Collection Fabrics

  

I was at the school alone the other night, and I decided to pull all my fabrics out and take a look at them together.  I'd been having a nagging feeling that some gorgeous printed crepe de chine I bought a few months ago was not going to fit as well into the collection as I hoped, so I piled all my fabrics onto a table and arranged them by outfit.  When I put the aforementioned crepe de chine with the other colors, it was okay, but when I switched it out for the Liberty Tana Lawn I bought a week or so ago, everything just clicked.

I made a little schematic of each outfit, since I've found that visual guides really help me.  I still have to map out a detailed schedule, but I've started looking at how much work I have to do in the time that I have.  What you see here is 12 garments; two are hand-knit sweaters that you've already seen, and I've started working on the white camisole and the pink blouse.  So I have 13 weeks, starting January 1st, to make 12 garments.

Yikes.

Doing patternwork on a few pieces already has simultaneously made me feel better and worse.  Better: it's possible, and in fewer than 10 muslins.  (Thanks, black dress, for that harrowing experience!)  Worse: it's still a lot of work, and by a lot of work, I mean, I'm going to be knitting and sewing my little fingers off and muttering to myself under my breath until April 13th around ten pm.  Sounds like fun, huh?

In light of this fact, unfortunately, I'm going to have to reduce my blog schedule again.  I'm hoping to post in-progress photos, but it might be at 2 am on a Tuesday, or it might be at 8 pm on a Friday.  There might be less written content as well.  Hopefully I can resume a normal schedule sometime in late April.

Thanks for bearing with me, and have a great week!

WIP: Ondrea Cardigan, Part 2

 

So I keep on talking about school, but the amount of school content I've shared isn't anywhere near proportional to the amount of time I've been spending there!  So here's my finished cardigan front pinned to Betty.  I'm really happy with it so far - blocking took this fabric from wobbly and slightly crispy, to soft, with a very nice weight.  And I love the combination of the diamond lace and the braided cable.  Maybe I am a sweater knitter after all!

 

This is the sweater that I'm basing the Ondrea cardigan on - it's a sweater from Halle Brothers, probably from the 1950s.  As you can see, the original cardigan is much less fitted, and the motifs are slightly different.  I like the way the armholes and shoulders fit in this sweater, so I decided to base my armhole decreases on the shaping in the original.  There were a few things that I really wanted to change, though - for one thing, the waist shaping, and for another, the neckline.  I was originally planning to make this a v-neck, but with the gauge that I'm using, decreasing the cable motif is not very pretty.  I was able to fudge it on the side increases and decreases, but those are less central to the sweater.

So, in keeping with the style of the original, I kept the neckline round, but deepened it, so that it ended up somewhere between a crew and a scoop neck.  I want this sweater to be versatile enough to be layered over a variety of necklines, but I also want it to be pretty (and flattering!) on its own merits, so for me, that means a more open neckline.

I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to pick up and knit a buttonband, or make a crocheted buttonband, but that can come later.  I've already started the second front, and am hoping to finish it by the end of next week, fingers crossed.

Happy Friday!

Tossing the Stash

  

Saturday night, I wandered into my studio to get something, and lo: a pair of powdery brown wings fluttered gently near my yarn.  My heart nearly stopped as the word etched itself across my grey matter:

moths.

I was standing in the middle of every knitter's worst nightmare.  The mere threat of moth infestation is something to be taken very seriously; it's not unusual for the average knitter to start twitching uncontrollably and stuffing yarn into freezers at the word alone.

So, I promptly killed the trespasser and set about scheming how to make sure that my stash was undamaged.  I started moving and reorganizing the first cube on Monday night, and did the bulk of the rest of it yesterday.  I moved all the yarn out of each cube, dusted, then put it back, examining (and okay, maybe fondling) each skein before it was returned to the stash.

I found nothing.  Not a casing, not a chomped strand.  Thank goodness.  I still need to go through a few of the pink baskets, but I'm pretty reassured that my yarn is safe.

In the process, however, I fell in love with my stash all over again.

I organized it a little differently this time around - where before I kept similar weights of yarn together and then organized it by color, this time I organized it more by type and fiber content.  So now I have a Rustic Yarn cube for all my Brooklyn Tweed and Shetland.  My lace cube is organized by fiber, going from Pure Merino (with a special Madtosh Prairie section!) to Pure Cashmere, to Cashmere-Silk, to Silk Blends (Alpaca, Llama, or Merino) to Pure Silk.  Sock yarn is organized by weight and twist.  Luxury fingering weight has its own cube, as does Single Skeins of handpaints, which share a cube with my little Handspun stashette.

Not to toot my horn - okay, maybe a little - but I have awesome taste in yarn.  And to be fair, so do the people who give me yarn!  And rediscovering this love for my stash has given me a renewed desire to knit from it.

School is keeping me super busy, and I have lots of knitting obligations to complete before I can cast on for something fun and new, but I'm going to be keeping my eye out for stashbusting projects.  In the meantime, I'm going to keep on popping back to my studio every five minutes to look at all the pretties.

The clean, blessedly moth-free pretties.

Deep Sea

  

  
  

In keeping with my blue obsession, these are a few of the inspirations for the Deep Sea colorway in my spring collection.  I'm particularly excited about the blue and white cherry blossom yardage, which is a Liberty Tana Lawn print I've been dreaming about for months - I have an idea for a boatneck dress with a low v in the back and a slightly flared skirt.  We'll see if I can flesh out this idea fast enough to include it in the fashion show, but this fabric is so perfect that I have no doubts it will fit in somewhere, whether it's in my collection or just in my closet!

The blue petticoat is also new; I got it last week at Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle from a collection called Glam Garb by Gunlis.  She hand-dyes and adds detailing to vintage lingerie, and her colors are amazing!  I'm hoping that the petticoat will get to be in my line as well, under one of my circle skirts.  It's really big and swishy - I wore it around the apartment for a few minutes last week, and I couldn't stop twirling.

I started a muslin of a camisole in the collection on Saturday, so I'm going to go work on that today.  It's cool to see things go from flat sketches to actual garments.  I'll be sure to share once I have something presentable!