Red – Page 3 – Hopefully Creative

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.

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.

Cycling Bloomers

Bicycle bloomers for the fashionable young lady, with anachronistic blue on the inside.

While making the cycling skirt, I also came across a free pattern for Cycling Bloomers from Bikes & Bloomers. I figured I needed one of those in my life too. So I googled around the internet for helpful blogposts, much thanks With My Hands Dream for all the helpful pictures. I then printed my pattern and got to work. I used the leftovers from the red graduation dress. Since this fabric frays quite a bit, I wanted to bind all edges. So I got the light blue leftovers from the animals quilt and cut those into more strips to bind the edges. I also used some bigger pieces to make the pockets. There is a little blue in the fabric, so I say it fits. It might be somewhat anachronistic, but I don’t really care.

The project came together easily, mostly. While there were no instructions, I managed to figure out the order of construction without too much difficulty. My pocket pieces did turn out to be the right size, where they were off for WMHD. I’d finished nearly all of it and then I had to make the button holes. This, as almost always, took me weeks to get round, because I just didn’t feel like doing it. In the end though, I did manage to get myself motivated to finish the thing.

I really like the details of this pattern. The dip in the waistline, the buckle there to tighten it if needs be. The four button closure on the sides and the buttons on the cuffs. There were supposed to be three buttons on the cuffs, but my buttons were to big. I had already put three loops in, but I just tucked on inside, no one will know. The pockets are nice and deep and I did a short test drive on my bike, and I can definitely cycle in them. (Mission Accomplished!)

There is a teeny tiny bit of this fabric left, but I haven’t a clue what I could possibly do with that but maybe I can squeeze some hat pieces out? Anyway, I like the pattern so much that I’m thinking about making it a full length pair of trousers. Perhaps without the buttonholes and just a zip. We’ll see where that ends up on the list of projects I still want to make. Even though I keep making things, that list doesn’t seem to get any shorter. I wonder why…

T-rex Hat

A little knitted Christmas hat!

Just to give you some joy this Christmas, I recently made a hat for my Tyrannosaurus Rex. Here he is, just ambling along with his slight preference for going left. He’s got a turning circle of about 2 meters. There’s no pattern to the hat, just increased from six red stitches until it was wide enough and then added in a few rows of white fluffy stuff. I also made a tiny pompom for the top. I get a lot of joy from this little thing.

*If you click the dinosaur, he’ll open up a YouTube window and walk around with his little hat!*

Enjoy your Christmas if you celebrate!

Head to Toad

Dressing head to toe in red with white dots is going to be a staple around here.

So I was on the market two weeks ago, and saw a sign saying 2€/m on a bolt of fabric. The fabric had a white fluffy back and the front was red with white-ish dots. The market lady explained that some of the dots had red dye running in, so that’s why it was so cheap. I decided that I didn’t care too much and got myself two yards. Two laundry cycles and several bright red colour catchers later and I got to work. I’d decided that I wanted to make a sweater, so I layed out my Frankensteined pattern and found I had a lot left. Then I decided that I would try to see if I could also get some pants out of the fabric and create the ultimate stay-at-home-outfit.

Three hours later I had figured out a way to get all my pattern pieces bar one neatly onto the fabric. The patterns included pattern 44 from Simplicity Naaimode 24, aka Simplicity 1165, which I cannot figure out if I ever made before but I had it drawn out in my pattern stash. I excluded the waistband for that one. For the sweater, the shortened version of Lekala 4742 (flamingo-style here) and the hood from the Nelly sweater by Pattydoo. Only the hood-front needed to be pieced. I approached it in a similar manner as when I pieced the hood for the dinosaur coat. After finishing the pants, I learned that there was excess at the bottom and I might have been able to fit all the pieces on normally if I’d shortened the legs by 4 cm, ah well, live and learn.

Anyway, the first time I made Lekala 4742, here, the hood could fit at least two of my head in it. I didn’t feel like repatterning the entire thing so I stole the hood from a sweater I had been working on before; Nelly. I put the Nelly neckline on the Lekala pattern and adjusted it that way. This worked out wonderfully. Originally, the Nelly hood is supposed to have a lining, but I liked the fluffy white of mine so I just made a facing. I took the sweater in along the sides. And to combat hemming, I added a cuff to the arms and the bottom.

Then onto the pants, just sewed them up as I would normally. Then put them on and could fit a second human in the back. So I resewed the crotch seam, see the red line in my wonderful paint image for some potential clarification (?). In total, I took out 8 cm on either side of the center back. Then I added a waistband of the same cuff material as the sweater, threaded some elastic through it, hemmed the legs and called it a day.

I titled this post Head to Toad, that’s because I had planned to have this thing done for halloween and just be a mushroom for the day. That clearly failed as I finished it exactly a week later. However, when I was telling my colleagues about the plan, and showed them the mostly finished sweater, one told me I looked like Toad – now, this is not completely correct. The other one said I would be Head to Toe(d) in this mushroom suit. I thought the pun was too brilliant to pass up, so Head to Toad it is! I’ve been wearing the finished thing for the past 2 hours now, and I love it. I shall be a mushroom for many weekend days to come!

No such thing as too much red and white, right?!

Replacement Red Dungarees

Sometimes letting go of something old is only possible when you already have the perfect replacement. Hence these improved dungarees!

I absolutely loved these red dungarees that I made in 2014. Sadly, they haven’t seen a ton of wair, mainly because the fit was just that little bit off. However, because I was so fond of them, I decided that I NEEDED another pair (or a replacement pair, really). Off to the second-hand shop I went, where I managed to find a piece of red fabric by pure coincidence. I’m not sure how or why, but it worked out perfectly!

This time around, I chose a different pattern, now from a Knipmode magazine (Knipmode 7/2009 pattern 113, shorts). The original was shorts with turned hems, so I added the bib-front and the straps to make them similar to the original red item. Next to that, I made sure to create a space for buttons to close the sides. The zipper on the original just wasn’t very nice. I also changed the front pocket a little – I had some scraps leftover so I pieced the pocket together. I think it looks nice and more fun.

Once I had the pants nearly all the way finished, I needed to decide on some buttons for the sides. In the end, I chickened out and chose to go with my all-time favourite, black snaps. Easy, breezy, beautiful snaps. For the straps, I bought some black clip on things, I wanted them to be black and these were the ones I found. Then I needed to attach those things and didn’t really know how. So back to the trusty favourite I went, snap-time!

I have worn it during the hot summer and I enjoy it very much. So much, that I wanted to make another item to wear with it, but that’s for another day. By now, I’ve relegated the original to the ‘bag-that-needs-to-go-to-the-second-hand-shop’, and am happily trying to find occasions to wear these replacements. The one small issue I have with the pattern is that I think that the back pockets are a little too high. But if that’s the most pressing problem, then I can definitely live with that.

Taking a Dragon on a Walk

Now that I’m working from home, I need to see more friends on a daily basis. So I decided to make a friend who wouldn’t be influenced by quarantine. I bought the dragon backpack pattern from CholyKnight in December and never dared to actually start. It took until the stay-home-order and throwing the budget out the window to get going.

Getting the fabric was the biggest mental hurdle. Initially I wanted minky, which was what the pattern make advised. However, I was only able to find flat minky in Chinese webshops and not in any local-ish ones. There was some that had raised bumps, and I didn’t think a bumpy dragon would look good. In the end, I settled on something called wellness fleece and got a meter each of bright red, dark grey and black. Where the colours would go was to be the next hurdle. After some deliberation, the back was going to be grey, the belly red and the nails and horns black.

The pattern pieces were taped and cut from the fabric. My floor was COMPLETELY covered in fluff. Fluff everywhere. I only made two changes to the pattern and the first was to change the shape of the wings. There are four types of wings included in the pattern but none of them tickled my fancy. So I googled toothless wings and drafted a pattern based on that. I also decided that I wanted the wing-spine to be a different colour, so I cut that and figured out the order of operations. I was amazed that my sewing machine managed to get through 6 layers of fleece and a layer of foam.

I didn’t have many problems when sewing this new friend, although there were some. According to the pattern, an ‘advanced skill’ was to install a hidden tail pocket with an invisible zipper. This posed no problems. For some reason however, just basting on the bottom straps was the thing I had to rip out multiple times. Very frustrating.

The second change I made was to change the straps. The original pattern includes straps that are just webbing, but that isn’t very comfortable if you ask me. Therefore, I decided to draft some curved straps, based on the straps on my larp backpack. I even used the same fabric as I used for the bottom of those straps. The plan was originally to use back webbing and strap adjusters, but the local sewing shop only had 2 cm and 3 cm wide webbing and 2.5 cm adjusters so that wasn’t going to work. I was very happy to find 2.5 cm wide red webbing in some deep dark recesses of my hoard. That was sewn on top of the straps with some dense zigzag.

Finally, I managed to put the remainer of my new friend together – taking some extra care around the straps to make sure they weren’t sewn into the seam. Cursing a little here and there when there were lots of layers and finally handsewing the last details in place. Once he was done, I took him on an outing to the supermarket to show him life outside my house. He’s probably going to be quite useful since his main pocket is quite large, I can fit most of my underarm in there.

So far, he’s wonderful and I hope that I can show him around to more people.

Pocket Coatigan

Recently, I discovered that some of my all time favourite yarns was brought back into production. The Tweed yarn by Zeeman had returned! I’ve used it in the past for classics such as the leaves sweater, the striped sweater, the eighties revival sweater and the eyelet sweater. Once I brought back a bunch of yarn in three different colours, I discovered that the yardage per 100 grams was less than the original. I also determined that the red yarn I bought was exactly the same the eyelet sweater…

Once I’d discovered this, I still set out knitting a red top. The first try was using a pattern called Gardner by Amanda Keep Williams. While I did like the idea of this sweater, I got about halfway when I decided that I didn’t like it nearly enough. I don’t tend to wear cropped anything, so it was a bad choice to start with. So I frogged the whole thing and set out on search for another pattern. I ended up with the pocket coatigan by Originally Lovely, a free pattern available on their site.

According to my Ravelry notes, I set out knitting the coatigan on the 25th of January. That means it’s taken me a little over a month to finish. Quite decent if I say so myself. The knitting is straightforward. I made a few small changes along the way. There were a few extra decreases in the sides to attempt some shaping (not sure if that helped at all), and somehow my stitch count at the neck edge was off. I’m unsure how it’s possible to knit the size S with the stitch counts they give, because they don’t add up according to my math, but perhaps I’m wrong. So I winged the neckline a little.

I haven’t worn it out yet, nor have I done any blocking (not that I’m planning on doing that anyway), so I’m unsure how this will hold up. The sleeves are a little long, but that’s because this yarn tends to shrink on me lengthwise, which means that practically none of my Tweed sweaters have arms that are over bracelet length. It does have pockets, which admittedly were the main attraction for me. Now I just need to see if I will voluntary pick a sweater from my cupboard that doesn’t closes, if not, I may still add some form of closure to make it more wearable. But yay! I finished a thing!

Graduation in Red

For last week’s graduation ceremony, I tried something new. I’d found a picture on Pinterest, links below, that I really liked. So I set out to recreate it. I didn’t want to use grey plaid from my hoard, so I chose something completely different. A red fabric with specks of different colours, including some light blue.

So, I set out to create something resembling the pictures. Since I knew that the top and sleeves needed to fit and the rest could be loose, I chose to use the top of the bodice up to the armholes and heavily altered sleeves of the Garden Party dress. Then I just extended the side seams out to create a giant tent shape. I added some pockets, because a dress without pockets is just a torture device, and cut out light blue leather strips. The fabric itched, so I added a brown lining for the sleeves up to the waist. The lining was the original Garden Party bodice, but now with the darts sewn as shallow pleats.

Once the dress was sewn up, I needed to get the leather strips on. In some long forgotten days, I apparently purchased 10 ‘book screws'(?), that seemed to work quite nice. I used a series of needles and knitting needles to make holes in the dress big enough for the screw to go through and then added the leather strips on. The pleats on the arms are not sewn down at all, and the ones on the waist are only tacked on the front. To make it easier to get in and out of, I found some leather laces to thread through the zipper. And that was that!

I did get some compliments on the day, so that was nice. I do want to wash it, but I’m not sure how the leather and screws will hold up, so we’ll see how that went in about an hour..

Red Coat

At some point in the past, I bought between 4 and 5 meters of some thick red fabric. Vaguely wool-esque, but probably mostly poly-something. I’d planned to make a coat out of it, and some time in November, I finally started on the project.

I found the pattern in Knipmode 9-2019, pattern 15 – Robe Manteau. It was never going to be that simple though. Changes and alterations would be needed. First, it was going to be shorter than the original pattern, mainly because I’m short. Next, the neckline was going to be altered dramatically, because I’m always cold and therefore having such an open neck was not an option. I settled on this type of neckline, and used the scale model to figure out how to make my own collar. Cue pieces of paper stuck to other pieces and pins everywhere! I also wanted a hood and stole the pattern from Simplicity Naaimode 14 model 51 (also known as Simplicity 2056) but reduced in height.

It took me forever to decide on all of this, and then I started with an old tablecloth to see if the pattern even fit me. It did, mostly. The only change to the original was in the back center seam, where I took out a lot at the top and added some in around the waist; and reduced the length of course. Then I started cutting out the outside and the waterproof and stitched them together around the outsides on almost all pieces. The only ones where I varied that were the center fronts, where I didn’t want to have 5 million layers, so I settled on using the waterproof as lining, and the pocket flaps.

The pockets are lined with the super soft white plaid fabric used for poppys. That was the start of the project. Then loads of pushing really heavy fabric through my sewing machine to sew the outside together. Once the outside was complete (apart from the hem), I needed to puzzle the lining together. The lining was an off-cut of fabric with white flowers, teal and red. There were practically no left-overs once I finished cutting out the lining.

The lining was hand sewn in because it was just easier than trying to wrangle 26 kilos of fabric under my machine (perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but you get the drift). The zipper is two way, the hood can be detached with another zipper and it’s got elastic pulls. I’m quite fond of it, even though it started pilling about 10 seconds after I first put it on. We’ll see how damaged it gets over the course of this winter. The fun thing about a new coat is that I have an excuse to make new hats and scarves, so expect some black knitting in my future.

Christmas Knit Gifts

This post was written a while ago, but the post has made me wait until one of the gifts arrived in New Zealand, that took a while..

Poinsettia

When I was making and sending my Christmas cards, I wanted to include a little gift for a friend of mine who is currently in New Zealand. She’s bought poinsettias for the past few years and managed to keep them alive through to July or so, so I decided to make one for her to see if the Christmas spirit transfer. Sadly my card hadn’t arrived yet by Christmas, so I don’t know if it worked.

The free pattern for this little flower was found on Ravelry – it’s the knitted poinsettia by June Gilbank. It has you make six large green leaves, six smaller red leaves and some yellow stem bits. I ignored the stem bits and chose to do some french knots instead. This was a very quick knit and quite easy to put together. I liked the way she finished the back with a knot and very limited weaving of ends.

Friend of the Forest hood

The second gift was a hood – the friend of the forest hood by Gretchen Tracy. I’d been wanting to knit a hood like this for a while now and when I found some lovely ‘printed yarn’ (?), I decided to go for it. However, I was also making a very red coat at the time. I wouldn’t be able to wear this hood with it because it would clash something horrible. So I decided to gift the hood to a colleague who enjoys these types of fall colours.

It knit up real easy and quick. I still have the last two colours of the ball left (grey and some more purple) and another ball but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. So I guess that’ll be a story for another day.

Tag: Red