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Light and Scrunchy

I love the Alchemy Silken Straw swatch. It is very light and very drapey, but it has a little bit of a scrunchy sproing to it. Many silk yarns knit to a fabric that is smooth and drapey and clings to the body in a heavy way, even if the fabric itself is light, much the way a silk charmeuse clings and drapes. But this knitted fabric is different. It is drapey and fluid, but I don’t think it would cling, it stands away slightly, perhaps the way a crisp cool percale sheet flows over the body but also stands away a little bit. It has a scrunchy feel, but it is also light and airy. It reminds me more of a very light silk dupioni that has been washed so it has lost some of its stiff dupioni crispness, but still retains a memory of its crisp character with more drape.

I think I will love the garments knitted with this yarn, and I am always thinking of light crisp-lacy garments, it would make a truly sumptuous light nightie, perhaps even a delicate shawl, crisp and light all at once. And yes, I am going to swatch that Shirley Paden pattern as well.

August 25, 2007
Heavy Lifting

I’m still here, although I have yet to find much time for sewing.

Now that G has been given the all-clear, I decided that is well past time that I started whipping myself back in shape. And so I have been at the gym every day the past week (or at the physical therapists — I am not yet up to gym and PT in one day). 6 days and 9 hours of exercise later I can definitely say that I am more exhausted than I can imagine, but I also have less back pain, and less sciatica. Yeah for me. I also think my pants are a little looser in the waist, but I think that is more due to wishful thinking than any actual visible benefit of exercise at this point, unless I am just too tired to lift my fork to my mouth.

Going to the post office on the way home from the gym has also been a challenge this week as the September fashion magazines are rolling in:

The vogue is so heavy I have to have it flat on a table to look through it. To think I had hopes of reading it on the exercise bicycle. Ha. I would have to use both hands just to hold it and would have to stop and put it down to turn a page — not good for exercise.

So my progress through these wish books is slow. That is good, because I think I also need to take my sewing slowly, with a plan. I need to sew what I am going to wear now, not what I hope to wear later in the fall, so that leaves plenty of time for perusing the mags and dreaming.

But what is that plan? I have no idea. I only know I am sick of the few clothes I have been wearing and am ready to dress again. But in what? I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out, because at this point I don’t even have energy to figure out what clothes I have much less what I might need.

As to these magazines, I am still working my way through the 4 buckets of mail I picked up from the post office after I returned from a trip of a mere week’s duration. I don’t think I have ever gotten that much mail in a week in my life….and at this point I only hope that I get caught up before I go away again.

August 24, 2007
Purple

Gray: Damp, dark, dank, dreary. These are the words that come to mind recently as the weather turned cool and rainy. The house is dark. It is none too thrilling outside either. Although it has been cool and damp all week, the temperature barely topping 70 degrees, today is much hotter, 81 degrees at 11 AM. , hotter yet before the end of the day. Still there is no sun. We have traded cool damp and dreary for hot, heavy and sodden and still gray. For the first morning this week there is no fog, but the air remains thick. The house remains dark.

Is it any wonder that my urge to knit a pretty, frilly, white piece of froth has fallen by the wayside. My thoughts have been on Fall knitting all week, although today’s heavy heat reminds me that it will be some time before wools are inviting against the skin.

If only knitting Passel would insure the return of hot sunny days frolicking among the flowers. I want to knit it. I want to wear it. I dream of wearing the feminine white sweater with white pants in the bright sunshine. Here we are, heading into September and I still crave white, white and bright colors.

As I headed out for Thursday Knitting I was primed for distraction.

Enter a new shipment of Alchemy Silken Straw: The colors were absolutely stunning. I wanted to grab them all and run off with them, hording them flike precious gems filled with life-giving brightness, saving them up to illuminate future somber darkness-filled days. The texture intrigued. I had no mental reference points for how this would knit. What kind of fabric would it produce? Obviously there would be some crispness there, but would the silk soften? Would it produce a soft draping fabric or a scrunchy crisp drape?

I indulged in a skein just to play. I decided to knit a swatch and wash it to see what kind of fabric is produced. It is not an inexpensive yarn. $28 to produce a swatch may be expensive to one way of thinking, but it is cheaper than a symphony ticket, and probably provides far more hours of entertainment. One skein is also much easier on the pocketbook than many skeins which prove to be wrong for the intended project.

I didn’t have the right size of needle with me, so I ended up buying size 3 bamboo needles. The yarn calls for size 4 US, and I knit loosely so 3 seemed like a good starting point.

It was a mistake. I had difficulty casting on the yarn. My gauge was inconsistent. Splits were a big problem. As soon as I came home and switched to metal needles all went smoothly again. As you can see in the photo, everything got much smoother when I switched from bamboo (at the bottom of the swatch on the right). The splitting problem also went away. I wonder if I can return them — after I only used them a few hours in the shop.

I often find that I am much more likely to split a yarn when using bamboo than when using metal needles. Even though I am a loose knitter, and I might think that my gauge would be looser on metal than on wood, I find that the opposite is true. I struggle less with the yarn on the metal and therefore I am more consistent.

I am not far along yet. I don’t know how the swatch will be affected by washing, but already the yarn is softer than it appeared in the skein. I am starting to dream of lacy knitted things and lovely little camisoles and tanks. This morning I looked up the Shirley Paden pattern in the summer Interweave knits. That is another possibility. Ah, knitting dreams. I don’t need more yarn or more pending projects, but my dreams are not hampered by such practical considerations.

But for now, this scrunchy little bit of purple silk is making me very happy.
New yarn had arrived at Yarn Central when we gathered for knitting last night.

August 24, 2007
A Birthday Sweater

This is the project I was primarily working on during our trip too and from Knoxville, but not while we actually were in Knoxville, for obvious reasons. Owen’s first birthday is slightly less than a month away and I decided that he needs a new birthday sweater. It might actually be a little large on him. Different designers and different pattern companies seem to have different interpretations of what "1 year" means as a size for children’s clothes, but it will fit him soon enough.

I actually began this last fall, shortly after his birth, but grew frustrated as it became evident that Owen was not really going to wear the baby sweaters I had already knitted although perhaps there is still hope as the sweater his parents liked best was a bit big and is only now the right size for Owen to wear.

So I had only knit about an inch or two of one piece of this sweater before I abandoned it. This summer I reconsidered my selfish motives and decided to knit it anyway. The pattern is from Mission Falls, as is the yarn. I don’t really know which book — I was working from a coffee stained photocopy and leftover yarn, from another sweater or two I knit years ago when some friends were having babies and grandbabies.

I’ve already been told that little boys don’t wear purple and I should have chosen different colors. It doesn’t scream "little girl" to me, it doesn’t strike me as being particularly for any gender, but this whole gender-specific color thing is a little beyond me anyway. It looks like a box of crayons to me but I am really no expert on children’s clothes. Although Owen is starting to form opinions on many things, I don’t think the colors of his sweaters is one of them, so I’ll just hope for the best.

August 19, 2007
Sew Stylish Dreams

¿ ¿Sewing time, what’s that.?? Just finding time to write seems to be a struggle this week.

Thursday night I met a friend at the local Barnes and Noble for what was billed as an evening of knitting but actually ended up being an evening of browsing through knitting and sewing books, drinking coffee, and talking up a storm. Not a bad way to spend an evening at all.

When I walked in to the store, I saw the new Sew Stylish magazine and quickly grabbed it before heading up the escalator. After that, I kind of flipped through it here and there between fits of talking and giggling, put it down on a shelf while I looked at crochet books and proceeded to forget all about it until I was leaving the store. Then I had to go back in and buy a copy. Of course I am glad I did because I have been hauling it around with me ever since, flipping through the pages, looking at the articles and the ideas and just generally getting a major sewing inspiration hit.

Generally I have been very interested in this magazine even though I did not subscribe to it, although I would have eventually. I cannot be convinced that my failure to subscribe has lead to its demise, barely before it got started, because I have been down this road too many times with magazines from Taunton Press. I have been charter subscribers to most of their new magazines, loved them, and have been sorely disappointed when they cease publication and my subscription is applied to one of my other Taunton subscriptions (like Threads, my subscription to which I believe is due to expire in something like 2011).

But enough grousing…back to the magazine. There are a lot of good tips and ideas in this magazine and more than just a compendium of ideas and tips, I like the way they have tied all this information together by building a collection of garments based on one pattern; Simplicity 3631:

I am actually rather impressed with the things they have turned out of this with this pattern, and if you haven’t looked at this magazine, I think you should. I would have loved something like this when I was learning to sew because it ties ideas for actual garments that I could sew now in with all kinds of useful information that I would otherwise have to search for in a bunch of different books without much confidence if I was doing the right thing when applying it to the garment I was trying to make.

This pattern is on my "to buy" list, even though I was not particularly thrilled with it when I first saw it on the website. There was a pretty interesting discussion about it over at Stitcher’s Guild but I wasn’t really convinced about it until I started looking at some fall inspiration garments and thinking about a few things I wanted to make, including my plans for making something inspired by that Anthropologie embroidered baby-doll top that will be neither baby-doll nor a top by the time I am done with it. Unfortunately this pattern was not yet in stock last time I was in my local JoAnn Fabrics before I left for Knoxville. I continue to hope that the pattern drawers will be restocked soon.

August 18, 2007
Fall Rowan

Suffice it to say that Passel did not progress as far as hoped during our trip to Knoxville. Not that all that driving time was wasted: 800 miles each way allows for much knitting time, even if I did somewhat over 1/3 and less than half of the driving. Instead much of my time was spent on a different project, about which you will hear more later, upon its completion, which is imminent.

I did finish the back of Passel and am about 6 or 8 rows from the armhole shaping on the right front. Very little has been accomplished since my return on Monday night despite the fact that I met fellow knitter Gina last night for what was supposed to be knitting time but ended up being chatting time. My own output came to two rows.

One thing we did discuss was the new fall Rowan magazine, which arrived while I was away, one of many knitting related treats, but the only one I have examined in any detail as of yet. (You know I MUST be busy).

I love this issue. There are a lot of cute things in here, a lot of inspiring ideas and a lot of details and designs that make me think differently about knitting or how I make and shape things. I rate this issue highly for its dream and inspiration factor and in fact there are also several garments that I may knit more or less as shown. that makes this issue a success on all counts from my perspective.

In fact, there are enough things I like that I keep changing my mind about what I might or might not knit. These are the patterns of which I am currently enamored (click on image to enlarge):

There is yet another sweater that I am considering more and more, can’t get it out of my head in fact. It is this sweater by Kaffe Fassett:

I love the color striping but at first I thought the shape was unwearable. Now I am not so sure. The shape is remarkably like my current "I can’t wait until Fall so I can wear it" new treat, this dress from Rachel Pally:

Granted the dress is a much thinner, stretchier knit so the look on the body would be totally different, but the way I wear it is not that different from the look of that Rowan sweater on the model.

I am tempted.

But there is an awful lot of kidsilk haze in that sweater and it could be a really expensive mistake, both in cash and knitting time, so I need to play with the idea a little longer, perhaps work out some kind of mock-up. But if it works it could be very cool.

If it works it would be way nicer than the remake of that bubble dress in the new Vogue Knititng, the one I made way back when…

August 17, 2007
Re-organization

Although the knitting on Passel is continuing at a good pace given how little time I am devoting to it, that is all about to change. We are driving down to Knoxville tomorrow for a few days with DSD and baby Owen. I am not sure how much knitting will be accomplished on the trip as I may end up doing a lot of the driving but there will certainly be knitting time available once we arrive. I have packed the entire thing in my bag, naive I am sure, because I doubt I will get the entire sweater knitted as I am only about 1/2 way through the back. But it seems best to plan for the best case scenario.

Anyway, in my spare time, instead of knitting, I have finally started reorganizing the old yarn stash. As you will recall, I lost the previous spreadsheet, and finding anything has driven me up the wall. I literally had no idea what was hiding in various closets and boxes.

I toyed the idea of building a database with pictures, but quickly gave up on that idea as I just don’t want to spend the time setting up a database the way I want it. This spreadsheet will work just fine.

What I am finding as I go through things though, aside from a few bits of yarn that can be added to the every growing e-bay pile, is that each time I see the yarn for another sweater I fall in love with it and want to start knitting it right away. There are about 20 such projects currently milling around my brain and I am seriously wondering why I never got to them the first time around. Oh I know the answer, but now I want to knit each and every one of them now…..at least until the next pattern book comes.

(Where are you Vogue Knitting!)

So I am somewhere between 15 and 20% through the stash, and I am going to organize books and patterns as well so there is really a lot more to do. I am really excited about the process however, and I think there will be a great benefit to the work.

Oh yeah, and as the new pattern books have come in I have found projects for at least 3 yarns that have been languishing in my stash. Now I just have to get those projects knitted up.

August 6, 2007
Off to Knoxville

We are off to Knoxville tomorrow morning early to visit baby Owen, who is apparently turning into quite the mobile little person since we saw him last at the end of May. I am not taking my computer and will be out of touch but will catch up upon my return. There is also some promise of actual sewing in the future if all continues to go well.

In the meantime, I have been savoring a few pages each day from this wonderful book which arrived at my door last week:

It is filled with beautiful ideas and wonderful ribbons and although I live in a rather modern house and most of the ideas presented are along the lines of home decor, I remain entranced.

I love ribbons and anything that justifies my passions with taste is fine by me. There are certainly ideas here that are filling my brain with dreams.

Have a good week and I will back after the 14th.

August 6, 2007
Marfy order

Since the Marfy pattern book arrived, several weeks ago, I have been perusing it periodically, attempting to make some kind of decision concerning my pattern order. But now the time has come for the order to go in and I had to make some decisions.

In the past, I have ordered at least one coat pattern each year. This year, although I have plans to make several coats, I ordered no coat patterns. Do I have all the coat patterns I need? Not likely. Still nothing really stood out.

Not to worry, there was no shortage of patterns on my list. Here they are, in numerical order:

I really love this dress. In fact there is a Simplicity pattern that seems similar which I had considered buying but have not picked up yet, primarily because it has yet to find its way to the stock drawers at my local Jo-Ann Fabrics.

I might even like this dress better. I like Marfy’s fit better.

I ordered the jacket as well, although it is not really that unusual. But it goes so well with the dress and given how nicely Marfy patterns are drafted I doubt I will be disappointed.

Whereas it took a little while for that first dress pattern to firmly implant itself in my mind, this jacket caught my eye almost immediately. I just love the detail of the angled dart in the front with the pockets and the peplum in the back. Very simple, but very nice

.

A blouse with interesting darts.

Then there were two rather feminine, "dressmaker " style jackets as opposed to the more tailored style that often attracts me. I really liked both but they also seemed terribly similar and different at the same time. First I would like one, then the other. Then I would decide to buy both, then I would convince myself that they were too similar to buy both. Then I would quibble again as to which one was most worth buying. In the end I just decided to buy them both.

Perhaps I am just intrigued by ribbons and bows this season, as one of the reasons I liked the above jacket was the little ribbon tie closure, and that is one of the features that I like about this blouse, as well as the gathers at the bust and the rather fitted shape through the waist.

I am also intrigued by the skirt. I passed it by at first, and then noticed it again later when I was looking for a pattern for a relatively straight but flippy skirt for a particular piece of fabric. This skirt is not what I had in mind for that fabric but it has stuck with me. It seems that a lot of skirts have godets, and a lot have bias ruffles, but this pattern, as it appears in the sketch seems to be some combination of the two and I am suitably intrigued. It is not that I couldn’t probably create something similar, but that I want to see how the people at Marfy do it.

The "year of the dress" may or may not be over, but I seem to be just getting started. There were two dress patterns that really caught my eye. First, I have been looking for a dolman wrap dress and this one looks tempting. The second dress has that nice soft gathering again, with a fitted band holding everything in shape at the waist.

August 4, 2007
What is inspiring me now

[In my own truly obsessed fashion, I did not like the way this post originally showed, so I have reformatted it with new pictures. The originals (if you saw that post) were downloaded from the Anthropologie website, but they were too small to see anything . All new photos have been scanned from the August catalog. ]

Sewing is seems to continue to be something that continues only to exist only in the virtual reality of my dreams, hence the excitement over sewing on a button. In a world where getting through the most basic stack of work seems to be a never ending task, I continue to be thrilled to have clothes that are clean and not held together by safety pins, and I continue to be be consoled by dreams of sewing.

The day my power dry arrived from Ressy’s Co-op, I dreamt of sewing slips. Even that bit of mundane virtual sewing was refreshing.

Yesterday, many of my spare minutes were spent dreaming of of the inspirations found in the August Anthropologie catalog. This month was absolutely filled with inspirations

First there were the dresses:

The first one is definitely not for fall, and may be too youthful of a style, but what I am actually attracted to is the combination of the dramatic floral print with the color blocking and this can be easily adapted to another look.

I love this layered wrap knit dress with the bubble skirt that does not bubble too much, but just hangs so nicely.

And I love the shape and the idea of the last dress. The dress is made from a sweater knit, and it is described as having "paint-like" metallic stripes. When I look at the photo I can’t tell if the hipline is gathered, tucked, or smocked ofr if the stripes are actually painted on the fabric. I suspect they are not painted and there is some kind of gathering going on there, but one could probably fake it by simply painting stripes, angling them into the waist on the finished garment, and saving oneself a little extra bulk at the hips. I doubt, however, that my artistic abilities are up to rendering anything as nice as the large painted flower on the skirt. Paint by numbers anyone?

This jacket (on the right) really appeals to me, and although it is described as being made from a sweater knit, I can really see this made up in a lovely wool double knit. I was very tempted to order this jacket, and if I did not already own several gray cardigans and jackets with dramatic and interesting collars, it would be winging its way to me as I write this. Instead, I dream of making something inspired by this shape in a different neutral color — perhaps a rich deep brown or even a lovely deep red.

The styling of the black corduroy jacket on the left doesn’t really appeal to me, but the embroidery does. You can get more detail here. I love the idea of this kind of dramatic detail on an otherwise simple shape.

But by far and away the item that most captured my imagination is a sweater. It is, unfortunately not a sweater that I could find on the website so we can’t zoom in and look at the detail of the embroidery yet. Even though it is a sweater, it is not something I plan to knit:

"Softer than felt" they say. Well, the photo looks almost felted but I am not going to knit this and felt it and embroider it. I do however think this is another look that could be darling in a nice wool double knit. The problem would be the collar. If I made the garment out of wool double knit, it could be difficult to find just the right yarn to knit a matching collar. I could, however, just make a sewn collar of the same double knit fabric. I am interpreting this look, not trying to make an actual copy.

The color of this is not good for me or I would have ordered it too, and Anthropologie has the annoying habit of not stating how long the garments are in the catalog or on the website so I suspect it would be too short anyway.

I don’t like the shape and length of the sleeves and I would do mine differently. I could do the embroidery. I used to do crewel work, but if I were going to put the time into this it would have to be something I would really love. And it just might be. My dreams include plans to play with a muslin of this shape, and I have a lovely soft violet-blue double knit that would probably look lovely in something like this.

Perhaps dreaming of making something like this is a bit ambitious given the current state of my sewing life. But hey, it never hurt anyone to have grand dreams, now did it?

August 3, 2007