Design Brainstorm: Baby Blanket

 

We found out a few days after the wedding that there's a baby due in the family early this spring, so of course I immediately started scheming a baby blanket design for them.  It's been a new challenge for me, since I'm not very baby-focused, thinking about the functionality as well as the look of a pattern.  I want it to be the perfect blankie for dragging around, snuggling, and throwing in the wash, so I've had to nix a few ideas right off the bat: although I love lace, little fingers might get caught in the holes, and since it's meant to be transported and used every which-way, I want it to be somewhat reversible.

With these ideas in mind, I did a bit of swatching a few weeks ago with some Berroco Comfort DK.  This yarn has the proud honor of being the only mostly-acrylic yarn I've ever enjoyed working with, so it has the convenience of acrylic yarn while still satisfying the texture snob in me.  We haven't yet heard the sex of the baby, and I hesitate to give gender-normative colors to children so early in life anyhow, so I settled on this lovely clear aqua blue.

I think I've worked out a pattern I like, so now I just need to crunch some numbers and cast on!

In other news - for the last month or so, Mr. Mackie has been trying for the world record in vet visits per week.  He's currently doing okay, but still angling to squeeze in one or two more.  He had a broken tooth 3 weeks ago, an abscess a week after that, and so much inflammation near the abscess site yesterday that we took him to an urgent care vet.  Poor little dude!  We'll be taking him to his normal vet again tomorrow, and hopefully he'll be back to his bouncy self soon.

WIP: Snapdragon Plain Socks

 

Last week I went down to Portland with some knitting buddies for a class with Emily Wessel of Tin Can Knits at TwistedPDX (which was awesome!), and I needed some new knitting along the way.  I've been carrying around plain socks in my purse for the last month or so and really enjoyed having something simple to work on, so when I finished knitting my Geodes plain socks in the car on the way down, I immediately cast on for a new pair.

And oh boy, am I in love.  The yarn is by Pigeonroof Studios, a dyer whose gorgeous wares I've coveted and stashed for many years.  I saw Krista's yarns in person for the first time in New Haven, Connecticut, while visiting a friend, and was entranced by her use of color.  This yarn is an 80/10/10 merino/cashmere/nylon blend in the colorway Wildflower, and it's knitting up really squishy and lovely.  The complexity of the colors is just amazing, and I've been having the best time watching each one come into play as I knit.

This will be pair #4 of socks this year, and although it's a far cry from the 12 pairs I planned, I think it's pretty good nonetheless!  My sock drawer is getting fuller by the minute, so maybe I can even start throwing away some of my old, holey hiking socks.

Happy Friday!

Patternmaking: Basic Tee, Part II

  

I spent this morning working on a muslin of my basic tee pattern out of a scrap of jersey I had left over from the show.  I've already tweaked the fit a bit by grading the bottom out 3/8", and haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about the fold of extra fabric in the lower back.  I have a feeling that if I slashed and spread up the center back, it would help, since it looks like the pattern is the right width at my waistline, but is bunching up because there's not enough width to cover my butt.  (For lack of better phrasing.)  I've definitely noticed that this jersey has much less horizontal stretchiness than the other fabrics I'm planning to use, so the fit will change as I start to use them.  I'm going for negative ease in the bust, just a touch of positive ease in the waist, and a lovely hip-skimming amount of positive ease in the hip, which will be greatly affected by the stretchiness and bounce-back of the fabric, so I'll just have to wait until I'm working in the final fabric to see how this pattern drapes and fits.

 

It's funny that my initial thought was that the body would be the easy part, and the sleeves would give me problems, because: holy range of motion, Batman!  I'm pretty impressed by the fit on this sleeve on the first try.  After copying the sleeve pattern, I changed the shape of the sleeve cap and added an extra 1/8" on each side of the underarm so that it would fit the armhole without any ease.  There's definitely bunching in the back of the underarm, but I'm trying to suppress my need for everything to fit perfectly when it's not in motion, because arm rotation is pretty important in a t-shirt, and as it stands, there's the perfect amount of ease to move my shoulders and arms around.

I also opted to baste this muslin together the way I'm planning to sew the final garment: shoulder seams first, sleeve set in flat, and side and underarm seams sewn up in one go.  Setting in sleeves in the round is, in my opinion, a total pain in the ass, so I decided to borrow a production trick.

Next up is serging the thing together at the shoulders, figuring out the hem treatment at the neckline, setting in the sleeves and sewing up the side seams, and finishing the bottom and sleeve hems.  Then onto real fabric!

Patternmaking: Basic Tee

 

This morning I was doing a bit of laundry, and as I was folding my clean shirts, I realized that my drawer of basic tees is pretty sad.  I have less than a dozen t-shirts that I wear on a daily basis, and of those dozen, I probably only really like two or three of them.  These are the tees that I grab whenever they're clean, and then have to wait until I do another load of laundry so I can wear them again.  One of them is a shirt I bought at Powell's in Portland about five years ago, and it's looking pretty sad, but it fits so well that I can't bear to part with it.

So instead of wearing it today, I decided to garment duplicate it.  So far, the Garment Duplication series has been one of the most interesting courses I've taken at NYFA.  It's really taught me to look at commercially manufactured garments in a different way, both for appreciating the patternmaking and construction tricks used, and for recognizing the failings and inaccuracies of mass-market clothing.

It's also changed my thinking about the nature of originality and the ethics of copying.  It might seem like cheating to duplicate a favorite garment, but if the manufacturer has changed the process or the design of that garment, or it's very old and no longer produced, it may not be possible to buy that exact one again.  There's a reason we choose favorite t-shirts and sweaters in our closets, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to use those favorites as templates to design or create new things.  It's always easier to start with something pretty good and change it than to start from absolute scratch - it cuts a lot of time and muslins out of the fitting process.  Although I think it's disrespectful to copy an unusual or innovative design wholesale, I think garment duplicating basic items can be a very useful exercise, especially if the designer uses it as a framework to build upon rather than as an end point.

So, now I'll get back to the plans for my basic tee.  It's pretty typical for t-shirts to be slightly off-grain - the shirt I'm duplicating today definitely is - which isn't the biggest problem ever, but is annoying nonetheless.  I'm hoping that my duplicated version will be just a notch better than the original by fixing little details like this.  I'm also thinking about changing the neckline treatment to a lace edging instead of ribbing; it will dress up the garment a little bit, while keeping it washable and easy to wear.

To start with, I'm creating a pattern map for both the front and back of the garment on a cut-up paper grocery bag.  (What can I say - inspiration struck and I realized I didn't have any butcher paper or sturdier craft paper, so I improvised.)  I have a feeling that I'll have to tweak the pattern once or twice after the initial draft, but I already know that the body fits me really well, so it's likely that the sleeves will cause the most trouble.  I have some warm yellow rayon/lycra jersey in my stash, so I'll probably use that to start with, then move on to a gorgeous nautical-stripe bamboo blend once I get the pattern perfected.