I’ve been trying to do bursts of short, 10 minute exercise every morning for a while now. I used to do it upstairs, but recently started watching tv in the living room at the same time. That meant that I wanted more shorts in case people would look in. YouTube was kind enough to show me an ad for exercise shorts that looked super fun, and I decided to look for a similar pattern. The Greenstyle Spark Tights seemed to be pretty close. After purchasing, printing and taping together, into the hoard I went. I returned with some yellow stretch fabric that would also make this suitable for roller derby as the team colours are yellow and black.
The pattern includes pockets, always essential if you ask me, a seamless front, three different length options for the legs and multiple options for the waistband. These yellow sparks were made in bicycle length. Cutting was pretty easy and fairly economical, you don’t need a lot of fabric for these tights. I sewed them together on my treadle with a slight zigzag stitch and did the hemming with a twin needle. I don’t have yellow serger thread and this seemed to work just fine when you stretch the fabric enough while sewing.
Pockets can hold a phoneThe gusset constructionTwin stitched hems
The pattern requires fabric with a lot of stretch (75% horizontal and 50% vertical), which makes it possible to skip elastics. I chose to make the high rise waistband (not the super contoured option) and removed about a cm from the top edge because it wanted to bunch when it was that little bit higher. The waistband is the same fabric as the rest of the shorts but they stay up really well. I’ve been wearing these every morning for the last week or so and I’m enjoying them a lot. Since they were so quick, I immediately cut out a second pair but this time with built in skirt. That’ll be up soon too.
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.
Blues on the inside
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.
Hood snapsArm adjusterPleated pocket
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!
The dyeing is just the first step, the next couple of thousands are knitting stitches and the end result is a pizza sweater.
After the New Year’s dyeing, I needed to use those freshly coloured skeins for a new project. I looked around Ravelry and discovered the Faverolle by Cirilia Rose that looked very interesting. This project by swhill80 was especially enamouring to me. So I set out to create something similar, if you want to read some of the ‘real time’ notes, the project is here. I showed the start of the project to a colleague of mine and she said it reminded her of pizza, so Pizza Sweater it is.
After casting on, I ran into difficulty with the thing being way and way too big. Took out some of the knitting but left the ribbing and started figuring out how to make this thing my size. This lead to the creation of a large spreadsheet that has just about every row in the project listed and the instructions recalculated. Following the spreadsheet worked well and knitting the body of the project was actually very quick. I got stuck a little with the sleeves due to lack of motivation and then got really bored knitting the collar insert. I did eventually get myself back in gear and once it got going, the collar was also easily completed.
The project has a saddle shoulder, which is not something I’ve ever done before but I quite like the way it turned out. What you might also notice is that there are two definite colour groups in the sweater. The sleeves and the collar inserts are more pink in hue while the body is definitely more yellow. This is to do with the different dye processes I used and I’ll definitely keep those results in mind when I dye again.
In the end, I do like this sweater and we will see how much use it gets. I’m not sure if the yarn might be a bit too scratchy or if it will be fine. The fact that the collar is relatively high is a plus because it should be nice and warm. I do think that I probably could have made it just a bit bigger than it turned out now, but my gauge apparently shifted throughout the project so it turned out a little tighter than expected. Luckily it is a knit and they are stretchy so it is probably not going to be a problem. I hope that finishing this project today will also spur me on to finish some of the projects that have languished in the box of shame… On to the future!
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.
Little humans slowly grow up, and one I know had a birthday in January. As usual, I wanted to make a thing. I’d decided on a play mat of some sort, preferably with a road grid on it, so that cars could race along. After weeks of scouring the fabric shops online for a fabric that had good, wide roads on it, I decided that it was impossible. So I went back to one of the fabric shops I’ve frequented the last few months that sells coupons (shorter lengths of pre-cut fabrics that are generally leftovers) because I’d been in love with a cactus printed linen for the longest time. There were some other fabrics that really tickled my fancy. A geometric pattern on some ochre cotton, smaller cacti on ochre, dinosaurs with umbrellas etc. (I may have developed an ochre obsession at one point).
The playmat was going to have both of the cactus prints, one for the ‘front’ and one for the ‘back’. There was also some dark blue cotton that I bought for the drawstring casing. You see, I found this Toy Bag & Play Mat tutorial by Fabric Mill, which I decided to almost entirely disregard, but I liked the standing edge on the drawstring casing a lot. I did want a contrasting one so that it was clear where the edge was.
Once the fabrics arrived in my house and were laundered, I set out to make a play mat/bag. I cut out the largest circle possible from both of the fabrics. Then layered them with some quilt batting and sewed lines every 10 cm in a grid pattern to keep the fabrics together. This was quite the ordeal but I did manage to make the entire thing in a day, so I guess it wasn’t too awful. After that, it was trimmed to size, the edge sewn and zigzagged down. Then the casing was added, this was the most annoying part of the entire project. I cut it 7.5 cm wide as per the instructions, which was not wide enough for my version because my seam allowance was larger. So I ended up cutting more strips and attaching them, having to unpick at least 8 sections because I sewed over folds in the first strip. Very frustrating. Once it was finally all attached correctly, it was sewed down and then the edge was closed. I didn’t have a cord, but the last bit of the project: ‘adding a cord and sewing a closure’ was only a few minute job so I’m counting it as a one day project.
That elation that you feel when you complete a 3 1/4 year long project and end up with a lovely night sky sweater.
I cast on my starry night sweater on the 22nd of May (2021) and finished it today! So about three months of intermittent knitting and a rush dye job in the middle and the project that got conceived in 2018 (backstory here) is finally done! Must say that it feels very rewarding to complete something that has been on the ‘to make’ list for such a long time.
So many pretty stars
Still hate set in sleeves
The pattern I chose was the Holly by Anna Bell, which is out of print but can still be found on the internet archive. I chose to deviate from the original a little, mainly in the length and amount of stitches. My gauge was wrong so I recalculated certain bits to fit better with the gauge I was achieving. I started with the front and back at the same time so I could be sure they were of equal lengths. When both the front and the back had a complete ball in them, I started on the sleeves. To my surprise those also took a complete ball each. Cue some ‘waiting for another skein to be delivered’ (so frustrating) as I wasn’t sure I could make both the top of the front and the back and the neckline with the one ball and change I had left.
The button
Leftovers, slightly less than a ball
I seem to have made it quite curvy
Turns out that that was a good choice because by the end I had 97 gram leftover. I’d have lost yarn chicken if I tried it. Waiting for the yarn to arrive when the sweater had been completely done would have been worse than in the middle of the project as it was now. I added a button to the neckline because it matched the yellow in my yarn. I think I probably added a little too much yellow while dyeing the yarn to achieve the exact effect I was going for, but I still really like the result and so far it’s been nice to wear for this afternoon. I think it will be a success!
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.
The first step of the journey to make a night sky on my body with yarn.
Ever since May 2018 when I saw the image below on the new Facebook page of a knitting shop that was to open in Vlissingen, I’ve been obsessed with recreating this. While I would have loved to support the shop, the colourway that they had of this was very blue and not very night-y, so I decided to wait until the next dye-run was completed. However, before I could get my greedy mitts on it, the shop sadly closed in 2019.
Months of feverish Etsy-searching on, and nothing would come remotely close to what I dreamed would be my starry sweater. Several times over the years, I went into the Etsy and google searches looking for my perfect starry night yarn. Then I decided to just take the plunge and order yarn and stuff for dyeing. I filled my online basket, got scared and deleted it all again. Cue several repeats of that too. Then came lockdown, and two months in (May 2020) I decided to give myself permission to actually spend the money and buy the things.
Type of Yarn
The Dyeing Cupboard
So off I went to worldofwool.co.uk and got myself 5 skeins of Cheviot Superwash Aran, Eurolana dyes, some other random single skeins and a drop spindle kit (potentially more on that.. in the distant future). Once the lockdown was eased a little, I went on several haunts to the local second hand shop and got some pans, stirring things, and eventually a steamer – very good bargain there. I’d read that you really shouldn’t use the pans for dyeing for food so separate everything was needed. Hence also the creation of the Dyeing Cupboard. And then all the equipment sat on the Dyeing Shelf, sat some more, and sat some more. Until the very final day of my Winter holiday, i.e. last Sunday, when I decided I was going to Do. The. Thing. Today.
Samples
Daylight – Colours seem more muted here
I used these instructions and set out to dye some test bits of yarn. That seemed to go well enough, so after some more general being scared, I actually dyed my first skein. I figured that the final result would only be visible after drying and I wasn’t going to wait for that, so I did all five that afternoon. I used yellow, navy and blue to create a sort of variegated night sky with somewhat random bits of yellow.
All my nicely dyed skeins
With their handy tie-rip handles
Since I quite enjoyed the process of puttering about with dye and yarn, I bought myself some more skeins this last week and hope to get some more funky yarn dyed in the future. As for knitting this up into that perfect sweater, that’s going to have to wait until I’ve finished my current ‘fallen leaves’ sweater. I’ve just divided the body stitches from the sleeve stitches after the yoke, so there’s been some progress?
After two years, there will finally be more plaid clashing in my wardrobe!
My Ravelry notes say that I started this project on July 16, 2018 *gulp*. Whoops, that was quite a while ago. There were lots of delays along the way. Some had to do with my arm injury that was preventing me from knitting as much as I liked. Others were because of pure laziness, to be honest. On to the story..
Front
Back
So I used another free pattern from Ravelry: Seattle by Leah Swindon. From reading my Ravelry notes, I didn’t completely follow the pattern. I don’t remember much because the knitting was completed a good long while ago. I do remember that I made a significant colour change and that was too also add the yellow horizontal stripe along the body and not just the sleeves. I apparently stopped knitting some time between 2018 and May 2019 when I noted something about restarting the sleeves. Then the project remained in a bin for about another year. You see, with adding in those yellow stripes, it meant that I had so many ends to bind off. I don’t like binding off ends, so I procrastinated for a very long while.
When my mom came to visit, I showed her this knitting project and a few others that are also still languishing in bags, boxes or bins. She said that she would be willing to bind off the ends if I put the sweater together. So I took that challenge and sewed the thing together, since all the pieces had been completed ages ago already. She then set to binding it all off and I got my finished sweater on August 29, 2020, over two years since starting the project. Not going to lie, I’m very happy that it now gets to take up space in my closet and no longer in my unfinished projects pile.
Inside out
Inside out
I don’t own that many plaid that can fill the sweater role. So I’m very happy to add this to my wardrobe and see if I can plaid clash some more in my life. I like the spiral on the front and that was fun to knit. Trying to figure out how to get the yellow across the spiral wasn’t the easiest, but I think it worked out. This sweater is also remarkably warm, so it’s probably going to be in use this fall/winter. I’m looking forward to it!
Making a little stuffed kraken that turned out more adorable than angry.
Way back when I purchased the dragon backpack pattern from CholyKnight, I also got a pattern for a Kraken plush and an Octopus/Animal plush. On Friday, I finally decided to make the adorable little Kraken.
I’d already purchased some dotted minky while getting the dragon fabrics precisely for the purpose of making something octopus-related. I thought the dots could perfectly represent suckers. So I got my grey fabric and some of the yellow dotted stuff and set out to make a Kraken with ‘angry eyes’. When I sent a picture of the finished plush to a friend of mine, he immediately suggested to name him ‘Brian’. Or even better, ‘Brian the bigbrained bracken’ [sic]. He also told me that mine is a little more derpy than the original, with which I totally agree. The pattern does not specify placement for the angry eyes so I sort of.. guessed based on where the regular eyes were positioned. Turns out that I put them a little too close together and now he looks derpy instead of angry.
He’s still magnificent and really soft. The eyes and spots are made of felt and stuck on with some vliesofix. Then I handstitched around them to secure in place permanently. The handstitching was done in a few hours while watching/listening to some old climbing competitions on YouTube, very relaxing. I may need to make another Kraken because I have some more dotted stuff hanging out in my fabric hoard.
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