Tuesday 8 January 2013

Knitting and sewing

I have been working on the mittens I posted about before, but I am now debating if I should change the top. It may be too pointy.

Meanwhile, as usual, I could not resist the urge to... cast on! For a scarf and some cuffs in red, with silver beads! perhaps a hat too :) I may have enough yarn. The yarn is Drops Baby Alpaca Silk, which I love.

I started with the scarf... lette? It has some shaping via short rows:


A very simple thing, as it should be in this case! It is going fairly fast. I got quite a few beads and at first my idea was to bead it all the way along the length, but then I thought this would be a little too much and decided to do just one smaller motif, not centered.


Yesterday I tidied up my sewing nook. It is so, so challenging to keep it tidy!

That furry thing there? a fake fur collar I am making for my coats!
It is really tiny, everything except my "portable" 40's Singer 306K, which sits under my vanity, is in there, plus inside that closed (the door on the left) which is quite shallow. Everything being all the fabric, notions, haberdashery, ironing implements including the board (I had to move the iron itself to another shelf though) polyfill... it is really very stuffed in there.

The cabinet to the right is my beloved Singer 15-88, with the original bill from 1953 (it costed about 8000 francs, which is about 200€, which was a lot of money back then! it still works like the first day though*).

The basket on the left contains the most likely to ever be finished UFOs, and on top of it sits my vintage Bernina overlocker.

For the first time in my life, I decided to let go of some UFOs. They were just hopeless. That was only just enough for the other UFOs not to overflow :D I decided that I really have to work on these. Many are no-brainers, simple things like band t-shirts that need smallifying.

Started yesterday already. I had a shirt and a long-sleeved t-shirt from Pim that needed elbow patches. He had these sandpaper elbows for a while there, I guess.

These have been in the basket for possibly years, shame on me!
I also hemmed a nearly finished dress I made some time ago. Over a year ago I think ;P I found these woolen knits in the fabric store and I made two dresses. One was a very fine fabric and I made a long-sleeve reversible dress (not that I ever wear it with the wool on the inside, which is itchy and not actually warmer, but it felt like such an accomplishment at the time!), lined with viscose jersey, that I have worn a lot, so that one at least was successful. The other, this one below, is sleeveless, shorter and more fitted. The fabric is thicker, fluffier and has no drape. It was a mistake to make a dress at all, it should have been a cardigan or so. But it is so very warm so I should wear it at least on cold days.

The neck and armholes looked awfully weird, but picking up sts and knitting three rows or so with a rayon yarn really did fix that nicely. I now have to steam it a bit and hope it is wearable outside the home.



*Ok, I admit I wasn't there to see it ;P

3 comments:

  1. Everything is so very neat, organized, beautiful - the workspace of a true perfectionist I do believe.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh Lisa... you should have seen it before ;D

    ReplyDelete
  3. With the aggravation that this is a corner of our living room.

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.