six stitches left over. Then I added a doubled strand of yarn through each of the left over stitches and pulled those tight.

The finishing touches knitting wise included adding the six strands to knit the ear flap closures, making a knot at the top, weaving in my 2 ends from the middle cast on and adding a tag for the back. The ear flaps are more to the back, so I needed to indicate which side needed to be at the back of my hat. I did this with a small bit of spare yarn. It works well!

After my first test drive, I determined that the wind does come through the knitting quite a bit. So I dug through my stash and found some matching fleece fabric to line the ear flaps with. I sewed it in and test drove my hat again on what felt like the windiest second day of Christmas I ever encountered. This was a significant improvement, so I was very happy with this decision. My hair also fits in it, it may not look pretty but it does fit. All in all, not bad for effectively 2 evenings of knitting and about an hour of finishing.

Round Up

So.. It’s been a while, but I’ve actually been doing some small things. I felt too lazy to post them before, but now I feel I should, so here goes.

May! I participated in me-made-may and wore at least one piece of self-made clothing every day in May. I also took pictures for the first half.

Fish! I saw a fish pattern on the internets here and decided to make one. So now there is a fish living in my house.

Scarf! I made a another circle scarf, now without any blue to be able to wear it with my other clothes. This one is grey-white and black-white polkadots.

Hood! So part of May was the annual LARP event that I frequent. On the Friday it was due to start, my central heater thing gave an error, so I spent the afternoon calling and waiting for a plumber-type guy to fix it. While waiting, I decided to make a hood based on this pin. I fudged the measurements a bit because I had a pieces of fabric left over from the graduation dress/blue coat that I decided should fit, even if they weren’t exactly correct. I made the thing in about.. 2 hours? I wore it for the weekend and it was nice.

Others! I’ve been working quite hard on two large projects, a graduation dress and a big plushie that have taken up a lot of time. However, they aren’t finished yet (just hems on the graduation dress though), so I won’t post them yet…

 

 

Baby Booties

(This post was written on the 25th of March. Since it is a gift, I waited until it was received to post this account of the project)

You may or may not know that I have not really been able to knit for a long time now. My arm starts to hurt and it’s just not fun. So when a friend had her first baby, I wanted to see if knitting would be possible again. What better way to test than with a small project: something for baby. I searched ravelry for some baby booties patterns and eventually found one for Baby Hausschuhe. Now, just a boring booty wouldn’t work, you understand. I needed to.. do something to make them stand out just a little.

Cue some dinosaurs! What else?

I’d found a chart for a cute little dinosaur that I figured could work here. It transferred it to an excel file so I could work it. The dinosaur would be on the left outside of the first booty, facing backwards (otherwise he would get caught up in the toe decreases). But before I could start on the body of the shoe, I had to work on the bottom. So I cast on two booty soles in yellow and started knitting. Once the soles were done, I followed the first rows of the pattern until the purl how, then I knit 6 stitches and started my dinosaur pattern there. It all worked out pretty well. After following the pattern for the toe decreases and about 5 cm of ribbing, I was bored. My arm also hurt again – stupid.

On Saturday I felt like working on the second one, but I wanted a different pattern. I’d first looked over ravelry for a fun dinosaur chart, but I couldn’t find one. So on to google I went. Eventually settling on a pterodactyl. I found this picture of a Pterodactyl slipper that became the basis of my pattern. I made something resembling it in Excel and again kept my fingers crossed. This one also worked remarkably well. I knit until I got to the same hight as the other one and then transferred them both to a circular needed so I knew that they were the same hight. A few more rounds, some stretchy bind off and two booties were done! I think they are cute, but I hope the new owners also like them. We’ll see.

Home Decor

You may have read in Shrug? that I have been looking for curtains on the fabric market. On the first try, I went with my Dad to Utrecht. That time showed us that even market salesmen don’t like snow… Only about a third of the stall were there and it was very cold. We went back and forth a couple of times, with my dad complaining of a cold neck most of the time. At some point I convinced him that we should just get a bit of fabric for him to wrap around his neck. We found something that was super nice, and that I wanted to have. Five minutes later, my dad had an improv scarf and I had enough fabric to make some pillow cases.

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It look me a little bit of time, but Sunday morning, I figured it shouldn’t take too much time. Luckily, I was right. About an hour after I’d decided to start my project, I had six finished pillowcases. Granted, the fabric didn’t need to be finished, so it was just cutting pieces and sewing two seams, but still. Cutting always take the longest..

Anyway, here they are in their new natural habitat. I need to see how long it takes for them to felt up, because that happened a little to the scarf bit…

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