Blue – Page 4 – Hopefully Creative

Leftovers Hat

With the last of the leftovers, made a jaunty hat.

After the success of the Nutmeg leftover sweater, I set out to finally get rid of the last bits of that yarn that had been hanging out in the stash for way too long. So on New Years Eve, I got the knitting machine ready, and cast on some stitches to see what the settings needed to be. Turns out that it was impossible to knit this yarn when casting on on every needle of the machine, so I had to skip every alternate needle. This did mean that while knitting, it was very wide but it would shrink in width and expand in length when off the machine. Since I was fairly uninterested in actually doing a super good job, I just cast on the maximum amount of stitches that would fit and figured it would probably be fine.

I was actually inspired to knit this thing by this video. While looking for a tutorial for a triangular scarf on the knitting machine, one of this channel popped up. After I watched it, it moved on to this new video and I decided to watch that too. I didn’t do any of the special things, but I did get the idea that rectangle hats were a thing. So after the cast on, I just knit until there was no more red yarn, then I switched to the white until that was all gone too. Next up, blue and because I didn’t think it was long enough yet, I also added two of the leftover tiny balls of grey. The rectangle of knitting was taken off the machine and I used knitting needles for the cast off. Then I sewed the sides and top together et voila, hat!

Since there is no further stitching in the hat, you can just fold over the bottom grey edge any way you want. I’ve been doing a fold in such a way that there is a three layer bottom and no purl is on show. Of course, you can also just fold it over and have purl visible. The points of the hat can be back to front or side to side or at any given jaunty angle. In the end, I used 45 g of grey, 15 g of red, 15 g of white and 37 g of blue. This means that I now only have 34 g of grey and 27 g of black leftover. We’re getting to the bottom of this particular yarn stash!

Nutmeg Leftover Sweater

Random stripes for random colours.

Some time ago (Ravelry tells me May 24, 2020), I started on a sweater meant to use up leftovers of Zeeman Tweed wool, the thick version. I had the body of a Marsala sweater basically finished and got stuck on the sleeves. It went into a box of doom for probably two years or so, never to be worked on again. In October of this year, I unraveled it all and started on a new leftover sweater. This time using the Nutmeg by Jenifer Stark.

It’s a fairly simple raglan sweater with the one design element being the roll over hems, made with 5 knit rows and one purl row. The original pattern was quite boxy, so I added some impromptu shaping in the sides and some sort rows to the back at the bottom. The original plan was to have all the hems in grey, and then alternate stripes of red, white, blue and green. About three stripes in I devised a new plan, to have main colour stripes (red, green, blue) that would all have white in between colour switches. It worked out quite well, but I had a literal mountain of ends to weave into the sweater. I dedicated long stretches of time to do this fairly regularly, knowing that if I didn’t do it immediately, the sweater was liable to go into another box of doom.

The body was finished first and then I completed the sleeves. At that point in time, I was wondering why the purl row at the bottom of the sleeves worked so well to stop further curling, but the one at the bottom of the sweater was doing nothing of the sort. Turns out, I’m still crap at counting and only did four rows before casting off. I undid all of that and knit an extra row. This seems to have helped a lot. Then it came time to do sweater surgery. Originally the neck was grey-blue-red, but the new white in the middle plan necessitated some adjustment. The neck was knit again, and then I matrass stitched it to the first row of the original red stripe. It took a while, but it worked out well. The last thing I did was to add a contrasting stitch in the back of the neck, so I can easily see how to put it on.

In the beginning I had 44 g of green, 136 g of blue, 101 g of white, 164 g of red, 79 g of grey and 27 g of black. At the end, there was no green anymore, 37 g of blue, 15 g of white and 15 g of red leftover and since I didn’t use any, still 79 g of grey and 27 g of black. All in all, a pretty good score. I think that leaving the grey out makes this a much brighter sweater. The grey really muted it. I think it’ll be easy to wear and we’ll see if I finally managed to make sleeves that are the right length. Something I’ve proven to be exceptionally bad at…

Next up, a hat as part of the leftover projects!

Cake Yarn Dyeing Experiment

Experimenting with colour gradients.

I’ve been interested in trying to see if I can dye a skein gradually transforming rainbow colours from the start to the end. What I mean is that I don’t want the rainbow to repeat, just that the one end is red and migrates through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and ends up as violet. So I decided to try and see if it was possible to wind up a skein and then divide it into seven and dye each of those pieces. While playing around with the yarn winder, I discovered that this was not really possible because it needs to continue turning the other remaining parts otherwise I assume tangles. So I gave up on that plan for the day and just continued winding the ball. It turned out very loose, so that gave me a new plan.

I put the new loose cake in a bath to soak for a little bit and went upstairs to the dye cupboard for a pan, a metal basket and the first leftover dye stock I could find. This turned out to be something I’d scribbled ‘blue-grey’ on, so I guess this experiment was going to be blue-grey. Once the cake had soaked enough, I put it in the basket to leak a bit of the water. The dye stock was added to the pan with more water and some vinegar. The basket was lowered into the water and then simmered for 30-40 minutes. After that, it was left to cool. The yarn was Natural Boo DK, a merino and bamboo mix.

The reason it’s an experiment was because I wasn’t sure how the dye would be soaked up by this loose cake. Would it have lots of white spots? Be darker on the outside or underside? Would it turn out very light? Would it even work? Turns out that the bottom was indeed much darker than the top, which still had some white remaining. When it was dry and I balled it up again, inside out, it turned out much lighter than to start with. It reminds me of the colour of jeans, perhaps it’ll be a fun scarf!

Dinosaur Momiji

Manipulating origami dinosaurs into a new winter coat.

After breaking yet another coat zipper and clearly not learning my lesson, I set out to make myself a replacement Dinosaur Coat. I’d fallen in love with the Momiji walking jacket from Waffle Patterns and desperately needed one with dinosaurs on it. So the internet was scoured again for dinosaur printed softshell fabric and I landed on some from Takoy. I wasn’t fully sure what the colours would turn out to be, but when it arrived on my doorstep I really liked it. Off to the haberdashery for some new zippers! I tried to line up the dinosaurs so they went around the entire coat and almost matched along the zipper. That seemed to work out quite well.

The pattern works in such a way that you pick the elements that you want to include and follow the relevant instructions for those. I chose to use A: Hood, C: Chest pocket, E: Kangaroo pocket + hand warmer and H: Knit cuff. There are only four adaptations from the original pattern, I think. One is to have larger eyelets on the hood because the ones that were the right size just kept coming loose. The second was to do the pleat on the front pocket to the outside instead of the inside, mainly because I couldn’t find a way to have the dinosaurs show nicely with the inside pleat. Three, add some elastic to the inside of the chest pocket to keep my wallet in place, because I didn’t measure it beforehand. And lastly, to add a hanging loop to the inside when attaching the lining hood to the neckline.

The coat is lined with some fairly thick and smooth orange-y fabric that was a close enough colour match to the outside dinosaurs. The pattern comes with separate pieces for the lining. All in all, I’m very impressed with the pattern. The pieces all match up and the instructions all made sense and were very clear. While the project wasn’t even that difficult, it did take me a fairly long time to complete. That was mainly because I was very unsure on how long to make the sleeves. So the two pieces of the project sat on the back of a chair and on the couch for weeks before I decided to just follow the pattern and make nice long sleeves.

There are a few things I would do differently, if I make it again. The first is are to decrease the height of the hood. It’s too big, so I have to scrunch it down a whole lot for it to stay on my head. Second, the pocket opening for the hand warmer pockets is too far down, which means that I never feel secure in putting something else in there as it would probably fall out. The outside pocket pleat also means that if I put stuff in there, I get a massive tummy, but I guess that was all my choice. Lastly, the zipper doesn’t really comfortably close all the way up so it generally ends where the hood attaches to the neckline. The first time I wore the coat, I wasn’t convinced. But it’s been in stable rotation for weeks now and I really love it.

Spur of the Moment

Sometimes Pinterest just sparks your imagination and you’ll make it come to life in less than 24 hours.

Browsing through Pinterest has given me lots of ideas over the years. Recently there was an image of a dress that really tickled my fancy and that I’ve been thinking about on and off. So last Monday evening around 20:00, I remembered that I had an event on Wednesday. I decided that I wanted a new outfit, but if it didn’t work out, I’d have enough in the cupboard to make something work anyway. To the hoard I went to select a piece of fabric. I chose a length of blue synthetic something with a smooth back and an peachy outside.

For the pattern, I decided initially not to look for an actual pattern to but to try and drape something on my dress form. I cut two bits of fabric and attempted to pin the shoulders in place. It didn’t really work as I intended so I moved on to another part. That was the side straps, which involved cutting 4 and sewing them together. By then it was bedtime, so I postponed the further fiddling to the next morning.

At that time I’d decided that I did want some sort of sleevelet unlike the sleeveless inspiration image. I thought it would perhaps work to fold over the sleeves and create some sort of integrated facing. To make my sleeves, I grabbed the bodice pieces from Simplicity 1076 (also used here), and centered them on my fabric pieces. Then I rotated them out so that the sleeve edge would be straight vertical and could be folded in to the center. I sewed the side seams, cut the neckline, made the facing and added pockets.

The fitted waist is accomplished with an identical arrangement of pleats in front and back. They are 5 cm high, 1 cm wide and 5 cm apart. I had no idea if that was going to work, but my pin-try-on indicated that it might, so I just went for it. The side straps are caught in the outer pleats. Once that was all sewn down, I put it on again to mark the button holes. For the first time ever, I sewed buttonholes on my Pfaff! The buttons were added, lovely green ones with a small pattern that I have an entire tube of. Added the hem and sewed the facing edges over. The dress was completed at about 17:20, right in time for a small gathering. All in all, less than 24 hours from fabric to finished dress. Quite a decent turn around! For the event, I chose to wear it with my tiny petticoat for a little bit more oomph. I really enjoyed wearing it.

Mini Manta Ray Plush

Gifting a miniature manta ray plush

After debating it for a while, I finally jumped on CholyKnight (Sew Desu Ne)’s Patreon. I’ve been using so many of their free patterns for my plushies that I decided that it was probably time to give back a little. As there was also a recent birth, I needed a tiny baby gift. Cue the Manta Ray pattern. This is a free plush pattern already but if you are a patron, you can also get access to a mini version. It’s got three pattern pieces, made out of four bits of fleece fabric and with optional spots. I left off the spots for this version but did include the eyes and the blush.

You first apply the blush, eyes and eye whites, then stitch them down. Then you attach the top fins to the top piece. Attach the bottom to the completed top piece while leaving a bit of the tail open. Turn it right side out and sew along the top fin seam so that the fins stay flat. Stuff the body a little and close up the tail and DONE. This was a super easy evening project and I really like it. As usual my living room was filled with fluff until I got the lint roller out, but that’s the price you pay for super soft plushies. That same evening I also cut out a pumpkin platypus but I’ve yet to complete that. Stay tuned though, it shouldn’t be too long.

For Those Prickly Days

If you’re grumpy and you know it, wear this sweater.

In May 2020 with Covid still locking everything down, the local market stall that sells pre-cut lengths of fabric, decided to do some online auctions. That meant that they showed their fabrics in front of a camera and people could buy those from their website. So I took that opportunity to purchase some fabric. Now without being able to touch fabric, I’m apparently not very good at picking out things that I want to use. I think this is one of the first lengths that I’ve actually sewn up from that batch. Since I was in a fairly prickly mood at the time with corona and other stuff, this cactus fabric really spoke to me. However, when it arrived, it was not as thick as I expected it to be, so it took a while for me to decide on a project.

After the batwing top partial success, I wanted to try a batwing with sleeves that covered all of my arms. So I set out to find another pattern and settled on the one from Sew Different. When comparing the shapes, this Sew Different one was fair bit wider and with deeper ‘wings’ – it was also a size L so that wasn’t too surprising. I decided to adjust it a little so that it would 1. fit on my fabric and 2. wouldn’t be quite as wide. I basically scooped the wings up a little so that it was less exaggerated and made it narrower at the bottom. I could also get away with shortening the sleeves a little as I was doing bands anyway.

The fabric is not as thick and warm as I would normally like, but I thought that with the summer heating up, it would be good to have a thinner sweater. It went together smoothly and actually is quite nice to wear. I might end up with a few more items with similar shapes, either in fabric or in knit.

Cheshire Tops

Making two different cat face shirts.

While stalking the local market recently, I discovered a jersey with Cheshire Cat faces on it. It was love at first sight and the length went home with me. It then languished in the hoard for a fair few weeks before I got up the energy to make a thing. One of my tried and true t-shirt drafts got picked first because I just wanted to have a cat eye shirt in rotation. My serger was being good and actually worked for the entirety of this project, so that made it a very quick sew. Not much more to say, I’ve got a fair few of these types of shirt in the cupboard and they all get a lot of wear.

After finishing that first top however, I had so much fabric left over that I started considering what to do with it. My penchant of keeping random short bits of fabric in the hoard means that I never seem to fully use up a fabric and I wanted to try and change that. I’d been thinking about bat wing tops for a while at that point as I’m planning on making one for my mother (have not completed that yet). So I looked for a pattern and settled on the Amy Bat Wing Top. Printed out the size small and tried to fit it on the fabric. That didn’t go exactly to plan so I cut the back in a top and bottom and reduced the length of the sleeves a little. Instead of hemming, I added a band along the bottom, similar to the arm bands. The neckline is also banded instead of made with facings.

When I first put it on, I couldn’t figure out if I liked it or not. The sleeves are approximately elbow length, which is not something I generally enjoy. The shape is also completely different to anything I normally wear. However, after living in it for a few days I decided that it was quite nice. I’m just not entirely sure if this will see much wear. There is a lot of fabric but short-ish sleeves so it won’t fit under a sweater but will it suit hot(ter) weather or not? Future will tell if it will escape the cupboard regularly.

Yellow Summer Coat

Making a light, bright summer coat that will hopefully protect against the rain.

I’ve wanted a thin but water and windproof summer jacket for a while now. I never really found the right fabric so it never really happened. But then I ruined my dinosaur coat with an ironing mishap and started looking for replacement dinosaur softshell fabric. On that same website (Takoy.nl), I discovered something called ‘summer softshell’. They told me that it was a light, breathable but waterproof fabric. I chose the mango yellow version. Since it was softshell, I also hoped it wouldn’t fray and I ordered enough to make the Susan jacket from Pattydoo again. This was the same pattern as I used for the original dinosaur coat.

This new jacket is not identical to the first coat that I made. For one, I decided to not include the zip-on hood. It’s now attached with only snaps which seems to be working fine. Since it would be a summer coat, I didn’t include the knit cuffs but I did include the sleeve adjusters. Third adaptation was to change the pockets. The reason the dinosaur coat died was because I tried to patch the pocket with an iron-on patch and then accidentally melted the zipper. I always wanted to stuff more into the pockets than they could realistically hold. I figured the solution for this was the create more space in the back of the pocket such that the front and back of the pocket weren’t exactly the same size; limited by the width of the center front coat panel. The back of the pocket now has a pleat on it so it can expand and not rip, hopefully. It seems to work so far.

Sewing this was quite smooth sailing. The fabric was very well behaved. I did use very thin pins because normal pins refused to go through. The only thing that really required unpicking was the bottom of the sleeves. In my infinite wisdom, I’d forgotten to read through the original post where I mentioned taking 3.5 cm of the bottom of the sleeves and these new ones were full length. I’d already put on the velcro for the sleeve adjusters all the way at the start, so that had to come off and be reattached 3.5 cm higher. I have now marked that change on the pattern just in case I sew it again. Since just yellow would make for a somewhat boring coat, I put in a contrast zipper. I then also added contrast binding the certain sections of the inside to make it a little more fun. I’ve worn this coat a fair few times now and it’s nice. We’ve been experiencing a little bit of a drought recently, so I haven’t tested it in heavy rain yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will hold up!

New Year’s Dyeing

Experimenting with yarn and different methods of heat setting, resulting in three different colourways!

After not sleeping enough with the fireworks still going for hours beyond midnight, completing the puzzle I started in 2021 and finishing up the last oliebol, I got to work on new years day. I’d been thinking about dyeing yarn all holiday week, and just.. didn’t get up to actually do it. I’d decided I wanted to try a few different things, oven dyeing, speckles and partial dip. I used three different yarns, all from World of Wool in the UK.

The one that I started with was some 56’s English Superwash Aran Weight, I have six skeins and decided to dye five of them. I kept one spare in case the sweater I want to make with this requires more than 5 skeins. I decided to try and oven dye some yellow and orange speckles citric acid speckles on it. The oven dyeing initially came from a blog post by Needles on the Move found here. The citric acid speckles from ChemKnits Tutorials on YouTube. I mixed soft yellow dye in a little pot with citric acid, and in another pot I mixed soft yellow dye and red dye with the citric acid. The yarn was put in a second hand roasting tin and the dye mixes sprinkled on top. Unfortunately, due to the water that needed to be added, this batch turned out a little bit runny, so the colours are not as defined as I would have liked them. Afterwards, I found a blogpost by The Impatient Dyer here, that talks about how to solve that problem.

I wasn’t going to wait for quite some time for the roasting pan to be free again to dye the other skeins, so I just used my dyeing pots for those. One has a steamer insert on which you can drape the yarn and then add the colour. The other has a steaming section for doing the same thing. These speckles turned out a bit clearer. You can maybe make out some small hue differences in the skeins that are hanging above. The two right most ones are more muted with speckles that were less clear.

The next type of yarn was sock weight, Merino Superwash / Bamboo Sock Weight. I decided to go for some blue and turquoise but with lots of white. The dye was mixed with citric acid, put onto the yarn and then the wool went into the steamer pans. I think it looks cute and I am looking forward to see what it looks like knit up into a project. In case that project will be socks, I ball them up into two ~50 gram balls that are still connected to each other, so that I know for sure how long my sock can be without running out of yarn.

This last yarn was an experiment. The base is Merino Superwash Sock Weight Singles. I wanted to dye a skein partly grey with some speckles of orange. So I dumped an amount of grey dye in the water and partly hung the skein in that dye water. The remainder of the skein was draped over a steamer inset and speckles were applied. Some grey with citric acid and to create the orange I mixed some red and yellow dyes in the citric acid.

When this skein was rolled into two ~50 gram balls, it changed the look a lot. The skein has a dark section whereas you can’t really see that in the balls. I’m really curious to see it knit up. To turn the yarn into balls, I use this weird contraption that I got from a secondhand store for 3.50 euro – maybe used for spinning? In combination with a small empty bottle to allow for a centre pull ball. While it takes forever to wind up over a kilometer of yarn, I was very happy once it was all completed. The yellow/orange yarn is already being knit up into a project that’s about 90% complete, so I hope to finish that soon. There are no intentions for the two sock weights as of yet.

Tag: Blue