Monthly Archives: March 2019

You are browsing the site archives by month.

box of socks, March edition

21/03/2019 6:49 pm \ 6 Comments \ Carolyn

I barely have time to scratch myself lately.. but did manage to produce my quota of socks for March, yay!!

I used a mystery ball of wool from A Homespun House, in a colourway named Peppermint Tea… now, I ask you, is this colour in ANY WAY AT ALL suggestive of peppermint tea? Like is there even the smallest hint in there somewhere… anywhere?!!! INEXPLICABLE!! I’m pretty sure this is going to be the very last ball of mystery wool I ever buy… anyway, naming head-scratchiness aside, I do rather love this neon lollypink colourway; it is very vividly pretty and and it’s going to be a fun one in winter. I jazzed up an otherwise plain sock with three rows of little fair isle hearts at the top; for these I used a few leftovers from my Advent-ure jumper, from the woolly advent calendar I bought from Dingo Dyeworks, here.

The sock pattern is my usual; from a 60s Patons pamphlet, and here is my super advanced and complicated pattern for the hearts. I cast on 60 stitches for my socks, and the pattern is a 10-stitch repeat, therefore each row is repeated six times across each row.

Because they are socks, and I don’t want to risk a toe getting caught in the fair isle yarn at the back when putting them on and pulling through a giant horrible loop of yarn – quelle horreur!! I wove the alternate colour in at the back for every single stitch. Which does make for a nice, neat and very tidy inside!

The current state of the box of socks …

Posted in: knitting \ Tagged: own design, Patons knitting book C11, socks

a cheerful dress

11/03/2019 3:47 pm \ 11 Comments \ Carolyn

New dress! And, how gorgeous is this cheerfully splashy fabric?!!! Ohmigosh, but I love it so much! You cannot possibly be sad whilst wearing this stuff. The very instant I saw it I was just like, YES. MUST HAVE.

SO! every year, my lovely friends give to me a Fabulous Fabric voucher for my birthday… and this year I treated myself to this truly lovely, fine, handkerchief linen, printed in a glorious array of golden mustard, tomato red, toxic-waste lime green, moody purple and a splash of tranquil turquoise thrown in too because sure why not? let’s just let alll the autumn-y colours join in the splashy fun! Not only are the colours absolutely luscious together, but the feel and weight of the fabric is quite perfectly and exquisitely summery. LOVE.

I didn’t actually use the actual voucher to buy this fabric, to be honest I used the real-life voucher to buy wedding dress lining, haha, as you do!! but I mentally made a note to myself that as soon as I saw something worthy I would spend the equivalent and that was going to be my birthday fabric. Confusing? Yes I know I know, hehe. Well I know what I mean anyway. Just very recently Fabulous Fabrics got in a fresh shipment, and I saw this, and knew it was The One.

The pattern is the Ariane dress, designed by C’est Moi Le Patron by Coralie Bijasson. The pattern is described as a gypsy style dress with shoulder princess seams, buttoned, with a gathered skirt & long sleeves with elastic in the hem. The instructions also include a note to insert piping in those princess seams, so obviously I did so like the obedient little seamster that I am. Well, I am the hugest of huge detail freaks so yeah. My piping looks black in these pictures, but actually it is a really deep navy, and the fabric is from a pair of Sam’s old work trousers. I’d previously used these same trousers to cut the lining for his and Cassie’s man D’s Christmas hats, blogged here.

Variations; the dress pattern doesn’t include pockets, so I added in some simple inseam pockets (my tutorial for adding inseam pockets here). The skirt is supposed to be gathered into the waist, and while I did initially do this it created some pouffiness that I decided I just did not need! so I unpicked that and instead pleated the extra width of the skirt into five tiny pleats on each side; just outside of the princess line of the bodice. Same for both front and back. I think that pleating/folding is a bit more age-appropriate than gathering… I can’t explain what I even mean by that! but maybe I mean it just feels a bit more “me”? Not that I even know what that means either, Anyway, I really like how this turned out!

The sleeves are long with elastic inserted in a hem. I love the sleeves, and especially pushed up to my elbow length like this.

Oh! the buttons! I almost forgot! SO, I’ve been covering buttons for Kelly’s wedding dress, 100, to be precise! Yes, 100, blinking, covered buttons. This took, HOURS.

But I absolutely adore how they look! and since I was using a particular colour fabric for the piping I thought it would be nice to have the same particular colour buttons for this project too… so I ordered some more of the 11mm buttons. I bought my buttons here. By the way; the “naked” buttons are actually silver, and for Kelly’s buttons, I’d covered a few experimentally and we thought the silver showed through the ivory fabric a little, giving the buttons a slightly grey tinge. SO I painstaking lined up all the bare silver buttons along bamboo skewer tracks and spray-painted them creamy-ivory before covering with our ivory crepe. The spray-paint I already had, leftover from when I made my Queen Rutela costume.

Spray painting the buttons is as fiddly as all get out and I’m not going to lie, actually quite a pain in the neck to do… but it does give some really good advantages. Number one, the silver doesn’t shine through a “porous” or very light coloured fabric, and secondly, and maybe even more importantly, spray paint makes the surface of the buttons a little “sticky” which is definitely a plus when you’re trying to put the buttons together. When I was covering the naked buttons, the fabric slipping and sliding about over the smooth shiny surface was driving me a little mad, and I really noticed a huge improvement with a grippier spray painted surface instead. So, while I didn’t really need to worry about silver showing through in this darker fabric, I did the spray painting gig again for these buttons too, simply for that grip factor.

So that’s it! I’m wearing the dress today.. and while I didn’t get a proper “out and about” picture of the dress, I did snap this… hehe, so silly I know, but I was randomly loving how the lovely floaty linen was rippling in the breeze. I’ll get a proper photo some other day because right now I am getting strrrrrapped for time!! to say the very least. In the meantime… it’s back to the wedding and bridesmaid’s dress for me! Panic stations!!

Details:

Dress; Ariane dress, designed by C’est Moi Le Patron by Coralie Bijasson in a floaty printed linen
Shoes; Zomp, from Zomp boutique

Posted in: knitting, Uncategorized \ Tagged: ariane dress, buttons, coral bijasson, daily outfit, dress

jasika blazer

02/03/2019 3:44 pm \ 22 Comments \ Carolyn

Remember in my 2018 end of year round-up I mentioned briefly I had made a Big Thing? Well this is it! A tailored blazer… this is the Jasika blazer, the newest design by Heather of Closet Case patterns.

Well, what a project! I really really enjoyed making this; sinking my teeth into my most involved and meaty project in ages! since I’d pretty much fallen into the lackadaisical habit of quick and easy “ordinary” things for quite a long time prior. I was very ready to take on something a bit more contemplative, careful and slow-fashion-y, and this was a really nice thing to ease back into that… I’m so glad Heather asked me to test for her again!

The Jasika blazer is described as a classic tailored jacket, made utilising modern speed tailoring techniques, with fusible interfacing and minimal hand-stitching, but rest assured, purists! there is still hand-stitching where it counts! And I do really appreciate that the process for making this blazer is nicely catering to the modern-day maker that still wants to sew timeless classics for themselves but might be time poor, and so might prefer to do as much by machine as possible.

Materials: I used a length of lovely raspberry-rusty silk/wool tweed given to me by my friend L when she cleaned out her garage, and it was perfect for the job! I love the luscious colour; I think it’s a good one for my colouring, and of course the texture is totally divine… I lined with black polyacetate lining fabric, another longterm resident from my stash; and mostly used the tailor-made (ha!) interfacing/notions package that Heather is stocking specifically for this project. This kit contains fusible woven and knit interfacing, horsehair canvas, padded sleeve heads and shoulder pads and cotton stay tape. Boy, but this is a really fab little kit too and I SO appreciated this! It’s not always that easy to get quality tailoring bits and pieces like this in Perth so it was just brilliant to have them at hand, to help me get a really nice finish to my blazer. Because you really want this to turn out as good as you can get it; a tailored blazer is quite the time-consuming project and it would be nice for the materials to be worthy of your time!

I dithered on whether to use my own label, or the Me-Made from Closet Case patterns. Cassie said why not use both, why not indeed…

I honestly can’t remember now whether I bought the perfectly matching button from Fabulous Fabrics or from Spotlight now. I scouted through both shops, and bought candidates from both shops too! so much agonising!… and now its provenance is lost in the hazy mists of time… I did really take my time with the buttonhole though, and made a mini double welt one, so as to match those pockets.

Oh! Pockets… I LOVE all the pockets in this blazer! I jammed every single one of them into my blazer, in order to test all the pocket options for the pattern of course! Not that I’m a complete pocket-whore or anything, o no! There are three; a single welt breast pocket, a double welt hip pocket, and a double welt with flap hip pocket. I’m actually toying with the idea of opening out the lining and adding an extra, internal welt pocket to the inside of the jacket too… but that will have to wait until I get a few more, ahem VIP’s; and by that I mean Very Important Projects, out of the way! #drowninginweddingsewing

We’re not supposed to reveal a project before the pattern’s been released, which is sometimes so hard to do… I did however sneakily wear the blazer out for real, once, one coolish day (below). Fortunately for me, it’s been quite summer-y and not conducive to blazer wearing, and I felt sorry for all the northern hemisphere testers who have no doubt been dying to wear their splendid new blazers! The pattern has been released just at the right time for us in the southern hemisphere, yay… how often does that happen? not very often! Though, it was 35C when I was taking all these photos… my husband thought I was bonkers putting on tights, boots, woolly top and blazer in this heat. I was like, but it’s a winter thing, I have to look the part, even if I’m legit dying! Aah, the things we do…

Not only did I thoroughly enjoy making my new blazer, I’m really quite proud of how it turned out, and am very much going to enjoy wearing it too. I might even be… dare I say it? looking forward to winter?? Going too far?? maybe!!